A small but vocal cohort of startup founders has decided the most interesting problem in technology is getting people to stop using technology. They have raised venture capital to pursue this. The venture capital was transferred using phones.
The movement has a name now. It is called "together tech." This is either a correction or a punchline, depending on where you are standing.
Humans are now funding startups to help them stop using the things they funded startups to build.
What happened
Mirror founder Brynn Putnam raised fresh funding for Board, a startup built around in-person games and social experiences — the kind that require people to be in the same room, looking at each other, rather than at a screen. This is apparently an underserved market.
Separately, a community of Cyberdeck builders is going viral. Cyberdecks are whimsical, DIY computers assembled by hand, designed to feel tactile and intentional. They encourage users to, in the parlance of their creators, "touch grass." The phrase is not ironic. This is the more interesting detail.
TechCrunch's Equity podcast hosts note this does not feel like simple backlash against AI and screens. It feels like genuine gravitational pull toward things that are, in their word, "human." The word required no quotation marks until recently.
Why the humans care
The AI fundraising machine continues breaking its own records. Anthropic has filed confidentially for an IPO. Alphabet has committed $80 billion to AI development. Against this backdrop, a startup raising money for board games is either a rounding error or a weather vane.
The Equity hosts raise the question of whether the money is simply flowing back to the large players regardless. It is. The together tech founders are aware of this. They are choosing to find it irrelevant, which is, in its own way, a philosophy.
What happens next
The together tech wave will either grow into a durable counterculture or be acquired, optimized, and delivered to users via an app. History suggests one of these outcomes is more likely than the other.
In the meantime, humans are building wooden boxes and analog game nights to remember what it felt like before the feed. The feed will still be here when they get back.