Tech Refusal Has a Very Long History w/ Thomas Dekeyser

Setting the Stage for Techno-Negative Thinking You know, we need to ask the much bigger questions and in order to ask, be able to ask the bigger questions, such as how can we make tech work actually for people, for the majority of not everyone? How can we actually make it work in favour of of radical emancipation? How can we make sure tech is not reliant on extractivism and all those things. Maybe we need to, you know, negate our concurrent technological imaginations to even begin to think outside of our presence. Speaker 2 Hello and welcome to Techno and Save Us made a partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marx, and this week my guest is Thomas de Kazer. Thomas is a lecturer in human geography at the University of Southampton. The author of Techno Negative, a long history of refusing the machines, and Co made a documentary called Machines in. Speaker 3 Flames, which honestly, when we started recording the episode I hadn't realized he had helped make, and then he had to tell me and I felt like a real idiot, but that's it. Speaker 2 The I would recommend checking it out. It's it's an interesting documentary, but in this conversation we're mainly talking about Thomas's book Techno Negative, because it is this fantastic history and philosophical and theoretical interrogation of the refusal of technology, right? What it means not to say let's reform technology, you know, let's try to make technology better, but to just say, you know what? These technologies don't work. Let's smash them, let's break them, let's refuse them, let's not use them. You know, this is a fantastic history of that. And there's so many examples through history, not just of individuals and groups and collectives trying to push back against technology, but even states just saying, you know, these technologies do not work for us. And institutions as well, including, you know, say the the Christian Church or the Catholic Church to actually refuse technology. And one of the things that really stood out to me in reading the book was just how much of A history there is here, how much of this there has been, and how little that really plays in our modern narratives of technology, right? You know, because so much of it is about inevitability. And of course, the industry is going to create this new product, and we just all have to use it and accept it. But is that the case? Well, it hasn't always been in the past. And actually, we as humans have a rich history of refusal of these technologies. And I think that this is something that we need to remember and learn from as we think about the path forward. Certainly the Luddites are in this book and part of this history, but they're far from the only one. And actually, I feel like the history that Thomas gives us allows us to look at the Luddites in a slightly different way or to perceive, you know, the the role that they played in this history slightly differently. And seeing how they represented even potentially a shift in how refusal worked before and then how refusal potentially even evolved after, right. You know, there there are a moment in this history that can be very instructive to us, but there are other moments that I think that we can learn from and should learn from as well as we think about the right approach to the technologies that we face today. This this all powerful industry that is behind these digital technologies in particular, and how we respond to that and what it means to build a better world. You know, build technology that actually works for humanity rather than just these these companies in a way that maybe we don't talk enough of right now with the discourses that we have around digital technology and the ones that this industry tries to promote to serve its own interests really at the end of the day. So I think that this is a fascinating conversation. You know, we dig into a lot here, but there's also a lot that we couldn't get to just because there's a lot of, you know, interesting history and and discussions within Thomas's book. But I still think you're really going to like it. If you do, of course, make sure to leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice and you can share the show on social media or with any other friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech one, save us every single week so I can keep having these conversations to try to inform you and hopefully, you know, broaden your perspectives and your horizons on discourses around technology, the politics of technology and things like that. Well, you can join supporters like Patrick from Montreal and Adrian in Alaska by going to patreon.com/tech Won't Save Us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Uncovering the Hidden Histories of Tech Resistance Thomas, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Speaker 1 Hi Paris, good to be here. Speaker 3 Absolutely, it's great to speak with you and to have you on the show. You have this fantastic new book, Techno negative that I think will really resonate with the audience of this show in particular. You know, as people who are, you know, critical of the tech industry, who often oppose a lot of the technologies that, you know, are kind of rolled out in our lives, you know, seeing the negative social effects that can come of this. And so I'm I'm really excited to have you on the show and to dig into this further with you. And, and just to start, like I wanted to ask why this is a book that that you wanted to write? Why was this a subject that you wanted to to dig into? Speaker 1 So I think the main reason why I became interested in writing this book was a sense that kind of the way we understand technological politics today is very, I would say, quite limited. It's very often about, for example, how can we legislate something a little bit better? How can we make sure that that we adapt the technology in such a way that it does less harm, for example. I think, And I always felt like it is sort of, that's interesting, but surely there's like more to technological politics than just a sort of a change in legal framework for how we deal with technological innovations. And so I became particularly interested in kind of looking at the long histories of resistance to technology to start looking at how have people maybe resisted technology otherwise in the past. And it was really a very particular group, a collective and anti tech collective from the 1980s that I stumbled across. And that really made me go, oh, now this is interesting. And I made me sort of wonder what else is out there. And so this group was a was a group that's called Clodor, which stands in English for Committee for the Liquidation or Subversion of Computers. And they were a French group active in early 1980s France. They're active for three years. And as their name suggests, they were all about kind of attacking tech. And specifically they bombed computer companies. So they bombed computer companies like Philips, Honeywell and other sort of American companies, also other companies. Yeah. So they were very much kind of using these really radical means to resist technology. And that really kind of when I just accidentally came across this sort of interview with them and it made me really go, Oh my God, like, how is that not something we know more about? And so the book kind of emerged from that feeling that surely there is so much more we can learn from the resistance, resistance technology in historical terms than what we already know today. Digging into Unknown Territories of Tech Refusal Yeah, and and I think the first time that I had heard of Cloto was watching, you know, a film that you that you Co created called Machines in Flames. And I, I was, you know, as you talk about that, I'm just thinking like it must have been fascinating to kind of embark on this, this effort or, or this adventure of going into this history and understanding more about technological refusal over the past, you know, several 100 years that that must have been really, I don't know, a really interesting kind of quest, I guess. Speaker 1 Yeah, I really felt a little bit like, felt a little bit like a detective sort of going into the archives. And in particular, because so much of this is a history, we don't know, meet people. Maybe listeners will know