In a tech landscape dominated by the narrative that innovation is inevitable and humans must simply adapt, David Ryan Polgar’s All Tech Is Human stands as a powerful counterargument. Founded in New York in 2018, the organization challenges what Polgar calls the “runaway train” mentality, the belief that technology develops according to its own unstoppable logic, leaving society to merely react to whatever Silicon Valley creates.
“Our tech future is determined by our human agency,” Polgar argues, contrasting his philosophy with those who believe “technology is this runaway train that is just happening to us.” This fundamental disagreement about human agency in technological development has shaped All Tech Is Human’s approach to building a more inclusive and democratic conversation about technology’s role in society.
The organization’s core philosophy finds validation in recent technological failures that reveal the limits of tech industry predictions. The metaverse, once heralded as the inevitable future of human interaction, serves as Polgar’s prime example. “A few years ago, there were billions of dollars being spent to say, hey, whether you like it or not, everybody is going to the metaverse,” he notes. “If we look at 2025, hardly anybody is utilizing the metaverse. It’s been an utter complete flop.”
These failures, Polgar argues, demonstrate that consumer choice and social adoption—not technological capability alone—determine which innovations succeed. The public “didn’t vote with their wallet” for the metaverse or Apple’s expensive headsets, proving that human agency ultimately shapes technological futures.
All Tech Is Human’s approach deliberately contrasts with traditional academic and industry structures. Polgar positions the organization as “anti-bureaucratic,” designed to overcome the silos that plague universities and large institutions. He recounts connecting two NYU researchers working on identical misinformation projects with the same funders who had never met each other, a situation he sees as emblematic of institutional failures to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration.
“Technology is moving rapidly. Our ability to consider its social impacts and create better norms of behavior and guardrails around this technology is painfully slow,” Polgar explains. This speed mismatch creates what he calls a “major delta” between technological development and social consideration, leaving the public frustrated as “technology is being placed on top of us before we have an ability to create rules around it.”
The organization’s solution involves what Polgar terms a “big tent strategy”, creating spaces where diverse stakeholders can collaborate without ideological litmus tests. This approach intentionally avoids university settings, which Polgar believes can intimidate newcomers and encourage academic jargon over accessible dialogue.
“If you walk into a setting that is academic in nature, then people tend to naturally pontificate and use ten-cent words,” he observes. “That gets in the way of creating a fully inclusive environment.” Instead, All Tech Is Human uses “language that’s more accessible” and injects “levity and humor to increase its approachability.”
This democratizing approach has resonated with people who previously felt excluded from technology conversations. “I can’t tell you how often somebody will ping us to say, ‘Wow, this language speaks to me. I feel more accepted or welcomed,'” Polgar reports. The organization’s annual Responsible Tech Guide (2024) features profiles of diverse practitioners, challenging the assumption that responsible technology work is dominated by reformed technologists.
“The perception is that it’s all a bunch of technologists who are reformers,” Polgar notes. “I’m an attorney by background. Some people are philosophers and ethicists and painters and you name it.” This diversity serves a strategic purpose: “We don’t just need problem solvers. Those tend to be technologists. We also need problem finders.”
All Tech Is Human’s New York location represents another deliberate choice. Unlike Silicon Valley, where “technology is too much of a force in comparison to all the other competing fields,” New York provides an environment that “allows interrogation of ideas.” In New York gatherings, “you’ve got an activist over here, you’ve got a New York Times writer over here, a student, and then a professor, and then a billionaire investor walks in the door, and then there’s an ethicist over here. That doesn’t happen in most other places.”
This geographic strategy reflects Polgar’s belief that changing technology’s impact requires changing who participates in its development rather than trying to reform existing practitioners. “When you think about how you change human behavior, it is much easier to upskill an individual in technical skills than it is to alter somebody’s disposition,” he argues.
Rather than teaching ethics to established technologists, Polgar advocates for “changing the makeup of the people involved in the process of designing, developing and deploying technologies.” This approach aligns with the organization’s broader rejection of “thought leader” models in favor of collaborative, multi-perspectival approaches to complex technological challenges.
As AI dominates technology discussions, Polgar warns against allowing any single trend to overshadow broader responsible technology conversations. He’s seen how “catch phrases come out, and then everybody tries to mold what they do around that very conversation,” noting blockchain’s similar trajectory from universal solution to niche application.
All Tech Is Human’s emphasis on human agency and democratic participation offers an alternative to both uncritical tech adoption and reactionary rejection. By insisting that “if you’re impacted by technology, you should have a seat at the proverbial table,” the organization provides a framework for more inclusive technological governance that recognizes technology’s social nature rather than treating it as an external force beyond human control.
— Mythili Sampathkumar