Joyful Defiance

Turning the Tech on the Tech Lords

Was anyone else raised to be a Good Girl or a Nice Boy? Any reformed rule-followers out there? Former badge-wearers, gold star collectors, brownie-point accumulators? I see you.

I was raised Baha’i—a beautiful faith in many ways, but one with very clear lines around what’s right, what’s wrong, and what’s definitely not dinner table conversation. My Mum was very hopeful that I was going to become a modern day Anne of Green Gables. For a long time, I coloured inside those lines. But that wasn’t me. So these days, I call myself a rebel with a paintbrush. A spiritual freestyler. It took a while to find the edges of the box I’d been living in—but then I found great delight in knocking them down. 

But here’s the thing. "Defiance" can feel like a dirty word to those of us raised to behave. Especially if we’ve been taught that “good citizens” keep their heads down and follow the rules. But what happens when the rule-makers start writing laws not for us, but for their donors, cronies, and data-harvesting overlords?

Let’s be real: our institutions are being quietly hollowed out. Governments, especially in the U.S., are no longer working for the people, but for the platforms—the tech oligarchs—whose algorithms shape our attention and whose billion$ shape our law$.

And yet… we still have something they don’t: Joy. Community. Creativity. Soul. 

One of the most radical things we can do in the face of extraction, surveillance, and control is to create anyway. Laugh anyway. Connect anyway. Rebel, with joy.

Joyful Defiance is resistance with glitter or giant inflatable poop emoji*. 

It’s remixing protest signs with memes. It’s singing outside Parliament. It’s turning your fear and fury into poetry, into posters, into performance and pavlova.

Joyful defiance is not just a protest—it's a reclaiming of power. It is tactical disobedience. 

We can turn their tools against them.

Right now, we have AI in our pockets. It has been trained on all of us—our language, our art, our questions—and while the ethics are murky, the opportunity is ours to seize.

So here’s an invitation:

Open ChatGPT.
Ask it: “What is a joyful act of resistance I could do around [insert your issue here]?”
Drill down. Get it to brainstorm a campaign name and tagline with you.
Prompt it to design you a poster or an invite in your fav colours. (or switch to Canva for even more control). Get it to draft a letter to your friends.
Create some invitations to a potluck protest planning sesh. Have fun, be amazed with how far tech can support you to strategise and create.

Let’s use the tech to organise, wrestle back our power, and scale it up through inviting others to join us in our irresistable acts of tactical defiance.  

And while we are at it, let’s be ever mindful that Joy isn’t a luxury—it’s a hope strategy.

Let’s get tattoos on our bums:

Joy disarms. Joy invites.
Joy makes resistance unforgettable.

In joyful defiance with you 

Megan x

* Before you do an act of Joyful Defiance, it is always good to check in with your local mana whenua/indigenous community to ensure alignment.  I’ve beeped up on that one before : )

P.S: Here are sparks of joyful defiance lighting up the gloom:

Harvard vs. Authoritarian Overreach

When the U.S. government tried to make federal funding conditional on gutting DEI programs and vetting international students, Harvard said: No thanks. They called it out as an assault on academic freedom—and put their values ahead of the $2.2 billion carrot dangled in front of them.

The Glitch Artists of Berlin 

A crew of digital pranksters projected anti-surveillance messages onto the HQ of a major tech firm—using the company's own hacked billboards. Guerrilla joy. Maximum impact.

P.P.S: Have you shared this Hope Dispatch with a friend in need yet?