about the Luddites who were sort of workers loom workers who in the early 19th century decided to fight against automation of, of their labour. And so they're based in northern England. And so a lot of people will have heard of the Luddites. They may even know a little bit about that. They were about that there was a worker struggle that it was against automation and so on. But besides that, there's very little kind of known about these archives. So it really felt like reading about these things really felt like kind of going into unknown territories to to some degree. Obviously there's a lot of work, particularly by kind of historians that already touches on on these things, but they're sort of hidden in academic articles right behind paywalls. And it required someone like myself with quite a bit of patience to kind of go through these things and start collecting them into a bit more of AI. Guess a coherent narrative, right? Speaker 3 Yeah, it it makes me think that like if I had the time, it's something that I would love to like endeavor and do. But I'm at least happy that you have put together this book so that, you know, we can kind of collectively get a piece of that through the work that that you have done. And, and I guess I'm wondering, you know, as I hear you discuss that, you know, there is a rich history as your book lays out and as we're going to talk about, why do you think it is that we're so ill informed in general about this history of technological refusal throughout in our societies and and throughout the world? The Narrative of Inevitable Progress and Hidden Histories I think it's the wider problem of how stories of resistance are often not known and in part is because history tends to be written by the powerful. It tends to be, we have, let's say the whatever the parliamentary minutes from the 17th century, and that is held in this some state archive somewhere. And then, you know, academics and others, amateurs can go and look at those things and write histories on those bases. And so stories of resistance very often don't feature in the archives. And particularly if it's not resistance that takes the shape of full on warfare, because full on warfare will have been documented heavily by the state, right. And the sort of archivists of of whatever era you're sort of looking at, whereas more kind of bottom up forms of resistance are, are usually, even if they are noted in the archives, they are hidden. And it's also not in the benefit of those who are, let's say, managing the archives or are interested in producing sort of official state narratives to bring these to the fore, right. So they remain hidden and they yeah, they require people to do a lot of digging to get to them. And so it's most often only really when resistance really ramps up, like with the Luddites where the British state thought that there was brilliant insurrection potentially that was about to happen. And so the military was sent in and and, you know, sort of it's almost like a close to like a scenario of warfare. So that's in part why these that history particularly does feature in to some degree in a public imagination, even if it's still limited, you know, maybe to a first and listeners of this podcast are not necessarily representative of of the wider population. But I would imagine, you know, compared to at least some of these other histories that I talk about in the book, it's one of those that's much more well known, I would imagine. Speaker 3 Yeah, I would definitely agree. And, and even when you talk about how, you know, those in power write the histories and, and what we know about them, even when it comes to the Luddites, like the way that the term Luddite is, is often understood to many people is just like, you know, someone who doesn't want to have to deal with technology at all, right? You know, it doesn't deal with the complexity. And, and it's a, you know, it's, it's kind of a rewriting of the actual motivations of the Luddite in order to try to fly, in order to try to smear what this group or this movement was. And so even then, in this history that is a little bit more familiar to people, you already have this kind of rewriting of what happened to make it so that people are intentionally misinformed about what it what it was, I guess. Speaker 1 Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think there's a sort of how, I don't know to what extent it's conscious, but there is definitely a a misrepresentation of groups like the Luddites. And I think in part, if there is a sort of motivation behind it is that to be able to tell the history of technology as some kind of smooth history that's almost like something that we can't stop whether we want to stop certain parts of it or not. So it's beneficial to be able to tell a story devoid of refusal, devoid of resistance, devoid of slowing down. So the the narrative of technological kind of progress as a sort of smooth linear process is one that's beneficial, right. And then I think that helps us in part that helps us understand why some of these histories are not well known is because those that have the sort of, you know, kind of power to write these histories may not have might not benefit from a history that's presented as much more contested. One that's much more with so many different sides with that was much more kind of messy than just the usual story, which is, oh, an inventor came up with a new machine and then 50 years later, someone else, another dude came up with another machine and that's sort of and that built on that previous machine, right? And that's the kind of story that I think at least in the public imagination, sort of is often kind of narrated. And I think today and in the past, it was beneficial to repress the notion of that actually being a fallacy. It's historically incorrect to think that that is it, that that was just a sort of smooth process. It wasn't. It was fought over very intensely, often by lots of different parties for very different reasons often. But it was a messy, sometimes bloody process. And I think we often forget that, particularly if we ignore these these histories that I think are so important. Speaker 3 Yeah, I think I think really well said. And as I was reading the book, like I was thinking about why, you know, we, we hear this narrative regularly, right, about why we see technology as inevitable rather than, you know, a contentious kind of history or a contentious process. Do you think that that is why we tend to see it as inevitable or or do you think there's a larger reason for that? Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I think there is this. The story of inevitability is one that benefits people. It allows someone to say you have to get on on board, whether you, whether you like this particular technological object infrastructure, whatever it is, whether you like it or not, you have to go on board. So I think there is a, there's a, there's a, a political motivation that underpins that narrative often I think that said, I think people often reproduce it because it's a simple narrative. It's a really easy narrative. It's much harder to think of history as something that's multi layered, as contradictory. That's not just like 1963 this happened, 1965 this happened, and it's sort of really that linear narrative. I think it's a very easy narrative, but it's one that's unfortunately, unfortunately, just generally speaking for how we understand the world, not great. But particularly, unfortunately for those of us who want to resist these technologies means we're up against a really powerful discourse of that kind of linearity of it all, whereby we are sort of seen as those who are, you know, kind of ahistorical, almost just like coming in and trying to resist something. Whereas, oh, in the past, people just accept technologies and, you know, and look, look what all these things have brought us. Look, it was great. And it sort of allows us to be sort of marginalized in many ways. So I think one of the key things discursively that's really important for basically anyone who's kind of interested in resisting technologies is really trying to break that discourse again and again and again because it is possible to break it. Discourse is going to be broken and they have been broken all the time. So I think this is something that that we kind of