You Are Not Your CMS
The Luddites weren't wrong. They were just living through the part of the story where the ending wasn't visible yet. So are we.
Why would a Sitecore subject matter expert enthusiastically support a migration to Adobe Experience Manager? Why would someone who spent years becoming the go-to authority on a platform eagerly welcome the arrival of another that could make much of that expertise less valuable overnight?
Over my years working in MarTech, I watched this play out repeatedly. On the surface, the resistance was always framed around practical concerns: migration risk, governance, implementation complexity, timelines, budget, adoption challenges. And those things are real. But beneath them almost always sat something much more human.
Being "the expert" becomes part of who people are, even if they stop consciously thinking about it the moment the laptop closes. Their role, their hard-earned expertise, their place within the organization — these things slowly calcify into identity.
I think that's incredibly human.
Part of us naturally grabs onto the things we do well and folds them into our sense of self. I don't think that's some uniquely modern sickness or a byproduct of capitalism. I'd be willing to bet our hunter-gatherer ancestors felt something similar about their skill in tracking game, gathering food, or crafting tools. Humans have likely always taken pride in competence — whether that meant catching antelope, weaving textiles, hemming pants, writing software, or managing enterprise CMS migrations.
Work and identity have probably been intertwined for as long as humans have organized themselves around specialized skills.
Which is why moments of technological transition can feel so destabilizing.
Perhaps the most famous example of this has become more trope than history: the Luddites.
Most people know the term. Far fewer know much about the people themselves. The Luddites were skilled textile workers in 19th-century England — artisans, craftsmen, people who had spent years developing highly specialized expertise. Then mechanized looms arrived, allowing factory owners to employ lower-skilled laborers producing goods faster and cheaper than most artisans could compete with.
The Luddites weren't irrational cave people terrified of progress.
They were people watching the systems around them change in ways that threatened not only their livelihoods, but their place in society and their understanding of themselves. They weren't afraid of the technology itself.
They were afraid of what it meant for their place in the world.
They weren't wrong.
Technology does reshape labor. It redistributes value. It renders some skills less economically relevant while elevating others. The industrial revolution radically changed human life. Mechanized agriculture changed it again. Automation changed it again. Software changed it again. AI is now poised to do the same.
And unlike the mechanized loom or the assembly-line robot, AI feels uniquely unsettling because it appears capable of touching not just physical labor, but intellectual and creative labor — domains many people quietly assumed were permanently human territory.
That uncertainty is deeply uncomfortable.
Uncertainty always forces us to confront the possibility that parts of our identity may have been more temporary than we realized.
A piece I return to often was written by Paul Graham in 2009: "Keep Your Identity Small." In remarkably few words, Graham outlines the danger of identifying too closely with any single idea, group, profession, or belief system. Once we begin thinking of ourselves as something, we start filtering reality through the preservation of that identity. We become less open to ideas, experiences, or technologies that challenge it.
And technology almost always challenges identity.
Not because technology is malicious, but because change forces adaptation. It forces reevaluation. It forces movement. And movement is uncomfortable when you've built stability around being a particular kind of person with a particular kind of expertise in a particular kind of world.
But identity itself is not fixed.
Think back to yourself at ten years old. Twenty. Even a few years ago. You were certainly you — but not entirely the same you that exists now. Experience continuously reshapes us in ways both dramatic and subtle. Some changes arrive loudly. Most happen quietly, without announcement. Technology evolves the same way.
AI is not static. It is constantly adapting, learning, and expanding based on the intentions of the people building and using it. I'm genuinely neutral on what the right level of AI adoption looks like for any individual — I suspect that answer varies wildly depending on values, goals, industries, and personalities.
But what feels increasingly important is keeping our identities flexible enough to survive periods of rapid change. Because while AI may reshape jobs, industries, and workflows, I'm far less convinced it can replace the fundamentally human parts of being alive: connection, judgment, meaning, friendship, love, community, taste, presence, shared experience, curiosity, grief, humor, philosophy, art.
Ironically, the more technology accelerates, the more valuable many of those things may become. As AI increasingly handles efficiency, optimization, and execution, perhaps part of our responsibility becomes leaning harder into the things that resist optimization. Conversation. Creativity. Gathering with other people for no reason beyond simply wanting to be together. The deeply human experiences that can't be automated away. Not because technology is bad.
Because humanity still needs to be practiced.
The future will change how we work. It may disrupt parts of your identity along the way. Some of those disruptions will feel unfair. Some probably will be unfair.
But if history suggests anything, it's that humans are remarkably adaptive creatures.
The Luddites were right to fear disruption.
They were also living through the painful middle of a transition whose final shape they couldn't yet see.
Perhaps that's exactly where we are now. Somewhere in the middle. Trying to understand which parts of ourselves are truly permanent — and which were always tied to systems that were eventually going to change.
Ryan Yepsen
Ryan writes about enterprise AI, customer reality, systems thinking, and the operating conditions that make meaningful execution either possible or painful.