b2o: boundary 2 online

  • Zachary Loeb — Specters of Ludd (Review of Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work)

    Zachary Loeb — Specters of Ludd (Review of Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work)

    a review of Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right about Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021)

    by Zachary Loeb

    A specter is haunting technological society—the specter of Luddism.

    Granted, as is so often the case with hauntings, reactions to this specter are divided: there are some who are frightened, others who scoff at the very idea of it, quite a few dream about designing high-tech gadgets with which to conclusively bust this ghost so that it can bother us no more, and still others are convinced that this specter is trying to tell us something important if only we are willing to listen. And though there are plenty of people who have taken to scoffing derisively whenever the presence of General Ludd is felt, there would be no need to issue those epithetic guffaws if they were truly directed at nothing. The dominant forces of technological society have been trying to exorcize this spirit, but instead of banishing this ghost they only seem to be summoning it.

    The problem with spectral Luddism is that one can feel its presence without necessarily understanding what it means. When one encounters Luddism in the world today it still tends to be as either a term of self-deprecation used to describe why someone has an old smartphone, or as an insult that is hurled at anyone who dares question “the good news” presented by the high priests of technology. With Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job, Gavin Mueller challenges those prevailing attitudes and ideas about Luddism, instead articulating a perspective on Luddism that finds in it a vital analysis with which to respond to techno-capitalism. Luddism, in Mueller’s argument, is not simply a term to describe a specific group of workers at the turn of the 19th century, rather Luddism can be seen in workers’ struggles across centuries.

    At core, Breaking Things at Work is less of a history of Luddism, and more of a manifesto. Historic movements and theorists are thoughtfully engaged with throughout the volume, but this is consistently in service of making an argument about how we should be responding to technology in the present. While contemporary books about technology (even ones that advance a critical attitude) have a tendency to carefully couch any criticism in neatly worded expressions of love for technology, Mueller’s book is refreshing in the forthrightness with which he expresses the view that “technology often plays a detrimental role in working life, and in struggles for a better one” (4). In clearly setting out the particular politics of his book, Mueller makes his goal clear: “to make Marxists into Luddites” and “to turn people critical of technology into Marxists” (5). This is no small challenge, as Mueller notes that “historically Marxists have not been critical of technology” (4) on the one hand, and that “much of contemporary technological criticism comes from a  place of romantic humanism” (6) on the other hand. For Mueller “the problem of technology is its role in capitalism” (7), but the way in which many of these technologies have been designed to advance capitalism’s goals makes it questionable whether all of these machines can necessarily be repurposed. Basing his analysis on a history of class struggle, Mueller is not so much setting out to tell workers what to do, as much as he is putting a name on something that workers are already doing.

    Mueller begins the first chapter of his book by explaining who the actual Luddites were and providing some more details to explain the tactics for which they became legendary. As skilled craft workers in early 19th century England, the historic Luddites saw firsthand how the introduction of new machines resulted in their own impoverishment. Though the Luddites would become famous for breaking machines, it was a tactic they turned to only after their appeals to parliament to protect their trades went ignored. With broad popular support, the Luddites donned the anonymizing mask of General Ludd, and took up arms in their own defense. Contrary to the popular myth in which the Luddites smashed every machine out of a fit of wild hatred, the historic record shows that the Luddites were quite focused in their targets, picking workshops and factories where the new machines had been used as an excuse to lower wages. Luddism did not die out in its moment because the tactics were seen as pointless, rather the movement came to an end at the muzzle of a gun, as troops were deployed to quell the uprising—with many of the captured Luddites being either hanged or transported. Nevertheless, this was certainly not the last time that machine-breaking was taken up as a tactic: not long after the Luddite risings the Swing Riots were even more effective in their targeting of machinery. And, furthermore, as Mueller makes clear throughout his book, the tactic of seeing the machine as a site for resistance continues to this day.

    Perhaps the key takeaway from the historic Luddites is not that they smashed machines, but that they identified machinery as a site of political struggle. They did not take hammers to stocking frames out of a particular hatred for these contraptions; rather they took hammers to stocking frames as a way of targeting the owners of those stocking frames. These struggles, in which groups of workers came together with community support, demonstrate how the Luddite’s various tactics served as “practices of political composition” (16, italics in original text) whereby the Luddites came to see themselves as workers with shared interests that were in opposition to the interests of their employers. The Luddites were not to be assuaged by appeals to the idea of progress, or lurid fantasies of a high-tech utopia, they could see the technological changes playing out in real time in front of them, and what they could see there was not a distant future of plenty, but an immediate future of immiseration. The Luddites were not fools, quite the contrary: they saw exactly what the new machines meant for themselves and their communities, and so they decided to do something about it.

    Despite the popular support the Luddites enjoyed in their own communities, and the extent to which machine-breaking remained a common tactic even after the Luddite risings had been repressed, already in the 19th century more optimistic attitudes towards technology were ascendant. Mueller detects some of this optimism in Karl Marx, noting that “there is evidence for a technophilic Marx” (19), yet Mueller pushes back against the common assumption that Marx was a technological determinist. While recognizing that Marx (and Engels) had made some less than generous comments about the Luddites, Mueller emphasizes Marx’s attention to the real struggles of workers against capitalism and notes that “the struggles against machines were the struggles against the society that utilized them” (24, italics in original text). And the frequency with which machines were becoming targets of worker’s ire in the 19th century demonstrates the way in which workers saw the machines not as neutral tools but as instruments of the factory owners’ power. While defenders of mass machinery may point to the abundance such machines create, some figures like William Morris pushed back on these promises of abundance by noting that such machinery sapped any pleasure out of the act of laboring while the abundance was just a share in shoddy goods. In Marx and Morris, as well as in the actual struggles of workers, Mueller points to the importance of technology becoming recognized as a site of political struggle—emphasizing that in worker’s resistance to technology can be found “a more liberatory politics of work and technology” (29).

    That the 19th century was home to the most renowned fight against technology, does not mean that these struggles (be they physical or philosophical) ended with the arrival of the 20th century. While much is often made of the “scientific management” of Frederick W. Taylor, less is often said of the ways in which workers resisted this system that turned them into living cogs—and even less is usually said of the strike at the Watertown Arsenal wherein (quite unlike the case of the Luddites) Congress sided with the workers (and their union). Nevertheless, the Taylorist viewpoint that “capitalist technologies like scientific management” were “an objective way to improve productivity and therefore the condition of workers” (35) was a viewpoint shared by a not inconsiderable number of socialists in those years. Within the international left of the early 20th century, debates about the meaning of machinery were heated: some like Karl Kautsky took a deterministic stance that developments in capitalist production methods were paving the way for communism; others like the IWW activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn cheered the tactic of workers sabotaging their machines; still others like Thorstein Veblen dreamed of a technocratic society overseen by benevolent engineers; various Bolsheviks argued about the deployment of Taylorist techniques in the new Soviet state; and standing at the edge of the fascist abyss Walter Benjamin gestured towards a politics that does not praise speed but searches desperately for an emergency brake.

    While the direction of debates about technology in the early 20th century were significantly disrupted by the Second World War (just as they had been upended by the First World War), in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima debates about technology and work only intensified. Automation represented a new hope to business owners even as it represented a new threat to workers, as automation could sap the power of agitated workers while centralizing further control in the hands of management. Importantly, automation was not simply accepted by workers, and Mueller notes “on the vanguard of opposing automation were those often marginalized by the official workers’ movement—women and African Americans” (63). Opposition to automation often took the form of “wildcat strikes” with union leaders failing to keep pace with the radicalism and fury of their members. In this period of post-war tumult, left-wing thinkers ranging from Raya Dunayevskaya to Herbert Marcuse to Shulamith Firestone articulated a spectrum of different responses to the promises and perils of automation—yet even as they theorized: workers in mines, factories, and at the docks continued to strike against what the introduction of automation meant for their lives. Simultaneously, automation became a topic of interest, and debate, within the social movements of the time, with automation being viewed by those movements as threat and hope.