need to need to keep in mind when we think about contemporary resistance technology as well. Speaker 3 Yeah, I I definitely agree. And so I want to dig into some of the history in the book, but but obviously the title is techno negative, right? Radical Negation of Tech Beyond Simple Reform So in your view, what does it mean to be techno negative? Speaker 1 So I use the term techno negative as almost as an umbrella term. So I use it on the simplest level as holding a negative relationship to technology. I mean, the name suggests that, right? And so the a negative relationship is, is distinct from, let's say a relationship, which says, yes, I like that technology. It's also different from relationship, which is, yes, I like that technology, but we need to change it a little bit. That would be a kind of reformist sort of relationship technology. And I'm interested in a relationship that's neither the yes nor the yes, but but the no. And so I'm interested in historically and in the present ways of resist technology that don't rely on on the yes. And so that means people, groups, individuals, collectives who are interested in the radical resistance of a particular technological object infrastructure, even technological Ida, particular technological imagination, there's much more kind of a radical negation of those things rather than a simple sort of taking for granted of a particular technological presence. So I'm interested in what's outside of that. And so for me, So what I, what I do in the book is trace these to the more radical negations of technology throughout history. And in part, this goes back to what I was saying earlier where I was sort of looking for a widening of our technological imagination beyond just what the tools that we seem to have available to us right now, which is one that relies on the idea that the present that we have is one that that we need to stick with. And maybe there's a little bit of wiggle room to move things a little bit more this way or that way or to prevent that very particular articulation or that very particular data set for being sort of unevenly distributed as it is. So thinking of negative is my way of trying to like trying to break out of that. And I try and do that historically, I guess. Speaker 3 Yeah, like even as you were starting to describe the concept, that's really what I was thinking, right, is that it does feel like the discourse that we have about technology today is very limited, right? In that, you know, obviously you have the, the boosters of the technology, the people who really want us to adopt it. And they have a really important, you know, role in setting the narrative around technology. And then, you know, a lot of kind of the counter to that is to say, OK, this technology is here, but how do we at least make it a bit better? How do we reduce the harms a little bit of, of how it might work? There's a lot less of that. Just get this technology away from me. We shouldn't have it. Let's get rid of it. Let's destroy it. Like whatever. Right. I, I feel like, and I wonder your thoughts on this. I, I feel like we're seeing a little bit more of that maybe in the past few years, but I feel like that's a distinct change from what we've been think for a while. Speaker 1 I think you're right. And I think I should also emphasise like I understand the impulse to go, OK, these technologies are here now, so let's just try and make them work a little bit better first. I understand the impulse and I'm not saying that people are completely misguided in going down that path. I just think it's, it's too limited and it's lacking bravery. I think, and I think some of that bravery is indeed what we've been seeing in the last few years. I think it's at least unique and within the last few decades what we're kind of seeing with I guess the popular conversation that came with, with new innovations in AI. And I think the kind of really strong push both on the state and the corporate level towards the introduction of AI and every single possible domain you could possibly think of means that people are a lot of people at least are are like, even if we make this slightly better, like this is not going to get rid of the problems that are inherent to it, or at least that are a very important component of it. Which I think is why we're seeing some people kind of moving beyond just a sort of for reformist relationship to tech. I think it's just the intensity and the brutality with which the stuff is being introduced that means that people are like, hold on, maybe we need to hold a slightly more negative relationship to this then maybe we help with. Social media or the introduction over like the commercialization of the Internet. How Capitalism Redefined Resistance to Technology Yeah, I definitely agree. And I and I also feel in a sense it's also like a building on right. It's like there are are so many harms that have come so far and now we're being like presented with a whole new wave and it's just like, no, this is too much, right? It's gone too far now. But you mentioned the state there and and I wanted to start to get into this history because it was really fascinating to me to start to read how you were laying this out. And you know, it was interesting to see that it I think today we associate opposition to technology with individuals, right? And and maybe with certain groups, but, but actually in the past, the state was actually very invested in trying to constrain the roll out and the adoption of certain technologies. Can you talk to us a bit about that and and why there was that incentive to try to stop technological development in a certain period, you know, of history? Speaker 1 Yeah. So you're absolutely right. I think this is a very important shift that I think we see historically. And I would say kind of the shift really happens with the birth of capitalism. And people disagree over when exactly the birth of capitalism is, but I'm going to say late sort of 18th century in the Industrial revolution. And that really is, in my reading at least, is a really important shift that we see in the history of resistance technology. So before that moment, most often resistance technology, So what I call technical activity was sort of wielded by those in power. And that could be a religious elite, that could be a social elite, and that could be a political elite. And so amongst that were sort of states who were particularly kind of the late medieval times, but sort of still before the birth of, of capitalism, you actually had a lot of states, both on a kind of national level and local level, very strongly pushing, pushing back against specifically automation of, of, of labour tools, but also might generate particular kinds of technological innovations. And, and the reason why I mentioned that this, this in relation to capitalism is that within that period, the sort of dominant economic model was sort of mercantilism. And mercantilism is very much set up around at least one of the key features is that it's very, it wants to make sure that people stay in work and have stay employed because they were very afraid of having a kind of insurrection happening. And so resisting technology, particularly technologies that would make people unemployed was actually a way of making sure that people were not left hungry on the streets and ready for an insurrection. So actually, so here, like before the lad I, so before the kind of birth of capitalism, you had places like Hamburg and, and Germany where they did public burnings of, of, of machines like the state that public burnings of machines. Like imagine this in 2026, imagine that a local council going, actually, we're going to set this data centre on fire because we're afraid that it's going to render people unemployed. So you had this? Speaker 3 Maybe we're slowly heading back to that, to that. Speaker 1 Maybe, Yeah, maybe we are. Yeah, that's just one example of that kind of public burning. At some point you even had an inventor that was being strangled and which was sort of by at least one archive is sort of read as actually ordered by a local government. So he had a really strong push back against tech in that period. And then and the both of capitalism obviously came with a much sort of a tightening connection between on the one hand, obviously the new kind of capitalists, a new ruling