A brief history of techno-negativity
From the techne pessimists of Ancient Greece to the computer firebombers of the Information Age, here's a look at the long—and fruitful—legacy of refusing the machine.
With the backlash against AI escalating dramatically, I can’t imagine a better time to consider the history of what the scholar Thomas Dekeyser terms the “techno-negative.” Dekeyser has just published a new book on the subject, titled, fittingly, Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, with the University of Minnesota Press. It’s an academic work, but it’s sharply and compellingly written, already garnering great reviews from mainstream outlets. It’s a hard recommend for readers of BITM.
I met Dekeyser, a lecturer in human geography at the University of Southampton in the UK, around the time his 2022 film “Machines in Flames” debuted, and have followed his work ever since. Now, with the book out, I asked if he’d be interested in writing a piece exploring its themes for BITM. He was kind enough to share this whirlwind look at how people and communities have rejected, shunned, or refused technology through history, and why their techno-negativity matters more than you think.
Before we get to that, a little housekeeping. First: I’m looking for a podcast producer to help make a weekly show about AI, labor, and the rising resistance to Silicon Valley. If that sounds interesting to you or someone you know, here’s a link to the job description. This is a paid, part-time gig, and I would love to work with someone familiar with the BITM project. Second: As always, this work—the writing, reporting, editing—is made possible by paid subscribers who chip in each month. If you find value in BITM, please consider becoming a paid supporter, too. OK! Enough of that, and onwards to the techno-negative.
The history of the techno-negative
By Thomas Dekeyser
Technological progress is not just driven by innovations in technical abilities: explosive growths in compute power, processing speed, predictive algorithms, and so on. It is also, deeply, about discourse. AI-promoters and other Big Tech evangelists have long aimed to push their technological agendas by way of normalizing it through discourse, telling us that their tech futures are not simply desirable, but inevitable.
In this story, technological progress is a big, clean wave that carries everything forward, and cannot be halted. What we are presented with is a natural process that takes societies away from a presumably savage past and into a civilized present or future, one invention at a time. Because it is natural, attempts at pausing or slowing current forms of technological progress down are not simply naïve; they are futile. This story is omnipresent. We hear, again and again, from the mouths of Big Tech CEOs, AI grifters, national governments, and greedy employers around much of the world. “Whether you like it or not, it’s coming,” they tell us. “There’s no point in resisting.”
The problem: the inevitability narrative is a fantasy. It relies on a logical fallacy; just because something is emerging does not mean it will stay. More than that, it is historically incorrect. Technological advancement has never been a linear process. There is no clean wave; there are messy currents, vortexes, tides, rocks. When we pay close attention, what we find is that rather than a smooth, natural progression, the history of technology is in fact a political battlefield, with numerous actors fighting over the paths of technological innovation. Recognizing this allows us to free ourselves from the idea that the technological world we find ourselves in is somehow an immovable fact.
In my new book, Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, I show how whenever technological advancements took place, they encountered deep pockets of refusal. In my book, I dig into the archives to reveal the oft-perplexing and stubborn existence of a fierce urge to negate life’s technologization, of what I call ‘techno-negativity’. From early machine breakers in ancient Greece and medieval Christian monasteries banning technologies to revolutionaries smashing street lanterns in 19th century France and ultra-leftist armed assaults on capitalist computation, the book explores techno-negativity as a deep—but persistently condemned—current in history. I would like to briefly spotlight five specific historical episodes in techno-negativity that may be of interest to readers of Blood in the Machine.
Ancient Greek machine-breakers
For as long as there has been what today we would consider innovation in the development and use of technological tools, there has been a desire to undermine it. In Ancient Greece, the very promise of ‘techne’, that is, of both the crafts and craft-knowledge, was intimately bound up, from its very beginnings, by its refusal and delay. As historians have shown, the expansion of scientific knowledge at the time failed to translate into a corresponding burst of technological invention. The era was overwhelmed by a deep suspicion in the face of techne.
To give just one example, the philosopher Archimedes, a crucial inventor of various technical devices and machines, was also the world’s first machine breaker, destroying his own machines in the hope of staving off future use. Even an influential Greek origin story of technology, in which Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave them to humanity, came with a dark warning. Zeus clung Prometheus to a cliff high up in the mountains, where he was exposed to the elements and an eagle hungry for his organs. To the Greeks, techne had brought something dark and possibly sinister into the world, and thus, needed to be kept at bay.