    Lurking in the background of many of the discussions around automation was the spread of computers. As increasing numbers of people became aware of them, computers quickly conjured both adoration and dread—they were a frequent target of student activists in the 1960s and 1970s, even as elements of the counterculture (such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog) were enthusiastic about computers. Businesses were quick to adopt computers, and these machines often accelerated the automation of workplaces (while opening up new types of work to the threat of being automated). Yet the rise of the computer also gave rise to a new sort of figure, “the hacker” whose very technological expertise positioned them to challenge computerized capitalism. Though the “politics of hackers are complicated,” Mueller emphasizes that they are often some of technology’s “most critical users, and they regularly deploy their skills to subvert measures by corporations to rationalize and control computer user behavior. They are often Luddites to the core” (105). Not uniformly uncritical celebrants of technology, many hackers turn their intimate knowledge of computers into a way of knowing where best to strike—even as they champion initiatives such as free software, peer-to-peer sharing, and tools for avoiding surveillance.

    Yet as computers have infiltrated nearly every space and moment, it is not only hackers who find themselves regularly interacting with these machines. The omnipresence of computers creates a situation wherein “work seeps into every nook and cranny of human existence via capitalist technologies, accompanied by the erosion of wages and free time” (119) as more and more of our activities become fodder for corporate recommendation algorithms we find ourselves endlessly working for Facebook and Google even as we respond to work emails at 1 a.m. Despite the promises of digital plenty, computing technologies (broadly defined) seem to be giving rise to an increasing sense of frustration, and though there are some who advocate for an anodyne “tech humanism,” it may well be that “the strategy of refusal pursued by the industrial workers of old might be a more promising technique against the depression engines of social media” (122).

    Breaking Things at Work concludes with a call for the radical left to “put forth a decelerationist politics: a politics of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, and limiting capital’s rapacity, while developing organization and cultivating militancy” (127-128). Such a politics entails not a rejection of progress, but a critical reexamination of what it is that is actually meant when the word “progress” is bandied about, as too often what progress stands for is “the progress of elites at the expense of the rest of us” (128). Putting forth such a politics does not require creating something entirely new, but rather recognizing that the elements of just such a politics can be seen repeatedly in worker’s movements and social movements.

    In putting forth a clear definition of “Luddism,” Mueller highlights that Luddism “emphasizes autonomy” by seeking to put control back into the hands of the people actually doing the work, “views technology not as neutral but as a site of struggle,” “rejects production for production’s sake,” “can generalize” into a strategy for mass action, and is “antagonistic” taking a firm stance in clear opposition to capitalism and capitalist technology. In the increasing frustration with social media, in the growing environmental calls for “degrowth,” and in the cracks showing in the golden calf of technology, the space is opening for a politics that takes up the hammer of Luddism. Recognizing as it does so, that a hammer can be used not just to smash things that need to be broken, a hammer can also be used to build something different.

    *

    One of the factors that makes Luddism so appealing more than two centuries later is that it is an ideology that still calls out to be developed. The historic Luddites were undoubtedly real people, with real worries, and real thoughts on the tactics that they were deploying—and yet the historic Luddites did not leave any manifestoes or books of their own writing behind. What remains from the Luddites are primarily the letters they sent and snatches of songs in which they were immortalized (which have been helpfully collected in Kevin Binfield’s 2015 Writings of the Luddites). And though one can begin to cobble together a philosophy of technology from reading through those letters, the work of explaining exactly what it is that Luddism means has been a task that has largely fallen to others. Granted, part of what made the Luddites successful in their time was that the mask of General Ludd could be picked up and worn by many individuals, all of whom could claim to be General Ludd (or his representative).

    With Breaking Things at Work, Gavin Mueller has crafted a vital contribution to Luddism, and what makes this book especially important is the way in which it furthers Luddism in a variety of ways. On one level, Mueller’s book provides a solid introduction and overview to Luddite thinking and tactics throughout the ages, which makes the book a useful retort to those who act as though the historic Luddites were the only workers who ever dared oppose machinery. Yet Mueller makes it clear from the outset of his book that he is not primarily interested in writing a history, rather his book has a clear political goal as well—he wishes to raise the banner of General Ludd and encourage others to march behind this standard. Thus, Mueller’s book is simultaneously an account of Luddism’s past, while also an appeal for Luddism’s future. And while Mueller provides a thoughtful consideration of many past figures and movements that have dallied with Luddism, his book concludes with a clear articulation of what a present day Luddism might look like. For those who call themselves Luddites, or those who would call themselves Luddites, Mueller provides a historically grounded but present focused account of what it meant, and what it can mean, to be a Luddite.

    The clarity with which Mueller defines Luddism in Breaking Things at Work places the book into a genuine debate as to how exactly Luddism should be defined. And this is a debate that Mueller’s book engages with in a particularly provocative way considering how his book is both a scholarly account and an activist manifesto. Writing about the Luddites tends to fall into several camps: works that provide a fairly straightforward historical account of who the original Luddites were and what they literally did (this genre includes works like E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, and Kevin Binfield’s Writings of the Luddites); works that treat Luddism as an idea and a philosophy that is not exclusive to the historic Luddites (this genre includes works like Nicols Fox’s Against the Machine, and Matt Tierney’s Dismantlings), works that emphasize that the tactic of machine-breaking was not practiced exclusively by the Luddites (this genre includes works like Eric Hobsbawm and Geogre Rudé’s Captain Swing, and David Noble’s Progress Without People),  and works that draw lines (good or bad) from Luddism to later activist practices (this genre includes approving works like Kirkpatrick Sale’s Rebels Against the Future, and disapproving works like Steven Jones’s Against Technology). Mueller’s Breaking Things at Work  does not fit neatly into any single one of those categories: the Marxist analysis makes the book pair nicely with Thompson’s book, the engagement with radical theorists makes the book pair nicely with Tierney’s book, the treatment of machine-breaking as a common tactic makes the book pair nicely with Noble’s book, and the call to arms places the book into debate with books by the likes of Sale and Jones.

    All of which is to say, the meaning of Luddism remains contested terrain. And even though many of technology’s celebrants remain content to use Luddite as an insult, those who would proudly wear the mask of General Ludd are not themselves all in agreement about exactly what this means.

    Mueller has written a wonderfully provocative book, and it is one in which he does not attempt to hide his own opinion behind two dozen carefully composed distractions. Instead, Mueller is quite clear “to be a good Marxist is to also be a Luddite” (5), and this is a point that leads directly into his goal of turning Marxists into Luddites and making Marxists out of those who are critical of technology. And in his engagement with Marx, Mueller tangles with the perceptions of Marx as technophilic, engages with a variety of Marxist thinkers who fall into a range of camps, all while trying “to be faithful to Marxism’s heretical side, its unofficial channels and para-academic spaces” (vii). And all the while Mueller endeavors to keep his book grounded as a contribution to real struggles around technology in the world today. Considering Mueller’s clear statement of his own position it is likely that some will level their critiques at the book’s Marxism, and still others might critique the book for not being sufficiently Marxist. And as is always the case with books that situate their critique within a particular radical tradition it seems inevitable that some will wonder why their favorite thinker is not included (or does not receive more attention), even as others will wonder why other branches from the tree of the radical left are missing. (Mueller does not spend much time on anarchist thinkers).

    Overall, the question of whether this book will turn its Marxist readers into Luddites, and its technologically critical readers into Marxists is one that can only be answered by each reader themselves. For what Mueller’s book presents is an argument, and the way in which a reader nods along or argues back is likely to be heavily influenced by the way they personally define Luddism. And Mueller is not the first to try to rally people beneath the Luddite’s standard.