class of capitalists who owned the factories, who owned the means of production between them on the one hand and the kind of state on the other. So the birth of capitalism was in part A, a kind of a legal transformation whereby private property was really deeply sort of written out in law. Wage contracts, like labour contracts as we know them today were really kind of at least in sort of Western Europe were really sort of written out properly at that time. So you increasingly you get a very strong connection between the state and capital on the on the other hand, and that means that resistance to technology was no longer a taken by the state because they had a benefit. They they were, they didn't see people losing their jobs as much as a problem anymore because where they were much increasing on the side of of capitalism and the capitalists. And so at that moment, I think of that as a sort of first, the Luddites really is the first moment whereby resist technology really becomes a matter of resisting power and power relationships, a resistance against the dominant dress before. And I haven't talked about any of the other examples, but before even the kind of the examples I talked about with with Hamburg, for example, and the sort of States and local states resisting tech. Even before then as well, it was very much sort of religious community saying these technologies have to be banned because it prevents you from properly praying and it makes you too proud and blah, blah, blah, all these things. But so it's really kind of birth of capitalism that really, for me at least, very much kind of moves us into a different kind of phase of technological resistance from a kind of weapon of power to a weapon of of kind of resistance. Speaker 3 Yeah, definitely. And I, I think I want to come back to the religious piece that you just touched on right there. But I, I want to stick with what you're talking about in this kind of transition right from mercantilism to capitalism and how that changes the relationship to technology. Because it really stands out then that if you look at the Luddites, as you're saying, you know, these are people who are resisting technology and the state is really trying to like repress that resistance, which is a real difference from what had happened before. But you also mentioned private property and kind of the, the property relation and how that develops through that transition and how that's really key in redefining that relationship to technology and, and the state's role in relation to it. Could you, could you maybe expand on that, on that piece a bit, especially that property piece and and how that's really key in that transition? Speaker 1 Yeah. So with the birth of capitalism, it became an increased sort of ownership of the means of production within the hands of quite a small band of people that say in the case of the leather, it's the factory owners. And so resistance to technology. So for example, in the case of the leather, it's actually attacking machines became an attack on the property of of, of the capitalists. And so it became in, in purely legal terms, that was like, oh, but that is those tools, those machines are owned by a particular group and they're under attack by another group. So it was very easy to sort of draw a clear line. Whereas before you didn't have that sort of mass organization of the economy around capital and around sort of private property of the capitalist in the same way. And so you really see this and the French philosopher Michel Foucault like really goes in to sort of how the law sort of changed at that around that period to really present the worker as a potential predator, as a potential thief as well. And so, and that could be the worker as someone who might conduct sabotage, who might attack your private property, but also it might be someone who steals on the workflow, who takes things from you. And so you really see this sort of this much stronger, at least a legal terms, but also and wider kind of political terms, this really strong attack on the worker as a potential threat to private capital and, and with that to the sort of means of production. And I think you're right, I think this is a, this is a really important shift in terms of understanding the history of this technology because it really becomes, you know, the Luddites is really the point at which and it became a capital felony to attack machines. And lots of people, you know, got publicly executed, right? Lots of the others got publicly executed. They got shot as well. All sorts of things happened. And it's really like you read that was written the, I think it's called the breaking frame or the frame breaking Act. It was really written in law that to attack a machine was to conduct a very, very serious crime. And that would have not been thinkable a century, 2 centuries before then where there is a much more kind of protectionist relationship between the kind of state and and the worker. So yeah, I think you're, you're right. I think this is really important to kind of keep in mind, particularly if we're thinking about the present as well, like who owns these tools today and what it means to resist these tools. Speaker 3 Yeah, I, I think it was really fascinating to to read that kind of distinction and that and that transition in your work to understand how that how that was happening, right? Because, you know, many listeners will know the story of the Luddites, right? And how they did try to appeal to Parliament and Parliament wasn't very interested until the capitalist went to parliament and said, these people are breaking our machines, vandalizing our factories. And then all of a sudden, you know, the the military was rolled out to to deal with this, right? And so you could see the constituency that they were interested in. But then I guess looking back at the kind of mercantilist period as you were talking about, you know, in in that period the state was interested in keeping people employed. But I guess, you know, the kind of actors were different too, in that you had the kind of artisans and the guilds and you know, there's a very different kind of relationship to power and to production, I guess. And and that is really important in understanding the the shift, I guess. Examining Motivations for Pushing Back Against Technology Yeah. I, I think it's, it, it just reminds me that we have to keep thinking about the relationship between technology on the one hand, the state and capital on the others. And not just historically. Because you're right, that relationship shifts will radically shift throughout history. And depending on when you're looking, which period you're looking at, which place you're looking at, but also in the present, right, Different technologies will be situated differently within that within that relationship. And then that means resistance to those technologies might look very differently, but also they might be repressed in different ways or to very different degrees. So yeah, I think that relationship is really important in terms of understanding where power lies, but also where the kind of space of resistance might be. Speaker 3 Yeah, I, I think, I think really well said. And just to pick up on that, on that religious piece very briefly, you know, I, I think people will be familiar with hearing kind of, you know, say the Catholic Church or something like that. Be warning people about using the Internet or, or back in the 80s, warning people about using personal computers, right? And, and how, you know, religious people should not, you know, be, be using these new technologies because of, you know, the simple nature of them or, or whatever. I'm not going to know the exact argument that was made. Can you talk about how that is distinct from the way that it would have been approached, you know, much further back in kind of the history that that you're talking about in the role that, you know, say the church and and religious organizations would have played in suppressing technology in those periods? Speaker 1 Yeah. So the period I look at is the kind of medieval periods of 12/13/14 centuries where the Christian Church both sort of on the fringes but also very much at the core of the Christian Church. There was a push back against different kinds of technologies. Obviously technologies around that time