Time To Refuse .....

Reclaiming Our Time: Why Those Who Lived the Experiment Must Lead the Way

Freya India’s essay “A Time We Never Knew” on After Babel captures something profound about our moment: she describes a collective nostalgia, an ache for a childhood that many of us never had — a childhood without screens, without ceaseless algorithmic whispers, without the constant pressure to perform. afterbabel.com

She isn’t merely romanticising the past; she’s pointing to a rupture. As Freya and others in her generation have often argued — life in the digital age is structured by incentives, metrics, and feedback loops that distort what it means to belong, to connect, to grow. afterbabel.com+2afterbabel.com+2

Freya’s writing on After Babel isn’t just diagnosis. It’s also a call to refuse passivity. In pieces like “Time to Refuse”, she urges Gen Zers to push back against the normalisation of screens in all spheres — in schools, relationships, identities. afterbabel.com

The Power of “We Who Lived It”

We, the generation that came of age online, are uniquely positioned — not merely as victims or observers, but as agents of change. Because:

• We know the shape of the experiment — we lived it, we internalised its rhythms, we felt both the highs and the costs.

• We understand the machinery — we understand algorithms, engagement loops, dopamine feedback, social metrics. That gives us insight others might lack.

• We have the moral authority of experience — when older generations ask “why can’t you just put your phone down?”, we can show them how the phone was never just a neutral tool, but a system we grew up inside.

If leadership over this future is to emerge, it must come from those who have seen both sides: what it’s like to be entangled in the system, and what it yearns to be outside it.

What Young Leaders Can Do — Five Provocations

1. Build Alternatives, Not Just Critique Running podcasts, clubs, apps, platforms rooted in real conversation, offline gatherings, slow time. Not as “anti-tech” but as different tech.

2. Mentor & Teach Work with younger cohorts (Gen Alpha, younger teens) to share the sketches of what life could look like outside the feed. Help them resist being fully absorbed.

3. Advocate Policy Change Push for phone-free school policies, regulation of addictive social features, transparency and accountability for recommendation engines.

4. Radical Transparency & Storytelling Tell your own stories of turning away or backsliding. Share how you filter, log off, detox. Vulnerable stories carry sway more than sermons.

5. Anchor in Place & Community The most powerful antidotes to algorithmic life are rooted in real geography: gardens, neighbourhoods, local projects. Young people should be building those.

A Closing Note

We are living in a strange paradox: tools made to connect us have come to alienate. The task isn’t to retreat completely (machines are with us now), but to re-centre humanity in the midst of them. Freya India’s writing in After Babel reminds us that the young generation must not be passive subjects of technology’s experiment. We must become its authors.