    In 1990, Chellis Glendinning published her “Notes Towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto” in the pages of the Utne Reader. Furiously lamenting the ways in which societies were struggling under the onslaught of new technologies, her manifesto was a call to take up oppositional arms. While taking on the mantle of “Neo-Luddite,” the manifesto articulated a Luddism (or Neo-Luddism) that was defined by three principles: “1. Neo-Luddites are not anti-technology,” “2. All technologies are political,” and “3. The personal view of technology is dangerously limited.” Based on these principles, Glendinning’s manifesto laid out a program that included the dismantling of a range of “destructive” technologies (including genetic engineering technologies and computer technologies), pushed for the search for “new technological forms” that would be “for the benefit of life on Earth,” and this in turn was couched in a call for “Western technological societies” to develop a “life-enhancing worldview.” The manifesto drew on the technological criticism of Lewis Mumford, on Langdon Winner’s call for “epistemological Luddism,” and on the uncompromising stance towards technologies deemed destructive typified by Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television.

    The Neo-Luddites are more noteworthy for their attempt to reclaim and redefine Luddism than they are for their success in actually creating a movement. Indeed, the lasting legacy of Neo-Luddism is not that of a vital social movement that fought for (and continues to fight for) the principles Glendinning put forth, but instead about half a bookshelf worth of books with “Neo-Luddite” somewhere in their title. There are certainly critiques to be leveled at the Neo-Luddites, but when revisiting Glendinning’s manifesto it is also worth placing it in the moment at which it emerged. The backdrop for Breaking Things at Work is one in which most readers will be accustomed to seemingly omnipresent computing technologies, climate exacerbated disasters, and a world in which the wealth of tech billionaires grows massively by the minute. By contrast, the backdrop for Glendinning’s manifesto was a moment in which personal computers had not yet achieved ubiquity (no one was carrying the Internet around in their pocket), climate change still seemed like a distant threat, and Mark Zuckerberg was still a child. It is impossible to say whether or not Glendinning’s manifesto, had it been heeded, could have prevented us from getting into our present morass, but preventing us from winding up where we are now certainly seems to have been one of Glendinning’s goals. At the very least, Glendinning and the Neo-Luddites (as well as the thinkers upon whom they drew) are a reminder that the spirit of General Ludd was circulating before you could Google “Luddism.”

    There are many parallels between the stances outlined by Glendinning and those outlined by Mueller. Though it seems that the key space of conflict between the two is around the question of dismantling. Glendinning and the Neo-Luddites were not subtle in their calls for dismantling certain technologies, whereas Mueller is considerably more nuanced in this respect. Here attempts to define Luddism find themselves butting against the degree to which Luddism is destined to always be associated (for better or worse) with the actual breaking of machines. The naming of entire classes of technology that need to be dismantled may appear like indiscriminate smashing, while calls for careful reevaluation of technologies may appear more like thoughtful disassembly. Yet the underlying question for Luddism remains: are certain technologies irredeemable? Are there technologies that we can remake in a different image, or will those technologies only reshape us in their own image? And if the answer is that these technologies cannot be reshaped, than are there some technologies that we need to break before they can finish breaking us, even if we often find ourselves enjoying some of the benefits of those technologies?

    Writing of the reactions from a range of 1960s social movements to the technological changes they were seeing playing out, Mueller notes that the particular technology that evoked “both fear and fascination” was none other than “the computer” (91). This point leads into what is perhaps the most troubling and challenging element of Mueller’s account, as he goes on to argue that hackers and some of their projects (like free software) fit within the legacy of Luddism. I imagine that many hackers will not be too pleased to see themselves described as Luddites, just as I imagine that many self-professed Luddites will scoff at the idea that using bitcoins to buy drugs on the dark web is a Luddite pursuit. Yet the idea that those most familiar with a technology may know exactly where to strike certainly has some noteworthy resonances with the historic Luddites.

    And yet the matter of hackers and “high tech Luddism”  raises a much broader question, one that the left has been trying to answer for quite some time, and perhaps the key question for any attempt to formulate a Luddite politics in this moment: what are we to make of the computer? Is the computer (and computing technologies, broadly defined) the offspring of the military-industrial-academic complex with logics of control, surveillance, and dominance so deeply ingrained that it ultimately winds up bending all users to that logic? Despite those origins, are computing technologies something which can be seized upon to allow us to reconfigure ourselves into new sorts of beings (cyborgs, perhaps) to break out of the very categories that capitalism tries to sort us into? Have computers fundamentally altered what it means to be human?  Is the computer (and the Internet) simply something that has become so big and so widespread that the best we can hope for is to increase our knowledge of it so that we can perform sabotage strikes while playing in the dark corners? Are computers the “master’s tools”?

    Considering that computer technologies were amongst those that the Neo-Luddites called to be dismantled, it seems pretty clear where they came down on this question. Yet contemporary discussions on the left around computers, a discussion in which Breaking Things at Work is certainly making an intervention, is quite a bit more divided as to what is to be done with and about computers. At several junctures in his book, Mueller notes that attitudes of technological optimism are starting to break down, yet if you survey the books dealing with technology published by the left-wing publisher Verso Books (which is the publisher of Breaking Things at Work) it is clear that a hopeful attitude towards technology is still present in much of the left. Certainly, there are arguments about the way that tech companies are screwing things up, commentary on the environmental costs of the hunger for high-tech gadgets, and paeans for how the Internet could be different—but it often feels that leftist commentaries blast Silicon Valley for what it has done to computers and the Internet so that the readers of such books can continue believing that the problems with computers and the Internet is what capitalism has done to them rather than suggest that these are capitalist tools through and through.

    Is the problem that the train we are on is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go, so we need to slow down so that we can switch tracks? Or is the problem the train itself and we need to hit the emergency brake so that we can get off? To those who have grown accustomed to the comforts of being on board the train, the idea of getting off of it might be a scary thought, it might feel preferable to fight for a more equitable distribution of resources aboard the train, or to fight to seize control of the engine car. Besides, the idea of actually getting off the train seems like little more than a fantasy—it will be hard enough just to get it to reduce its speed. Yet the question remains as to whether the problem is the direction we’re going in, or if the problem is the direction we’re going in and the technology that is taking us in that direction.

    Here it is essential to return to an important fact about the historic Luddites: they were waging their campaign against the introduction of machinery in the moment of those machines’ newness. The machines they attacked had not yet become common, and the moment of negotiation as to what these machines would mean and how they would be deployed was still in flux. When technologies are new they provide a fertile space for resistance, in their moment of freshness they have not yet become taken for granted, previous lifeways have not been forgotten, the skills that were necessary prior to the introduction of the new machine remain vital, and the broader society has not become pleasantly accustomed to their share of machine generated plenitude. Unfortunately, once a technology has become fully incorporated into a workplace (or a society) resistance becomes more and more challenging. While Mueller evocatively captures the long history of workers resisting the introduction of new technologies, these cases show a consistent tendency for this resistance to take place most strongly at the point of the new technology’s introduction. The major challenge becomes what to do when the technology has ceased being new, and when the reliance on that technology has become so total that it becomes almost impossible to imagine turning it off.

    After all, it’s easy to say that “computers are the problem” but at this point it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of computers. And besides, many of those who would be quite happy to see capitalism come to an end quite like their computerized doodads and would be distressed if they couldn’t scroll social media on the subway, stream music, go shopping at 2 a.m., play video games, have video calls with distant family, or write overly lengthy book reviews and then post them online. One of the major challenges for technological criticism today is the simple fact that the critics are also reliant on these gadgets, and many of the critics quite like some things about some of those gadgets. In this technological climate, where the idea of truly banishing certain technologies seems fantastical, feelings of dissatisfaction often wind up getting channeled in the direction of appeals to personal responsibility. As though an individual deciding that they will abstain from going on social media on the weekend will somehow be a sufficient response to social media eating the world. This is the way in which a massive social problem winds up being reduced to telling people that they really just need to turn off notifications on their phones.