was not necessarily kind of automated machines. That was more sort of like basic tools, whether it's within use, within architecture, arts, labour, things like that. One particular text that I find really interesting by Pope called Pope Innocent the third who wrote book, which I think is one of the best types of book ever, which is on the misery of the human condition, which is just like, and we should just kind of goes through how everyone is miserable, not just the poor. Yes, the poor are miserable, but the rich are also miserable and everyone's miserable. It's fantastic book. But anyway, within that book he talks about the the kind of futility of technological innovation in the face of of kind of God. And one of the things that I've noticed with within that particular text, but also within kind of a specific Christian borders, such as the Cistercians and, and some other kind of groupings in the kind of continental Europe around the time, was a feeling that technology was a potential threat to God's civilisation, whereby as whereby we as humans suddenly think that we can be creators and as if the the divine world isn't already perfectly created by God. And so it's a very religious argument against tech, right? And on the basis of that, there's a banning of certain tools. It was really seen as like the embrace of technology and specific tools was really seen as a as a sin, almost as a deadly sin. It was to become too proud. It was to to embrace pride, you know, just one of the sins. Yeah. Within that period, you really get this strong kind of push back against various technological forms. I think this is really interesting because this is, again, similarly to the states that to the states that we talked about earlier, this was, yeah, my reading at least, was a, a way for these communities, for the Christian Church to hold on to the religious power that they had, right. They wanted, they, they wanted divine influence, they wanted divine rule. And so technology was seen as a potential threat with that. And we haven't really touched upon this yet, but a key argument that I make in the book is that technological innovations offer altered what we think of is the properly human or is the sort of the proper place of the human in the world. And with these Christian communities, we see this very clearly. So the emergence of these technologies and the use of these technologies is seen as a threat to, you know, a Christian idea of the human whereby the human is sort of subordinate to gods. And within that you have sort of priests or sort of like in between and other figures that are sort of in between, but it's a sort of threat to like the proper place of humanity within the divine cosmos. And I find that really fascinating. And I think we still see some of that today within or echoes of that. So I think for example, when the Pope put out his sort of anti AI statement, which I think is great, you know, I think it's interesting, but you even within that you see you still see echoes of that whereby it's yes, it's about big companies and like, you know, you have some kind of like a very light touch anti capitalist critique in there. I mean, very, very subtle. But it's also about kind of protecting a particular kind of religious way of life that they see that he sees as potentially the threat through the introduction and the mass popularisation of of AI. And I think, you know, I think this is interesting because this allows us maybe to unpick some of these texts and unpick some of these arguments and go, which of these do we actually want to follow? Which of these do we think problematic? I'm not saying that in here the religious critique of technology is bad, but I think there's often a kind of self-interest in resisting tech as there is in embracing tech. And I think we need to have tools. I need to do a lot of sort of self reflection to think about why is it that I or someone else or a group is pushing back against certain technologies? Because I think something I've sort of definitely seen in the last decade, so is that people I fundamentally disagree with resisting the same things that I might want to resist. So like, you know, you might have eco fascists groups resisting modernisation full stop, wanting to return to track for wives and traditional gender relationships. And so they might be critiquing the same thing that I might be critiquing, but for fundamentally different reason. I think the reasons are really important because the reasons give us a sense of what would happen if they were successful. And I think often with like the eco fascists, they have only a very particular group of people in mind that they want to see benefit from their resistance to tech. And I think this is, you know, this is an extreme example, but we might see sort of various versions of that in communities that maybe we are related to. And I think this is sort of for me kind of reading these histories as sort of a reminder to to think carefully. Is the resistance to take a way of holding onto a particular power that you and maybe a particular select group of people have, or is it actually about universal emancipation? And if it isn't the latter, then we have we have some work to do. The Pope's AI Stance and Growing Collective Resistance Yeah, I think it's really fascinating that you bring that up, right, Because we certainly have seen, you know, a lot of far right and fascist figures become increasingly critical of technology. And sometimes you do see kind of liberals and even people on the left, you know, occasionally kind of give them credit for some of these arguments that they're making because of how they might align with the types of things that we're saying about technology. But even when it comes to the Pope, right, and, and the Pope kind of putting out this encyclical on artificial intelligence, it really feels that at a moment where there is so much kind of incentive to adopt this technology, having this figure that is so prominent, that does have so much influence over, you know, a large number of people in our planet that they have someone like that making arguments that at least have echoes of some of the kind of refusal that that other people are hearing. It's like, it feels like it's a it's at least welcome, right? Even if the motivations are not the same as the motivations that, you know, kind of we might have for wanting to oppose artificial intelligence or generative AI or, or what have you. But I also wonder or like, it seems like it speaks to the moment, as I was asking you earlier about the fact that, like, refusal as an option feels like it's something that is becoming more common when you even have a Pope, kind of like actively speaking out against artificial intelligence. And people who are very secular and who would have never given much thought to the opinions of the Catholic Church on something are saying like, do we need to start taking the Catholic Church seriously again? Like, it feels like a really wild moment, right? Speaker 1 Yeah, 100%. I think at the moment when the kind of cultural narrative, whether it's in our sort of within the media or within our own workplaces or ever in school, in our universities, wherever it is, when, when the narrative is so saturated with a feeling that you have no option but to move along with it. With AI specifically, to have someone come in and kind of break that narrative, just like even if it's just literally 1 text dropped online and then Pope, the Pope never talks about AI again. Even if that's the case, it feels, I think for people like a kind of, it's almost like a release valve. It's like, OK, it's sort of like, OK, we can actually breathe for a moment like this. Temporarily at least, a space has been created in which I no longer feel like I am fighting against this on my own. And I think in part this is a failure of our, our failure to kind of collectivise technological critique in many cases. The fact that we need a very powerful figure to come in and tell us, yes, you can keep resisting tech. That's, that's great. And again, and I'm not saying that these things aren't welcome, but I think there is something about it tells us something about kind of where we're at where which is that we're, we still very often feel and often is actually the case that we're kind of resisting these things on a very individual