Some digital dissenters aren’t focused on the economic issues, but simply on the nature of human-machine interactions. This is an issue we all understand intuitively: We’re constantly distracted. We walk around with our eyes cast down upon our devices. We’re rarely fully present anywhere.

Other critics are alarmed by the erosion of privacy. The Edward Snowden revelations incited widespread fear of government surveillance. That debate has been complicated by the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, because national security officials say terrorists have exploited new types of encrypted social media…

Most painful for progressives has been the rise of the “sharing economy,” which they initially embraced. They feel as though the idea was stolen from them and perverted into something that hurts workers.

They say that companies such as Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Amazon Mechanical Turk are creating a “gig economy” — one that, although it offers customers convenience and reasonable prices, is built on freelancers and contractors who lack the income or job protections of salaried employees. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, an investor in Uber and Airbnb, owns The Washington Post.)

“What was billed as ‘sharing’ was actually ‘extraction,’ ” said Nathan Schneider, a journalist and co-organizer of the recent New School conference on cooperative platforms. “It’s revealed to be a way of shirking labor laws and extracting resources back to investors and building monopolies.”