    What makes Breaking Things at Work, and its definition of Luddism, vital is the way in which Mueller eschews such appeals to minor lifestyle tweaks. As Mueller makes clear the significance of the Luddites is not that they broke machines, but that they saw machines as a site of political struggle, and the thing we need to learn from them today is that machinery still must be a site of political struggle. Turning off notifications, following people with different politics, trying to spend a day a week offline—while these actions can be useful on an individual level, they are not a sufficient response to the ways that technology challenges us today. In a moment wherein so many of the proclamations from Silicon Valley are treated as though they are inevitable, Luddism functions as a powerful retort and as a useful reminder that the people most invested in the belief that you cannot resist capitalist technologies are the people who are most terrified that people might resist those technologies.

    In one of the most infamous of the surviving Luddite letters, “the General of the Army of Redressers,” Ned Ludd writes: “We will never lay down our Arms. The House of Commons passes an Act to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality, and repeal that to hang Frame Breakers. But We. We petition no more that won’t do fighting must.” These were militant words from a militant movement, but the idea that there is such a thing as “Machinery hurtful to Commonality” and that such machinery needs to be opposed remains clear two hundred years later.

    There is a specter haunting technological society—the specter of Luddism. And as Mueller makes clear in Breaking Things at Work that specter is becoming more corporeal by the moment.

    _____

    Zachary Loeb earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Loeb works at the intersection of the history of technology and disaster studies, and his research focusses on the ways that complex technological systems amplify risk, as well as the history of technological doom-saying. He is working on a dissertation on Y2K. Loeb writes at the blog Librarianshipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2o Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Works Cited

     

  • Zachary Loeb — General Ludd in the Long Seventies (Review of Matt Tierney, Dismantlings)

    Zachary Loeb — General Ludd in the Long Seventies (Review of Matt Tierney, Dismantlings)

    a review of Matt Tierney, Dismantlings: Words Against Machines in the American Long Seventies (Cornell University Press, 2019)

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    The guy said, “If machinery
    makes you so happy
    go buy yourself
    a Happiness Machine.”
    Then he realized:
    They were trying to do
    exactly that.

    – Kenneth Burke, “Routine for a Stand-Up Comedian” (15)

    A sledgehammer is a fairly versatile tool. You can use it do destroy things, you can use it to build things, and in some cases you can use it to destroy things so that you can build things. Granted, it remains a rather heavy and fairly blunt tool, it is not particularly well suited for fine detail work requiring a high degree of precision. Which is, likely, one of the reasons why those who are famed for wielding sledgehammers often wind up being characterized as being just as blunt and unsubtle as the heavy instruments they swung.

    And, perhaps, no group has been more closely associated with sledgehammers, than the Luddites. Those early 19th century skilled crafts workers who took up arms to defend their communities and their livelihoods from the “obnoxious machines” being introduced by their employers. Though the tactic of machine breaking as a form of protest has a lengthy history that predates (and post-dates) the Luddites, it is a tactic that has come to be bound up with the name of the followers of the mysterious General Ludd. Despite the efforts of writers and thinkers to rescue the Luddite’s legacy from “the enormous condescension of posterity” (Thompson, 12), the term “Luddite” today generally has less to do with a specific historical group and has instead largely become an epithet to be hurled at anyone who dares question the gospel of technological progress. Yet, as the second decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, it may well be that “Luddite” has lost some of its insulting sting against the backdrop of metastasizing tech giants, growing mountains of toxic e-waste, and an ecological crisis that owes much to an unquestioned faith in the benefits of technology.

    General Ludd may well get the last laugh.

    That the Luddites have lingered so fiercely in the public imagination is a testament to the fact that the Luddites, and the actions for which they are remembered, are good to think with. Insofar as one can talk about Luddism it represents less a coherent body of thought created by the Luddites themselves, and more the attempt by later scholars, critics, artists, and activists to try to make sense of what is usable from the Luddite legacy. And it is this effort to think through and think with, that Matt Tierney explores in his phenomenal book Dismantlings: Words Against Machines in the American Long Seventies. While the focus of Dismantlings, as its title makes clear, is on the “long seventies” (the years from 1965 to 1980) the book represents an important intervention in current discussions and debates around the impacts of technology on society. Just as the various figures Tierney discussed turned their thinking (to varying extents) back to the Luddites, so too the book argues is it worth revisiting the thinking and writing on the matter from the long seventies. This is not a book on the historical Luddites, instead this book is a vital contribution to attempts to theorize what Luddism might mean, and how we are to confront the various technological challenges facing us today.

    Largely remembered for occurrences including the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, the space race, and a general tone of social upheaval – the long seventies also represented a period when technological questions were gaining prominence. With thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, and Stewart Brand all putting forth visions of the way that the new consumer technologies would remake society: creating “global villages” or giving rise to a perception of all of humanity as passengers on “spaceship earth.” Yet they were hardly the only figures contemplating technology in that period, and many of the other visions that emerged aimed to directly challenge some of the assumptions and optimism of the likes of McLuhan and Fuller. In the long seventies, the question of what would come next was closely entwined with an evaluation of what had come before, indeed “the breaking of retrogressive notions of technology coupled with the breaking of retrogressive technologies…undergoes a period of vital activity during the Long Seventies in the poems, fictions, and activist speech of what was then called cyberculture,” (15). Granted, this was a “breaking” that generally had more to do with theorizing than with actual machine smashing. Instead it could more accurately be seen as “dismantling,” the careful taking apart so that the functioning can be more fully understood and evaluated. Yet it is a thinking that, importantly, occurred against a recognition that the world was, as Norbert Wiener observed, “the world of Belsen and Hiroshima” (8). To make sense of the resistant narratives towards technology in the long seventies it is necessary to engage critically with the terminology of the period, and thus Tierney’s book represents a sort of conceptual “counterlexicon,” to do just that.

    As anyone who knows about the historical Luddites can attest, they did not hate technology (as such). Rather they were opposed to particular machines being used in a particular way at a particular place and time. And it is a similar attitude towards Luddism (not as an opposition to all technology, but as an understanding that technology has social implications) that Tierney discusses in the long seventies. Luddism here comes to represent “a gradual relinquishing of machines whose continued use would contravene ethical principles” (30), and this attitude is found in Langdon Winner’s concept of “epistemological Luddism” (as discussed in his book Autonomous Technology) and in the poetry of Audre Lorde. While Lorde’s line “for the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” continues to be well known by activists, the question of “tools” can also be engaged with quite literally. Approached with a mind towards Luddism, Lorde’s remarks can be seen as indicating that it is not only that “the master’s house” must be dismantled but “the master’s tools” as well – and Lorde’s writing suggests poetry as a key tool for the dismantler. The version of Luddism that emerges in the late seventies represents a “sort of relinquishing” it “is not about machine-smashing at all” (47), instead it entails a careful work of examining machines to determine which are worth keeping.

    The attitudes towards technology of the long seventies were closely entwined with a sense of the world as made seemingly smaller and more connected thanks to the new technologies of the era. A certain strand of thinking in this period, exemplified by McLuhan’s “global village” or Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth,” achieved great popular success even as reactionary racist and nativist notions lurked just below the surface of the seeming technological optimism of those concepts. Contrary to the “fatalistic acceptance of new technological constraints on life” (48), works by science fiction authors like Ursula Le Guin and Samuel R. Delaney presented a notion of “communion, as a collaborative process of making do” (51). Works like The Dispossessed (Le Guin) and Triton (Delaney), presented readers with visions, and questions, of “real coexistence…not the passage but the sharing of a moment” (63). In contrast to the “technological Messianism” (74) of the likes of Fuller and McLuhan, the “communion” based works by the likes of Le Guin and Delaney focused less on exuberance for the machines themselves but instead sought to critically engage with what types of coexistence such machines would and could genuinely facilitate.