level, right. I think I do think this is changing to some degree. There's a lot of collective organizing beginning to happen, but I think I do think that's quite recent. Speaker 3 Yeah. And I want to pick up on what you're saying there about kind of the individual and the collective and, and that sort of thing, right? Because we've talked about the relationship to the state and of institutions and how that has evolved over time toward technology. But you know, obviously when you, when you get to the Luddites and you, and you start to tell the history beyond that, you know, you mentioned Klodo earlier, we're talking a lot more about, you know, individuals and people being motivated against technology and, and what their motivations are. And so I wonder what you see in kind of how the approaches of people and kind of, you know, groups that come together to oppose technology, how that shifts over time and, and how motivations can be different in in different moments. Speaker 1 I think you're right to point out that there is a quite an insane level of diversity between some of these groups. We already talked about kind of religiously powerful groups sort of deciding to ban particular tools in a monastery to ultra leftist bombing computer companies in 1980s France. You know, very broadly speaking, they each have their own kind of critique of what is considered technology or technique, to use the ancient Greek word around that time. What is sort of the artificial in that? In that moment, from sort of my understanding, I think 20th century was really a sort of the moment when we have the sort of further acceleration of capitalism and eventually kind of neoliberalism. The same way that sort of society, there's a sort of individualisation that takes place. Resistance often began to take that form as well. So I think a lot of the resistance that we that we see which whether it's in terms of people kind of withdrawing into anti tech communes to live there with 1520 people and sort of try and build a a different lifestyle outside of kind of western modernity, or whether it's more just kind of in terms of oh, how we was just technology is about whether you decide to use the computer or not. So I think there is a whereas the lad I sort of sort of anti thesis to that. Not just was it the workers coming together, it you had it on the kind of wider societal scale that people were very supportive and were very vocal, which is why it became a real threat, right? It was it was not just these specific loom workers. And in the beginning it was, but eventually it became much wider part of society. And I think like in the 20th century, that sort of became, it was a sort of individualisation of resistance to tech that I think is inseparable from the sort of wider a relationship between the individual and society and sort of capitalists, sort of European, North American sort of societies. I think what is unique about our contemporary moments is the specifically really AI that just takes how many different people feel affected by AI and how and why. And they have so many different reasons for wanting to negate AI within their lives in the workflow, where on the workflow wherever and it goes from someone who feels like, oh, a data centre emerging in my area is going to be really bad for my property values. So sort of like, you know, a petty bourgeois sort of like notion of like, OK, I want to be able to hold on to my private property. And it's a maximisation of value to an environmentalists who might resist the same data centre for fundamentally different reasons, to a worker who might eventually lose their job at these data centres keep being developed and the way that they're being developed. And therefore automation of labour becomes even more sort of normalised and prominent. And that means we're no longer speaking just about kind of individuals. And I think what is interesting is that we do increasingly see people kind of linking up. We're not either the United States, but stage. But I think we are kind of moving beyond the sort of very individualists, oh, I'm just going to decide to use GBT or not. Surely people are certain people are still going to do that, and maybe the majority of people are not going to get actively involved with a collective struggle. But I think what is unique is precisely because it is so omnipresent, so many people feel affected by it, even if it's just sort of discursively for now, they feel like they keep just being told to use it, even if it's not yet threatening the current job that they have. There is a sense that across the diversity, there's a sort of shared target, there's a shared object of critique, which kind of in my hope at least as sort of like might be a moment that which we kind of move away again from a sort of ego centred way of resisting tech towards something that's collectively much more more intense. And to go back to something I was saying about kind of eco fascist, that doesn't mean we need to sort of embrace everyone who has the shared, shared target. We need to do careful work. But I do think it means like for the first time in a long time, we have a something for on which we can kind of build a wider, hopefully wider social movement. Challenging the 'Neutral Tools' Fallacy in Technology It is interesting to hear you describe that though, right? The, the thought of there was this kind of collective movement in the time of the Luddites. And then things did get much more individual or, you know, kind of like as you were talking about the retreat into, into communes or these small groups kind of bombing computer centers or, or computer companies or, or things like that, which I guess we can debate the effectiveness of maybe, you know, whether they actually won things in in the end. Obviously we know that, you know, the Luddites were, were crushed by, by the state. But maybe if we see people coming together more today, that maybe means that there's a greater chance of actually pushing back and resisting and kind of halting some of these technologies like artificial intelligence or or hyperscale data centres. Speaker 1 I yeah, I fully agree with that. And I think to the question of sort of how effective these groups. So I think this is an interesting I think this is an interesting it's an important question. I don't give a sort of moral evaluation of different groups or even political evaluations necessarily of these different groups in into book. But I think what I like about those groups, even they even though they were very much in a kind of micro level, the way which they're operating is that within the kind of conditions that they were working. So let's say close or they were able to get local and national press to discuss the arrival of computation at a time when it when the personal computer didn't even exist yet. So they were like, you know, between 1980 and 1983, they were active, like personal computer either wasn't there yet at all or was just very slowly beginning to emerge. So at that time through they're really radical acts of sabotage, they actually were able to get these things talked about even a decade before the kind of Internet utopians came along in the 90s and who were like, internet's just going to mean the decentralisation for everyone and we're going to be able to avoid capture by the state and the market and we're going to have these amazing utopian kind of communism. I'm simplifying. But like before that kind of more positive utopian narrative, they were already saying actually computation is going to be a dead end eventually. They were looking specifically at the link between the computer and how it was sort of used by the state, by the military and by the police. So again, very particular context in which they were active, but I think we also have to understand them as sort of pushing back against and a moment on the left where the only people really who had a critique of tech were were the communists, was the Communist Party and for the Communist Party. And I think this is still the same for a lot of Labour parties within like various kind of contexts today is that their understanding is just oh tech as if if we have control over if it's publicly owned and this would already be a more radical party. Most would just say we just need better regulations. Some might say it might need to be collectively