Wonder as Resistance

There's a peculiar orthodoxy that has taken hold in how we talk about technology. To be taken seriously, one must be critical. To be sophisticated, one must be sceptical. To be intelligent, one must see through the hype. This orthodoxy has become so pervasive that we barely notice it anymore. We've forgotten that there might be another way.

I want to suggest something that might sound naive at first: in our current moment, wonder has become a form of resistance.

Walk into any number of discussions about emerging technology and you'll find a predictable rhythm. New development announced. Immediate deconstruction follows. Corporate motives questioned. Potential harms catalogued. Limitations highlighted. Discussion concludes with knowing nods about capitalism, surveillance or inequality. Any students listening? You have learned their lesson: clever people are critical people.

This of course isn't entirely wrong. These critiques often have merit. But something vital has been lost in making this our mode of engagement. We've created an environment where enthusiasm is embarrassing, where curiosity marks you as unsophisticated, where imagining positive possibilities feels almost transgressive.

What happens when the young people in our classrooms have absorbed this completely? They've learned that the safe position, the smart position, is always the critical position. They know how to tear down but not how to build up. They can spot flaws but struggle to envision fixes. Most troublingly, they've begun to see this as wisdom rather than what it really is: a kind of protective pessimism that shields them from the vulnerability of hoping.

In this context, approaching technology with genuine wonder becomes almost subversive. To look at a glitchy preview build and say "This could transform how we create" runs counter to everything the culture rewards. To spend time imagining what version ten might enable rather than cataloguing why version one fails requires a particular kind of courage. Wonder resists the flattening effect of cynicism. Where cynicism says "This is just another tool of control," wonder asks "What could we build with this?" Where cynicism sees only repetition of past failures, wonder glimpses unprecedented possibilities. Where cynicism protects us from disappointment, wonder accepts the risk of being wrong in exchange for the chance of participating in something transformative.

This isn't about being naive or ignoring real problems. It's about refusing to let critique be our only lens. Wonder as resistance means holding both scepticism and possibility in productive tension, refusing to collapse into either blind optimism or paralysing pessimism.

When we practice wonder as resistance, what exactly are we pushing back against? We're resisting a culture that has made cynicism synonymous with intelligence. We're resisting an educational system that rewards deconstruction over construction. We're resisting a discourse that privileges problems over possibilities.

Most fundamentally, we're resisting a kind of learned helplessness that has infected our relationship with technology. When we only critique, we position ourselves as passive observers of a future being built by others. Wonder repositions us as potential creators, as people who might shape what comes next rather than merely comment on it.

The orthodoxy tells young people that the serious response to new technology is to identify its dangers. Wonder as resistance suggests something different: that the most serious response might be to imagine its best possible uses and then work to realise them.

The Cost of Losing Wonder

What happens to a generation raised without wonder? They become brilliant at identifying problems but paralysed when it comes to solving them. They can articulate everything wrong with the world but struggle to imagine it differently. They've been trained to be critics when what we desperately need are creators.

This isn't just about technology. It's about agency itself. When we teach young people that the sophisticated response is always the sceptical one, we're teaching them that the future is something that happens to them rather than something they might shape. We're creating a generation of spectators when we need participants.

The particular tragedy is that young minds are naturally wired for wonder. Watch children encounter new tools and their instinct is to play, to explore, to ask "What if?" We systematically train this out of them, replacing natural curiosity with practised wariness. By the time they reach university, many have forgotten they ever knew how to wonder.

Practising Resistance

So how do we resist? How do we reclaim wonder in a culture that rewards its opposite?

It starts with recognising that wonder isn't the enemy of critical thinking but its essential complement. The most transformative innovators throughout history have been those who could see problems clearly while still believing in the possibility of solutions. They wondered not despite the challenges but because of them.

In classrooms, this might mean starting discussions of new technology not with critique but with exploration. What excites you about this? What could you imagine building? Only after we've exercised our capacity for possibility do we turn to limitations and concerns. This isn't about ignoring problems but about ensuring they don't become our only focus.

For the young navigating a world that seems to reward cynicism, practising wonder as resistance means giving yourself permission to be excited about possibilities even when that feels uncool. It means risking the vulnerability of caring about what could be built rather than simply cataloguing what's broken.

The stakes of this resistance couldn't be higher. The technologies emerging today will reshape human experience in fundamental ways. The question is whether the generation now in our schools will feel empowered to guide that reshaping or whether they'll simply comment on it from the sidelines. When we strip wonder from our engagement with technology, we don't become more sophisticated. We become less capable. We lose the very quality that might allow us to imagine and build better alternatives to the futures we fear.

Wonder as resistance isn't about ignoring the very real challenges new technologies present. It's about refusing to let those challenges be the whole story. It's about maintaining the creative courage to imagine what else might be possible. It's about believing that the future remains unwritten and that we might be the ones to write it.

In a culture that has made cynicism feel like wisdom, choosing wonder becomes a radical act. For the young people who will inherit the world we're building, it might be the most important form of resistance they can practice.