The Luddite workers attacking looms
Fast-forward 18 centuries and we come across that most infamous of machine-breakers: the Luddites. They were framework knitters who, in early 19th Century England, saw their livelihoods and craft under threat by the arrival of automated looms. As Brian Merchant’s book Blood in the Machine shows, rather than simply accepting their fate, they fought back, burning machines and factories.
While worker attacks on mechanic tools of labor took place since at least the 17th century, what set the Luddites apart was their size, intensity, and level of organization. Techno-negativity became an insurrectionary tool that swept up a not insignificant portion of the wider population into an unprecedented assault on the increasingly tight link between technological innovation and the expansion of capitalism. With the emergence of the industrial revolution, technology had become a weapon wielded by the capitalist classes. Against this emergent capitalism, the Luddites developed a spirit of collectivism, fighting for themselves, for their fellow workers, and for a future beyond self-interest and profit.
Early anti-tech governments
In the centuries preceding the Luddite Revolts, it was commonly not workers, but governments who dismantled machines by literally attacking them, or by prohibiting them. In Hamburg in the late 17th Century, to give just one example, it was common for the local government to do public burnings of newly invented machines. This was not a German craze, however. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the King of England Edward VI banned gigmills, the Dutch Council of Leyden prohibited weaving machines, a Dutch decree forbade ribbon-looms, an English Imperial decree was announced against ribbon-looms, and the Council of Vienna signed a generalized prohibition of new machinery. Far removed from our contemporary governments’ large-scale embrace of the latest technological innovations, these techno-negative states provided worker protection in the face of looming displacement.
The 20th century communes that withdrew from technology
In the twentieth century, new forms of techno-negativity took hold. Prominent amongst these were anti-technology communes in the US (MOVE), UK (Kibbo Kift), Israel (Degania Alef) and South Africa (Tolstoy Farm). Unlike the Luddites, who directly attacked technology, these communes embraced an ethos of withdrawal and disconnection. Neither accepting nor rebelling against technological life, they fled.
As one of many anti-tech communes, a commune called MOVE asked: what might it mean to disconnect from Western, capitalist technology? Founded in 1970s Philadelphia, MOVE aimed to live in line with what its founder John Africa called ‘Natural Law’, banishing electricity, machinery, running water, processed food, and products of inorganic origins. We may not personally consider it desirable or viable to live this way, but anti-technology communes showcase the possible diversity of resistance tactics in the face of a technological world that, increasingly, feels hostile to our collective well-being.
The 1980s computer arsonists
Moving away again from a politics of disconnection, the 1980s proved to be perhaps the fieriest decade in the history of technological refusal. Militant groups around the European continent—including the Italian Red Brigades, German Red Army Faction, and Belgian Communist Combatant Cells—set fire to the companies and infrastructures fueling the arrival of computers. A French group with the fantastic name Committee for the Liquidation or Subversion of Computers (C.L.O.D.O. in French) is amongst the most prominent of that era.
Between 1980 and 1983, they set arson to or bombed at least 12 computer companies. Late at night, they would sneak into offices of firms like Philips Data Centre and Honeywell, gather computers and magnetic tapes, set fire to them in the toilets, and flee before the police arrived. Their target was less tech’s displacement of labor (Luddites) or its general impoverization of life (MOVE), and instead computation’s enrollment into the state apparatus as a war machine and a technology of surveillance. Computers, they argued before the arrival of the ‘personal computer’, would bring dominance as much as emancipation.
Across its many actors and practices, techno-negativity has varied as widely in its justifications and ideologies as in its practices and successes. Whatever we make of any individual approach to resisting tech, techno-negative actors prove the absurdity of any linear narrative of technological advancement. With every leap in technological advancement, we witness a fierce urge to undo it. Technologies are invented, attacked, delayed, dropped, delayed, re-emerge, vanish again. Some gain momentum, only to disappear within a matter of months. Others fail to latch on, and then, decades earlier, suddenly rise to the fore.
The messiness of technological advancement shows those of us keen on altering our current technological predicament that there are gaps everywhere that can be cracked open further. The current path of technologization is neither inevitable nor natural. Evangelists in corporations or governments may like to tell us it is as a way of undermining our sense of collective agency, but together with the infinite cast who make up the history of techno-negativity, we know better. At a time when Big Tech is becoming enamored with authoritarian politics, the stakes are higher than ever. What are the vulnerabilities or cracks in our AI-obsessed moment that can be exploited? We can turn to radical movements from the past not for blueprints, but for initial inspiration. The point is not to try and turn back the time, but to realize a technological refusal adequate to our increasingly dark present.
Thank you for turning me on to Thomas Dekeyser - fascinating work !
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