    Coined by Alice Mary Hilton, in 1963, the idea of “cyberculture” did not originally connote the sort of blissed-out-techno-optimism that the term evokes today. Rather it was meant to be “an alternative to the global village and the one-town world, and an insistence on collective action in a world not only of Belsen and Hiroshima but also of ongoing struggles toward decolonization, sexual and gender autonomy, and racial justice” (12). Thus, “cyberculture” (and cybernetics more generally) may represent one of the alternative pathways along which technological society could have developed. What “cyberculture” represented was not an exuberant embrace of all things “cyber,” but an attempt to name and thereby open a space for protest, not “against thinking machines” but which would “interrupt the advancing consensus that such machines had shrunk the globe” (81). These concepts achieved further maturation in the Ad Hoc Committee’s “Triple Revolution Manifesto” (from 1964), which sought to link an emancipatory political program to advances in new technology, linking “cybernation to a decrease in capitalist, racist, and militarist violence” (85). Seizing upon an earnest belief that the technological ethics could guide new technological developments towards just ends, “cyberculture” also imagined that such tools could supplant scarcity with abundance.

    What “cyberculture” based thinking consists of is a sort of theoretical imagining, which is why a document like a manifesto represents such an excellent example of “cyberculture” in practice. It is a sort of “distortion” that recognizes how “the fates of militarism, racism, and cybernation have only ever been knotted together” and “thus calls for imaginative practices, whether literary or activist, for cutting through the knot” (95). This is the sort of theorizing that can be seen in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s commentary on how science and technology had made of “this world a neighborhood” without yet making “of it a brotherhood” (96). The technological ethics of the advocates of “cyberculture” could be the tools with which to make “it a brotherhood” without discarding all of the tools that had made it first “a neighborhood.” The risks and opportunities of new technological forms were also commented upon in works like Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex wherein she argued that women needed to seize and guide these technologies. Blending analysis of what is with a program for what could be, Firestone’s work shows “that if other technologies are possible, then other social practices, even practices that are rarely considered in relation to new technology, may be possible too” (105).

    For some, in the long seventies, challenging machinery still took on a destructive form. Though this often entailed a sort of “revolutionary suicide” which represented an attempt to “prevent the becoming-machine of subjugated human bodies and selves” (113). A refusal to become a machine oneself, and a refusal to allow oneself to become fodder for the machine. Such a self-destructive act flows from the Pynchon-esque tragic recognition of a growing consensus “that nothing can be done to oppose” the new machines (122). Such woebegone dejection is in contrast to other attitudes that sought to not only imagine but to also construct new tools that would put the people and community first. John Mohawk, of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy of Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca people gave voice to this in his theorizing of “liberation technology.” As Mohawk explained at a UN session, “Decentralized technologies that meet the needs of the people those technologies serve will necessarily give life to a different kind of political structure, and it is safe to predict that the political structure that results will be anticolonial in nature” (127). The search for such alternative technologies suggested a framework in which what was needed was “machines to suit the community, or else no machines at all” (129) – a position that countered the technological abundance hoped for by “cyberculture” with an appeal for technologies of subsistence. After all, this was the world of Belsen and Hiroshima, “a world of new and barely understood technologies” (149), in such a world “where the very skin of the planet is a ledger of technological misapplications” (154) it is wise to proceed with caution and humility.

    The long seventies present a fascinating kaleidoscope of visions of technologies, how to live with them, how to select them, and how to think about them. What makes the long seventies so worthy of revisiting is that they and the present moment are both “seized with a critical discourse about technology, and by a popular social upheaval in which new social movements emerge, grow, and proliferate” (5). Luddism may be routinely held up as a foolish reaction, but “by breaking apart certain machines, we can learn to use them better, or never use them again. By dissecting certain technocentric cultural logics, we can likewise challenge or reject them” (162). That the Luddites are so constantly vilified may ultimately be a signal of their dangerous power, insofar as they show that people need not passively sit and accept everything that is sold to them as technological progress. Dismantling represents a politics “not as machine hating, but as a way to protect life against a large=scale regimentation and policing of security, labor, time, and community” (166).

    To engage in the fraught work of technological critique is to open oneself up to being labeled a Luddite (with the term being hurled as an epithet), to accusations of complicity in the very systems you are critiquing, and to a realization that many people simply don’t want to listen to their smartphone habits being criticized. Yet the various conceptual frameworks that can be derived from a consideration of “words against machines in the American long seventies” provide “tactics that might be repeated or emulated, if nostalgia and cynicism do not bar the way” (172). Such concepts present a method of pushing back at the “yes, but” logic which riddles so many discussions of technology today – conversations in which the downsides are acknowledged (the “yes”), yet where the counter is always offered that perhaps there’s still a way to use those technologies correctly (the “but”).

    In contrast to the comfortable rut of “yes, but” Tierney’s book argues for dismantling, wherein “to dismantle is to set aside the dithering of yes, but and to try instead the hard work of critique” (175).

    Running through many of the thinkers, writers, and activists detailed in Dismantlings is a genuine attempt to come to terms with the ways in which new technological forces are changing society. Though many of these individuals responded to such changes not by picking up hammers, but by turning to writing, this activity was always couched in a sense that the shifts afoot truly mattered. Agitated by the roaring clangor of the machines of their day, these figures from the long seventies were looking at the machines of their moment in order to consider what would need to be done to construct a different future. And they did this while looking askance at the more popular techno-utopian visions of the future being promulgated in their day. Writing of the historic Luddites, the historian David Noble commented that, “the Luddites were perhaps the last people in the West to perceive technology in the present tense and to act upon that perception” (Noble, 7), and it may be tempting to suggest that the various figures cataloged in Dismantlings were too focused on the future to have acted upon technology in their present. Nevertheless, as Tierney notes, “the present does not precede the future; rather the future (like its past) distorts and neighbors the present” (173) – the Luddites may have acted in the present, but their eyes were also on the future. It is worth remembering that we do not make sense of the technologies around us solely by what they mean now, but by what we think they will mean for the future.

    While Dismantlings provides a “counterlexicon” drawn from the writing/thinking/acting of a range of individuals in the late seventies, there is something rather tragic about reading these thoughts two decades into the twenty-first century. After all, readers of Dismantlings find themselves in what would have been the future to these late seventies thinkers. And, to be blunt, the world of today seems more in line with those thinkers’ fears for the future than with their hopes. An “epistemological Luddism” has not been used to carefully evaluate which tools to keep and which to discard, “communion” has not become a guiding principle, and “cyberculture” has drifted away from Hiton’s initial meaning to become a stand-in for a sort of uncritical techno-utopianism. The “master’s tools” have expanded to encompass ever more powerful tools, and the “master’s house” appears sturdier than ever – worse still many of us may have become so enamored by some of “the master’s tools” that we have started to entertain delusions that these are actually our tools. To a certain extent, Dismantlings stands as a reminder of a range of individuals who tried to warn us that we would wind up in the mess in which we find ourselves. Those who are equipped with such powers of perception are often mocked and derided in their own time, but looking back at them with hindsight one can get a discomforting sense of just how prescient they truly were.

    Matt Tierney’s Dismantlings: Words Against Machines in the American Long Seventies is a remarkable book. It is also a difficult book. Difficult not because of impenetrable theoretical prose (the writing is clear and crisp), but because it is always challenging to go back and confront the warnings that were ignored. At a moment when headlines are filled with sordid tales of the malfeasance of the tech behemoths, and increasingly terrifying news of the state of the planet, it is both reassuring and infuriating to recognize that it did not have to be this way. True, these long seventies figures did not specifically warn about Facebook, and climate change was not the term they used to speak of environmental degradation – but it’s doubtful that many of these figures would be particularly surprised by either occurrence.