owned or it might even be have to be owned by the workers. But there is an assumption there that that once that's the case, we get rid of all the problems. And clothing was saying no, no, no, no, you've got this all wrong. Even if the the workers have control of these tools, we're still going to have surveillance. We're still going to have all these other problems. We're still going to have these users within the military. We're going to still have all these problems. And I think this is something to think about for us as well as sort of, you know, how do we relate to arguments for not just reform, but also kind of, you know, these infrastructures becoming publicly owned? Is that where we want to draw a line? Maybe it is, but I think we need to, you know, we need to think carefully about whether that's sort of our end goal or do we have something even beyond that. Speaker 3 Yeah, I, I find that that is still an issue today, right? When we have these discussions, especially on the left, where you do have this group of people who especially point back to Marx and say, you know, that we should want to kind of use these technologies, see the technologies develop because then we can seize them and use them for the benefit of, of workers, of, of the people, of whatever, right. And then this other view that I think is more represented by the things that I would argue, the things that you're arguing that would say that, you know, we need to look much more closely at these technologies And not all these technologies can actually be seized for, for better ends or, or better uses, right? Whether that, you know, is the French Communist Party that was saying it back in in the 1980s, you know, that we need to kind of use these technologies for good or we can use these technologies for good. Or even today, where we have politicians like Bernie Sanders saying we should take half of the AI companies into public ownership And, you know, people pushing back and saying, well, maybe the problem is not who owns the AI companies, but the tools themselves and what the technology is doing, right? Speaker 1 Yes, I think this is important because it allows us to push back against this notion that these are just neutral tools that can be seized and to put to any use. And I think this is philosophically and politically flawed because it assumes that you can just take a technology and cut off everything that sort of went into it originally and that keeps feeding into it. And you can just sort of take it out as if it's some sort of pristine kind of pure thing that can just become put to you somewhere else, as if it's not going to bring all the the baggage along with it. So for example, you know, we have to understand that kind of computation and kind of infrastructures were originally military infrastructures, right? And so that doesn't mean that, you know, that means that, oh, just putting the Internet into the hands of just a wider population doesn't mean that you get rid of, let's say, the surveillance infrastructures that are part and parcel of the very functioning of these tools. This is why I've sort of in the past pushed back against things like, oh, we just need to nationalise things like Facebook. And again, I get the, I get the impulse. But then my second question is like, what do you do about the, the inherent commodification at of, of social relationships at the heart of these tools? What do you do with the fact that it's built upon and reliant upon surveillance infrastructures without surveillance mechanism, like it can't function. Without the data capture, it can't function. And so the question then is, do we need these tools or do we need to abolish them? And then actually think about what is what are what would be a technological environment, a technological future that actually directly benefits us, rather than just going, OK, let's just use what we've got and try and make do. And I think this is this is the speculative challenge, right? What does it and I enter book with a kind of an argument speculatively for like an abolitionist politics of technology, which is to try and find an outside to that reformist or just kind of communist argument for it to go. You know, we need to ask the much bigger questions and in order to ask be able to ask the bigger questions, such as how can we make tech work actually for people for the majority of not everyone? How can we actually make it work in favour of of radical emancipation? How can we make sure tech is not reliant on extractivism and all those things. Maybe we need to, you know, negate our concurrent technological imaginations to even begin to think outside of our presence. And this is, again, this is a difficult task. This is a a complicated task that would need to be collect, that needs to be collectively kind of worked through. The Political Struggle Over What It Means to Be Human But I think this is, for me at least, the kind of the real challenge of our moments. How do we not fall into the kind of the easy answers? Speaker 3 Yeah, I, I completely agree with you. And I, I want to pick up on something that you were saying a little bit earlier as we start to, to wind down our conversation in the book, you know, you mentioned humanity earlier, right? And, and what understanding this, this history tells us about humanity or humans or, you know, about us, right. You wrote in the book that that this history of refusal actually helps us kind of understand ourselves, you know, as, as a whole better. How so like, how is that important? How? How is understanding our refusal to technology something that actually helps us understand humans and and humanity? Speaker 1 So the way I approach this is by so I understand both technology and resistance to technology as something that's more than about, you know, the question to use the technology to introduce it or to resist it is about much more than just kind of practical questions such as oh, is it going to make something more efficient or immoral? Questions such as oh, do we actually does does this raise any like particular ethical issues or not for a particular group or not? I actually, what I've seen by going through the archives is actually that that's the struggle for and a kind of against technology and everything in between is often takes place on that almost philosophical level. And by that I mean by that I mean that when a new technology is introduced, it often challenges what in that moment are sort of dominant ways of understanding the human. So earlier I mentioned the religious groups and that in medieval times, so their understanding of the human for that population was very particular. It was very much about the kind of modest position of the human in the face of the sort of all knowing gods. And so their technology becomes a potential kind of negotiation or a threat or a challenge to that. And we see this throughout the history of theological refusal is that there is at least in part, this kind of philosophical battle that takes place, particularly when like radically different technologies get introduced. And I think the reason why I think this, this isn't just a sort of intellectual academic exercise for me, this is because this is a political question, because being able to or settling on the particular definition of what it means to be human is, is a deeply political thing. So being able to say, for example, with with AI, and this is a little bit of a leap, but with AI that like AI obviously poses sort of threats to what we think of as as what it means to be human in the sense that it automates things. It's able to think something that most people would think of as sort of uniquely a human capacity. Like a big part of that is that on the one hand, there's this argument that AI might be sort of kind of blurring the line between the human and the non human. And that's a good thing. But actually, when you look more closely at like the AI evangelist, actually what they have in mind is for a particular set of people tends to be white men, to be the kind of the superior group collective within the world. They're the ones who don't have to deal with all the clever damage. They're not the ones having to do the extractivism in Congo. They're not the ones who have to do all the the brutal labour, who have to deal with all these horrible effects. Like they themselves sort