A couple of years ago, a client of mine (an RMS provider I’ll keep anonymous for obvious reasons) shared what looked like the perfect success story.
The system goes live. RevPAR increases. Margins improve. Every dashboard glows with reassuring shades of green.
Then something straight out of Project Mayhem happens.
Security footage captures the revenue manager — human, all too human — returning to the office at night, logging back into the RMS, and carefully sabotaging the system’s inputs. Not enough to break it, just enough to make human decision-making appear superior by comparison.
There was something almost poetic about it.
Call it AI-Luddism. Call it technological resistance. Take your pick.
What seemed like an isolated anecdote has since become a statistic. A recent Workplace Intelligence report suggests that 29% of employees actively resist AI adoption — a figure that rises to 44% among Gen Z workers. The tactics vary: politely ignoring AI tools, feeding them misleading data (like our revenue manager friend), or even leaking information where it was never meant to go.
Meanwhile, the AI narrative has taken on a strangely geological tone.
When people like Alexander Karp or Dario Amodei talk about entire job categories disappearing, they do so with the language of inevitability — as if discussing tectonic plates shifting beneath our feet.
And that’s where the original question changes shape.
The issue is no longer whether AI will replace human labor — “more a question than a curse,” as Greg Graffin might say.
The real question is how people respond when that possibility starts to feel real.
When someone sabotages a system, is it incompetence? Resistance? Or simply an attempt to negotiate space in a world that leaves increasingly little room for negotiation?
Perhaps what we’re witnessing has less to do with technology and more to do with a deeper, largely unspoken anxiety: the fear of becoming irrelevant.
Tyler Durden taught us that “we are not our jobs.”
It was a liberating idea, especially for a generation like mine — raised on testosterone, irony, and the underground fantasies of the 1990s.
But that statement belonged to a world where work was still something you could push against. Something solid enough to define yourself through opposition.
And my question is:
Tyler, is that still true?
See you next week,
SIMONE PUORTO