    As a contribution to scholarship, Dismantlings represents a much needed addition to the literature on the long seventies – particularly the literature that considers technology in that period. While much of the present literature (much of it excellent) dealing with those years has tended to focus on the hippies who fell in love with their computers, Tierney’s book is a reminder of those who never composed poems of praise for their machines. After all, not everyone believed that the computer would be an emancipatory technology. This book brings together a wide assortment of figures and draws useful connections between them that will hopefully rescue many a name from obscurity. And even those names that can hardly be called obscure appear in a new light when viewed through the lenses that Tierney develops in this book. While readers may be familiar with names like Lorde, Le Guin, Delaney, and Pynchon – Tierney makes it clear that there is much to be gained by reading Hilton, Mohawk, Firestone, and revisiting the “Triple Revolution Manifesto.”

    Tierney also offers a vital intervention into ongoing discussions over the meaning of Luddism. While it may be fair to say that such discussions are occurring amongst a rather small group of people, it is a passionate debate nevertheless. Tierney avoids re-litigating the history of the original Luddites, and his timeline cuts off before the emergence of the Neo-Luddites, but his book provides valuable insight into the transformations the idea of Luddism went through in the long seventies. Granted, Luddism does not always appear to be a term that was being embraced by the figures in Tierney’s history. Certainly, Winner developed the concept of “epistemological Luddism,” and Pynchon is still remembered for his “Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?” op-ed, but many of those who spoke about dismantling did not don the mask, or pick up the hammer, of General Ludd. Thus, this book is a clear attempt not to restate others’ views on Luddism, but to freshly theorize the idea. Drawing on his long seventies sources, Tierney writes that:

    Luddism is not the destruction of all machines. And neither is it the hatred of machines as such. Like cyberculture, it is another word for dismantling. Luddism is the performative breaking of machines that limit species expression and impede planetary survival. (13)

    This is a robust and loaded definition of Luddism. While it clearly moves Luddism towards a practice instead of simply a descriptor for particular historical actors, it also presents Luddism as a constructive (as opposed to destructive) process. There are several aspects of Tierney’s definition that deserve particular attention. First, by also evoking “cyberculture” (referring to Hilton’s ethically grounded notion when she coined the term), Tierney demonstrates that Luddism is not the only word or tactic for dismantling. Second, by evoking “the performative breaking,” Tierney moves Luddism away from the blunt force of hammers and towards the more difficult work of critical evaluation. Lastly, by linking Luddism to “species expression and…planetary survival,” Tierney highlights that even if this Luddism is not “the hatred of machines as such” it still entails the recognition that there are some machines that should be hated – and that should be taken apart. It’s the sort of message that you can imagine many people getting behind, even as one can anticipate the choruses of “yes, but” that would be sure to greet this.

    Granted, even though Tierney considers a fair number of manifestos of a revolutionary sort, Dismantlings is not a new Luddite manifesto (though it might be a Luddite lexicon). While Tierney writes of the various figures he analyzes with empathy and affection, he also writes with a certain weariness. After all, as was noted earlier, we are currently living in the world about which these critics tried to warn us. And therefore Tierney can note, “if no political overturning followed the literary politics of cyberculture and Luddism in their own moment, then certainly none will follow them now” (25). Nevertheless, Tierney couches these dour comments in the observation that, “even as a revolution fails, its failure fuels common feeling without which subsequent revolutions cannot succeed” (25). At the very least the assorted thinkers and works described in Dismantlings provide a rich resource to those in the present who are concerned about “species expression” and “planetary survival.” Indeed, those advocating to break up the tech companies or pushing for the Green New Deal can learn a great deal by revisiting the works discussed in Dismantlings.

    Nevertheless, it feels as though there are some key characters missing from Dismantlings. To be clear this point is not meant to detract from Tierney’s excellent and worthwhile book. Furthermore, it must be noted that devotees of particular theorists and social critics tend to have a strong “why isn’t [the theorist/social critic I am devoted to] discussed more in here!?” reaction to works. Nevertheless, there were certain figures who seemed to be oddly missing from Dismantlings. Reflecting on the types of machines against which figures in the long seventies were reacting, Tierney writes of “the war machine, the industrial machine, the computer, and the machines of state are all connected” (4). And it was the dangerous connection of all of these that the social critic Lewis Mumford sought to describe in his theorizing of “the megamachine” – theorizing which he largely did in his two volume Myth of the Machine (which was published in the long seventies). Though Mumford’s idea of “technic” eras is briefly mentioned early in Dismantlings, his broader thinking that touches directly on the core areas of Dismantlings are not remarked on. Several figures who were heavily influenced by Mumford’s work appear in Dismantlings (notably Bookchin and Roszak), and Mumford’s thought could have certainly bolstered some of the books arguments. Mumford, after all, saw himself as a bit of an anti-McLuhan – and in evaluating thinkers who were concerned with what technology meant for “species expression” and “planetary survival” Mumford deserves more attention. Given the overall thrust of Dismantlings it also might have been interesting to see Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope: toward a humanized technology and Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality discussed. Granted, these comments are not meant as attacks on Tierney’s excellent book – they are simply an observation by an avowed Mumford partisan.

    To fully appreciate why the thoughts from the long seventies still matter today it may be useful to consider a line from one of Mumford’s early works. As Mumford wrote, in 1931, “every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers” (Mumford, 1). To a certain extent, Dismantlings is an argument for those currently invested in debates around technology to revisit “and make friends” with earlier generations of critics. There is much to be gained from such a move. Notable here is a shift in an evaluation of dangers. Throughout Dismantlings Tierney returns frequently to Wiener’s line that “this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima” – and without meaning to be crass this is an understanding of the world that has somewhat receded into the past as the memory of those events becomes enshrined in history books. Yet for the likes of Wiener and many of the other individuals discussed in Dismantlings, “Belsen and Hiroshima” were not abstractions or distant memories – they were not the crimes that could be consigned to the past. Rather they were bleak reminders of the depths to which humanity could sink, and the way in which science and technology could act as a weight to drag humanity even deeper. Today’s world is the world of climate change, border walls, and surveillance capitalism – but it is still “the world of Belsen and Hiroshima.”

    There is much that needs to be dismantled, and not much time in which to do that work.

    The lessons from the long seventies are those that we are still struggling to reckon with today, including the recognition that in order to fully make sense of the machines around us it may be necessary to dismantle many of them. Of course, “not everything should be dismantled, but many things should be and some things must be, even if we don’t know where to begin” (163).

    Tierney’s book does not provide an easy answer, but it does show where we should begin.

    _____

    Zachary Loeb earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Loeb works at the intersection of the history of technology and disaster studies, and his research focusses on the ways that complex technological systems amplify risk, as well as the history of technological doom-saying. He is working on a dissertation on Y2K. Loeb writes at the blog Librarianshipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Lewis Mumford. The Brown Decades. New York: Dover Books, 1971.
    • David F. Noble. Progress Without People. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995.
    • E.P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.
  • Warding Off General Ludd: The Absurdity of “The Luddite Awards”

    Warding Off General Ludd: The Absurdity of “The Luddite Awards”

    By Zachary Loeb
    ~

    Of all the dangers looming over humanity no threat is greater than that posed by the Luddites.

    If the previous sentence seems absurdly hyperbolic, know that it only seems that way because it is, in fact, quite ludicrous. It has been over two hundred years since the historic Luddites rose up against “machinery hurtful to commonality,” but as their leader the myth enrobed General Ludd was never apprehended there are always those who fear that General Ludd is still out there, waiting with sledge hammer at the ready. True, there have been some activist attempts to revive the spirit of the Luddites (such as the neo-Luddites of the late 1980s and 1990s) – but in the midst of a society enthralled by (and in thrall to) smart phones, start-ups, and large tech companies – to see Luddites lurking in every shadow is a sign of either ideology, paranoia, or both.