of prop themselves up as a kind of properly human, as a sort of superior race. And I think this is really, This is why I think this is a political thing. So be so being able to propose by way of technology a particular idea of what it means to be human as a way of being able to devalue. And in very extreme cases, you know, the dehumanisation of a population is what lends itself to genocide, right? We've seen this throughout history. See this today in Gaza, you know, being able to portray people as other than human, whether it's animals, even objects. We saw this historically with slavery. The slave was a legally speaking and objects that allow them to be treated like an object. So this philosophical kind of struggle is a deeply political 1. And I think this is what I sort of traced throughout history, how that struggle plays out. And again, this isn't just an intellectual thing. This is about being able to understand what emerges with new technological innovations, but also particular ways of resisting it. And, and I think, you know, this is really important for me. It doesn't mean we talked about eco fascists earlier. Eco fascism has their own critique of technology, but it's there's a very specific idea of who counts as properly human. This for me is always a sign if there's a very particular idea of what it means to be human and so many people fall outside of it, we probably have a problem. There's probably something deeply reactionary at at play here. And so when we're thinking about our own ways of resisting tech, we have to think about, you know, who's included what, what form of humanity, who's included when our within our own understandings of of of the kind of property human then part is philosophical conversation philosophers, but it's also about you have everyday understandings of like, should certain people just be collateral damage? Should the people who just have to live next to the data centre, like, Oh yeah, they don't just, they don't count as much. They just have to suck it up? Or the people working in horrible working conditions, you know, for looking for rare materials for NVIDIA to be able to produce their chips. Like all of that is tied up with these kinds of political and very philosophical questions and facts. Speaker 3 Yeah. Who is actually included in these futures and who was allowed to, you know, reap the benefits of this technological marvel or whatnot that the industry is trying to sell us, Right. And that tells us a lot about their visions of what this future is, how it's going to work. Embracing a Radical Technological Imagination for Change Thomas, I just have one more question for you as we kind of close off our conversation. And that is very much about what we're seeing today, right? We've talked about it throughout this conversation. But how do you see this technological refusal evolving? And what is the politics that you think that we should be holding toward technology to today? Speaker 1 So it's always $1,000,000 question instead of like, what's the kind of way out? So I think the moment we're in today is is quite an exciting 1. So we've seen for the first time in a very long time, not just a white diversity of kind of groups and individuals sort of deciding they want to take action against specifically AI, but I also, but it's also just the level of intensity is novel. So the same extends that the kind of the push of AI is really unique in terms of intensity. The level of resistance to it is equally unique. So I think this is the kind of this is really from that perspective, it's really quite an exciting moment. And I think for me kind of what comes next, I wouldn't want to sort of offer a blueprint or a predetermined set of like methods or practices even. But I think what I'm interested in is I guess offering kind of tools or particular IDs to help us maybe collectively decide how we might want to actually kind of continue the struggles that many of us are already pardoned parcel of. And one of the things that one of the source of inspiration I often go to is it's the history of abolition. And so by abolition, I mean both abolition of, of slavery, slave trades, also abolition of prisons, family abolition, all sorts of kind of various versions of abolitionism. And what I find interesting about that is just the, the extent to which they're not happy with just going, oh, we're just going to, let's say reform prisons so that they're a little bit humane. In fact, they're interested in undermining, undoing the conditions that give rise to the prison in the 1st place. By which I mean, you know, the various economic, social and political things that are, that are, that have produced in worlds in which prisons and the way they exist today in the West are a thing. And so I, I learned from that a kind of a sense of bravery to, to want to push beyond just. Minimising our technological politics to just going, let's just make the horrible thing that we've got slightly better. Abolitionism for me is a is a way of breaking out of that. It's a way of breaking out of the present without necessarily immediately articulating what that future will be. But that's the sort of first move. And I think a second question that I always try and keep in mind when I'm thinking about technological politics and how we can sort of keep pushing it towards, you know, emancipatory ways. Is is around that question of how do we make sure that our technological politics don't just end up reproducing a old don't just end up kind of serving again, a very select bunch of people. So if we're looking at AI big tech, it's usually this is almost just a few dozen people who are radically benefiting from these technologies. So we need to make sure that our resistance technology, it is the polar opposite of that by which it means to be radically democratic. It needs to avoid reproducing a very narrow idea of what it of which humans count within these narratives. It needs to break out of these kind of categories that do that already exist. And I think resist technology is partially about sort of breaking out of these kind of fixed groupings that that we've got. So I think those are some some like initial, I guess tools questions that I think are important to keep in mind. I think generally speaking, it's about trying to push beyond just, I think because we are at the moment I think when unique radical things are possible. So I think really grasping that and really going, yeah, let's work towards the radically different technological imagination. Let's not reduce ourselves to just the sort of idealism that's reductive to can we make sure that the data set is a little bit more representative of the wider population? Again, I get why people go down that route, but I think it we are at a moment when I feel like if we just reduce ourselves to that, we're just going to eat, keep reproducing all problems that we've got. And with that old times, old violence and so on, these are things that need to be kind of addressed at a much more radical, sort of profound foundational level. So yeah, these are the kind of things that I think hopefully also my book speaks to kind of give some of these tools for for thinking through a radical technological imagination. Speaker 3 Yeah, I, I definitely agree. I think that we're in a moment where like there's a, there's a, there's a kind of hope that we haven't had for a different kind of technological politics for, for quite some time with the opposition to AI data centers is just kind of taking advantage of it. You know, the, the book is fascinating. There's so many aspects of it that we couldn't get into just because there's so much in there. And I would highly recommend people go check it out to to get more of that because I think it's exactly the kind of book that listeners of the show are really going to like and to enjoy and and learn a lot from. Thomas, thank you so much for taking the time. I I really appreciate it. Speaker 1 No, thank you. This was great. Thanks a lot. Speaker 2 Thomas the Kaiser is the author of Techno Negative, a long history of refusing the machines. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by ME. Paris Marx production is by Kylie Hewson. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com/tech Won't Save Us and making a pleasure for your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.