    Yet, such an amusing mixture of unabashed pro-technology ideology and anxiety at the possibility of any criticism of technology is on full display in the inaugural “Luddite Awards” presented by The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Whereas the historic Luddites needed sturdy hammers, and other such implements, to engage in machine breaking the ITIF seems to believe that the technology of today is much more fragile – it can be smashed into nothingness simply by criticism or even skepticism. As their name suggests, the ITIF is a think tank committed to the celebration of, and advocating for, technological innovation in its many forms. Thus it should not be surprising that a group committed to technological innovation would be wary of what it perceives as a growing chorus of “neo-Ludditism” that it imagines is planning to pull the plug on innovation. Therefore the ITIF has seen fit to present dishonorable “Luddite Awards” to groups it has deemed insufficiently enamored with innovation, these groups include (amongst others): The Vermont Legislature, The French Government, the organization Free Press, the National Rifle Association, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The ITIF “Luddite Awards” may mark the first time that any group has accused the Electronic Frontier Foundation of being a secret harbor for neo-Ludditism.

    luddite
    Unknown artist, “The Leader of the Luddites,” engraving, 1812 (image source: Wikipedia)

    The full report on “The 2014 ITIF Luddite Awards,” written by the ITIF’s president Robert D. Atkinson, presents the current state of technological innovation as being dangerously precarious. Though technological innovation is currently supplying people with all manner of devices, the ITIF warns against a growing movement born of neo-Ludditism that will aim to put a stop to further innovation. Today’s neo-Ludditism, in the estimation of the ITIF is distinct from the historic Luddites, and yet the goal of “ideological Ludditism” is still “to ‘smash’ today’s technology.” Granted, adherents of neo-Ludditism are not raiding factories with hammers, instead they are to be found teaching at universities, writing columns in major newspapers, disparaging technology in the media, and otherwise attempting to block the forward movement of progress. According to the ITIF (note the word “all”):

    “what is behind all ideological Ludditism is the general longing for a simpler life from the past—a life with fewer electronics, chemicals, molecules, machines, etc.” (ITIF, 3)

    Though the chorus of Ludditisim has, in the ITIF’s reckoning, grown to an unacceptable volume of late, the foundation is quick to emphasize that Ludditism is nothing new. What is new, as the ITIF puts it, is that these nefarious Luddite views have, apparently, moved from the margins and infected the larger public discourse around technology. A diverse array of figures and groups from figures like environmentalist Bill McKibben, conservative thinker James Pethokoukis, economist Paul Krugman, writers for Smithsonian Magazine, to foundations like Free Press, the EFF and the NRA – are all tarred with the epithet “Luddite.”The neo-Luddites, according to ITIF, issue warnings against unmitigated acceptance of innovation when they bring up environmental concerns, mention the possibility of jobs being displaced by technology, write somewhat approvingly of the historic Luddites, or advocate for Net Neutrality.

    While the ITIF holds to the popular, if historically inaccurate, definition of Luddite as “one who resists technological change,” their awards make clear that the ITIF would like to add to this definition the words “or even mildly opposes any technological innovation.” The ten groups awarded “Luddite Awards” are a mixture of non-profit public advocacy organizations and various governments – though the ITIF report seems to revel in attacking Bill McKibben he was not deemed worthy of an award (maybe next year). The awardees include: the NRA for opposing smart guns, The Vermont legislature for requiring the labeling of GMOS, Free Press’s support of net neutrality which is deemed as an affront to “smarter broadband networks,” news reports which “claim that ‘robots are killing jobs,” the EFF is cited as it “opposes Health IT,” and various governments in several states are reprimanded for “cracking down” on companies like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft. The ten recipients of Luddite awards may be quite surprised to find that they have been deemed adherents of neo-Ludditism, but in the view of the ITIF the actions these groups have taken indicate that General Ludd is slyly guiding their moves. Though the Luddite Awards may have a somewhat silly feeling, the ITIF cautions that the threat is serious, as the report ominously concludes:

    “But while we can’t stop the Luddites from engaging in their anti-progress, anti-innovation activities, we can recognize them for what they are: actions and ideas that are profoundly anti-progress, that if followed would mean a our children [sic] will live lives as adults nowhere near as good as the lives they could live if we instead embraced, rather than fought innovation.” (ITIF, 19)

    Credit is due to the ITIF for their ideological consistency. In putting together their list of recipients for the inaugural “Luddite Awards” – the foundation demonstrates that they are fully committed to technological innovation and they are unflagging in their support of that cause. Nevertheless, while the awards (and in particular the report accompanying the awards) may be internally ideologically consistent it is also a work of dubious historical scholarship, comical neoliberal paranoia, and evinces a profound anti-democratic tendency. Though the ITIF awards aim to target what it perceives as “neo-Ludditism” even a cursory glance at their awardees makes it abundantly clear that what the organization actually opposes is any attempt to regulate technology undertaken by a government, or advocated for by a public interest group. Even in a country as regulation averse as the contemporary United States it is still safer to defame Luddites than to simply state that you reject regulation. The ITIF carefully cloaks its ideology in the aura of terms with positive connotations such as “innovation,” “progress,” and “freedom” but these terms are only so much fresh paint over the same “free market” ideology that only values innovation, progress and freedom when they are in the service of neoliberal economic policies. Nowhere does the ITIF engage seriously with the questions of “who profits from this innovation?” “who benefits from this progress?” “is this ‘freedom’ equally distributed or does it reinforce existing inequities?” – the terms are used as ideological sledgehammers far blunter than any tool the Luddites ever used. This raw ideology is on perfect display in the very opening line of the award announcement, which reads:

    “Technological innovation is the wellspring of human progress, bringing higher standards of living, improved health, a cleaner environment, increased access to information and many other benefits.” (ITIF, 1)

    One can only applaud the ITIF for so clearly laying out their ideology at the outset, and one can only raise a skeptical eyebrow at this obvious case of the logical fallacy of Begging the Question. To claim that “technological innovation is the wellspring of human progress” is an assumption that demands proof, it is not a conclusion in and of itself. While arguments can certainly be made to support this assumption there is little in the ITIF report that suggests the ITIF is willing to engage in the type of critical reflection, which would be necessary for successfully supporting this argument (though, to be fair, the ITIF has published many other reports some of which may better lay out this claim). The further conclusions that such innovation brings “higher standards of living, improved health, a cleaner environment” and so forth are further assumptions that require proof – and in the process of demonstrating this proof one is forced (if engaging in honest argumentation) to recognize the validity of competing claims. Particularly as many of the “benefits” ITIF seeks to celebrate do not accrue evenly. True, an argument can be made that technological innovation has an important role to play in ushering in a “cleaner environment” – but tell that to somebody who lives next to an e-waste dump where mountains of the now obsolete detritus of “technological innovation” leach toxins into the soil. The ITIF report is filled with such pleasant sounding “common sense” technological assumptions that have been, at the very least, rendered highly problematic by serious works of inquiry and scholarship in the field of the history of technology. As classic works in the scholarly literature of the Science and Technology Studies field, such as Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work for Mother, make clear “technological innovation” does not always live up to its claims. Granted, it is easy to imagine that the ITIF would offer a retort that simply dismisses all such scholarship as tainted by neo-Ludditism. Yet recognizing that not all “innovation” is a pure blessing does not represent a rejection of “innovation” as such – it just recognize that “innovation” is only one amongst many competing values a society must try to balance.

    Instead of engaging with critics of “technological innovation” in good faith, the ITIF jumps from one logical fallacy to another, trading circular reasoning for attacking the advocate. The author of the ITIF report seems to delight in pillorying Bill McKibben but also aims its barbs at scholars like David Noble and Neil Postman for exposing impressionable college aged minds to their “neo-Luddite” biases. That the ITIF seems unconcerned with business schools, start-up culture, and a “culture industry” that inculcates an adoration for “technological innovation” to the same “impressionable minds” is, obviously, not commented upon. However, if a foundation is attempting to argue that universities are currently a hotbed of “neo-Ludditism” than it is questionable why the ITIF should choose to signal out two professors for special invective who are both deceased – Postman died in 2003 and David Noble died in 2010.

    It almost seems as if the ITIF report cites serious humanistic critics of “technological innovation” as a way to make it seem as though it has actually wrestled with the thought of such individuals. After all, the ITIF report deigns to mention two of the most prominent thinkers in the theoretical legacy of the critique of technology, Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, but it only mentions them in order to dismiss them out of hand. The irony, naturally, is that thinkers like Mumford and Ellul (to say nothing of Postman and Noble) would have not been surprised in the least by the ITIF report as their critiques of technology also included a recognition of the ways that the dominant forces in technological society (be it in the form of Ellul’s “Technique” or Mumford’s “megamachine”) depended upon the ideological fealty of those who saw their own best interests as aligning with that of the new technological regimes of power. Indeed, the ideological celebrants of technology have become a sort of new priesthood for the religion of technology, though as Mumford quipped in Art and Technics:

    “If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your love-life. If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion.” (Art and Technics, 81)

    Trade out the word “machine” in the above quotation with “technological innovation” and it applies perfectly to the ITIF awards document. And yet, playful gibes aside, there are many more (many, many more) barbs that one can imagine Mumford directing at the ITIF. As Mumford wrote in The Pentagon of Power:

    “Consistently the agents of the megamachine act as if their only responsibility were to the power system itself. The interests and demands of the populations subjected to the megamachine are not only unheeded but deliberately flouted.” (The Pentagon of Power, 271)

    The ITIF “Luddite Awards” are a pure demonstration of this deliberate flouting of “the interests and demands of the populations” who find themselves always on the receiving end of “technological innovation.” For the ITIF report shows an almost startling disregard for the concerns of “everyday people” and though the ITIF is a proudly nonpartisan organization the report demonstrates a disturbingly anti-democratic tendency. That the group does not lean heavily toward Democrats or Republicans only demonstrates the degree to which both parties eat from the same neoliberal trough – routinely filled with fresh ideological slop by think tanks like ITIF. Groups that advocate in the interest of their supporters in the public sphere (such as Free Press, the EFF, and the NRA {yes, even them}) are treated as interlopers worthy of mockery for having the audacity to raise concerns; similarly elected governmental bodies are berated for daring to pass timid regulations. The shape of the “ideal society” that one detects in the ITIF report is one wherein “technological innovation” knows no limits, and encounters no opposition, even if these limits are relatively weak regulations or simply citizens daring to voice a contrary opinion – consequences be damned! On the high-speed societal train of “technological innovation” the ITIF confuses a few groups asking for a slight reduction of speed with groups threatening to derail the train.

    Thus the key problem of the ITIF “Luddite Awards” emerges – and it is not simply that the ITIF continues to use Luddite as an epithet – it is that the ITIF seems willfully ignorant of any ethical imperatives other than a broadly defined love of “technological innovation.” In handing out “Luddite Awards” the ITIF reveals that it recognizes “technological innovation” as the crowning example of “the good.” It is not simply one “good” amongst many that must carefully compromise with other values (such as privacy, environmental concerns, labor issues, and so forth), rather it is the definitive and ultimate case of “the good.” This is not to claim that “technological innovation” is not amongst values that represent “the good,” but it is not the only value – treating it as such lead to confusing (to borrow a formulation from Lewis Mumford) “the goods life with the good life.” By fully privileging “technological innovation” the ITIF treats other values and ethical claims as if they are to be discarded – the philosopher Hans Jonas’s The Imperative of Responsibility (which advocated for a cautious approach to technological innovation that emphasized the potential risks inherent in new technologies) is therefore tossed out the window to be replaced by “the imperative of innovation” along with a stack of business books and perhaps an Ayn Rand novel, or two, for good measure.

    Indeed, responsibility for the negative impacts of innovation is shrugged off in the ITIF awards, even as many of the awardees (such as the various governments) wrestle with the responsibility that tech companies seem to so happily flaunt. The disrupters hate being disrupted. Furthermore, as should come as no surprise, the ITIF report maintains an aura that smells strongly of colonialism and disregard for the difficulties faced by those who are “disrupted” by “technological innovation.” The ITIF may want to reprimand organizations for trying to gently slow (which is not the same as stopping) certain forms of “technological innovation,” but the report has nothing to say about those who work mining the coltan that powers so many innovative devices, no concern for the factory workers who assemble these devices, and – of course – nothing to say about e-waste. Evidently to think such things are worthy of concern, to even raise the issue of consequences, is a sign of Ludditism. The ITIF holds out the promise of “better days ahead” and shows no concern for those whose lives must be trampled upon in the process. Granted, it is easy to ignore such issues when you work for a think tank in Washington DC and not as a coltan miner, a device assembler, a resident near an e-waste dump, or an individual whose job has just been automated.

    The ITIF “Luddite Awards” are yet another installment of the tech world/business press game of “Who’s Afraid of General Ludd” in which the group shouting the word “Luddite” at all opponents reveals that it has a less nuanced understanding of technology than was had by the historic Luddites. After all, the Luddites were not opposed to technology as such, nor were they opposed to “technological innovation,” rather, as E.P. Thompson describes in The Making of the English Working Class:

    “What was at issue was the ‘freedom’ of the capitalist to destroy the customs of the trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory-system, or by unrestricted competition, beating-down wages, undercutting his rivals, and undermining standards of craftsmanship…They saw laissez faire, not as freedom but as ‘foul Imposition”. They could see no ‘natural law’ by which one man, or a few men, could engage in practices which brought manifest injury to their fellows.” (Thompson, 548)

    What is at issue in the “Luddite Awards” is the “freedom” of “technological innovators” (the same-old “capitalists”) to force their priorities upon everybody else – and while the ITIF may want to applaud such “freedom” it is clear that they do not intend to extend such freedom to the rest of the population. The fear that can be detected in the ITIF “Luddite Awards” is not ultimately directed at the award recipients, but at an aspect of the historic Luddites that the report seems keen on forgetting: namely, that the Luddites organized a mass movement that enjoyed incredible popular support – which was why it was ultimately the military (not “seeing the light” of “technological innovation”) that was required to bring the Luddite uprisings to a halt. While it is questionable whether many of the recipients of “Luddite Awards” will view the award as an honor, the term “Luddite” can only be seen as a fantastic compliment when it is used as a synonym for a person (or group) that dares to be concerned with ethical and democratic values other than a simple fanatical allegiance to “technological innovation.” Indeed, what the ITIF “Luddite Awards” demonstrate is the continuing veracity of the philosopher Günther Anders statement, in the second volume of The Obsolescence of Man, that:

    “In this situation, it is no use to brandish scornful words like ‘Luddites’. If there is anything that deserves scorn it is, to the contrary, today’s scornful use of the term, ‘Luddite’ since this scorn…is currently more obsolete than the allegedly obsolete Luddism.” (Anders, Introduction – Section 7)

    After all, as Anders might have reminded the people at ITIF: gas chambers, depleted uranium shells, and nuclear weapons are also “technological innovations.”

    Works Cited

    • Anders, Günther. The Obsolescence of Man: Volume II – On the Destruction of Life in the Epoch of the Third Industrial Revolution. (translated by Josep Monter Pérez, Pre-Textos, Valencia, 2011). Available online: here.
    • Atkinson, Robert D. The 2014 Luddite Awards. January 2015.
    • Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine, volume 2 – The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
    • Mumford, Lewis. Art and Technics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
    • Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.
    • Not cited but worth a look – Eric Hobsbawm’s classic article “The Machine Breakers.”


    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, alternative forms of technology, and libraries as models of resistance. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog LibrarianShipwreck, where this post first appeared. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay