Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Stop Feeling Helpless About AI: The Violent History of Resisting Technology

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

What if everything you've been told about technological progress is a lie?Support my independent journalism: 🙏 Patreon: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz         ⁠ 🗞️ Buy a paid subscription to my Substack: ⁠https://www.usermag.co       AI is changing society faster than ever, but resistance to technology is not new. For this week's Free Speech Friday I spoke with academic Thomas Dekeyser, author of Techno Negative, about the history of anti-technology movements, from the Luddites smashing machines in the Industrial Revolution to anarchist groups bombing computer companies in the 1980s.We discuss AI, labor automation, surveillance, moral panic, Silicon Valley ideology, tech CEOs, machine breaking, environmental destruction, and why backlash against technology keeps returning throughout history. We also explore whether technological progress actually benefits ordinary people, or mainly serves corporations and power. Sometimes it's not what you think!Topics include:Why anti-AI movements are growingBig Tech and labor exploitationAI moral panic and conspiracy theoriesEnvironmental costs of AISurveillance and controlThe politics of technological progressWhy people resist new technologySilicon Valley and deregulation

There is this act, this kind of breaking frames act, which meant that being caught in machine breaking, you would receive a death penalty, basically. Is technological progress even good? There's this story that we tell ourselves about technology, where it's like, someone invents a thing, it's better than the thing that came before it. There might be holdouts to using this new thing, but eventually everyone comes around, everyone's life gets better, and the world comes around. Holdouts to technological progress are usually pitied and laughed at, or seen as out of touch. But Thomas de Kiser is an academic in the UK who's pushing back on that idea. In his new book, Techno Negative, a long history of refusing the machine, he talks about people resisting technology and why those movements were really important.

But that doesn't always mean that they were good. Today, he's joining me to talk about the history of resistance to technology, why this resistance can be a good or bad thing, how the technology that we use and adopt today shapes power, work, and our everyday life, and what ways of resisting technology are useful and which do you, an enormous amount of harm. Thomas, welcome to Free Speech Friday. Thank you. Great to be here. So to start off, can you tell me a little bit about what inspired you to write this book? Yeah, so my book, Technonegative, very much came from an encounter with a particular group,

a historical group that were very much anti-technology. They're a group called Clodotor, which in English stands for Committee for Liquidation or Subversion of Computers. And I came across this group kind of by accident and started reading about them. They were a discontaldo. that were active between 1980, 1983, and they quite literally went and bombed computer companies. And I found it so outrageous and interesting at the same time. And so I became very interested in what other groups, what other movements, what other individuals might exist historically

that might be, you know, shed some light on contemporary questions around how people resist or might resist technology. So it very much came from that kind of historical archival encounter. I guess. Why were they bombing the computer companies? So they were anarchists. You have to understand, like at that time in France, in south of France, there was kind of an emergence of a lot of anarchist groups and they were very pranksterish.

So they sent out these press releases and they were actually very hard to understand and they were like jokes in them. And so it's actually, it takes a little bit of engagement, takes a little of spending time with those texts to understand what they're actually about. This is the early 1980s. This is before personal computers really, before those were. sort of commercialized. And so computers were mainly used by the state, by very big corporations, by the police, by the military. And so they saw computers as this tightening connection

between violence in terms of like the police and the military and computation. And they saw computation as this emergent technology that would end up being a violent technology. And so they saw that particularly with regards to how computers were being used, for example, in order to guide ballistics in military and warfare, basically. But they also had a sort of wider critique, I would say. They were also more generally sort of suspicious of what computation might do to society more generally. So they were suspicious of very statistical ways of trying to understand people, for example,

and the role that computation plays in that. But also they were kind of afraid that computers would render us kind of very easily controllable, I guess. So both in terms of like how it would be used. by the police and the military, but also just sort of people more generally. So they were, it's interesting because it was in early 1980s, which is pretty much a decade before you get all the sort of utopian narratives around how computers are going to lead us into this kind of decented society

where the state isn't the only one who has power and we can circumvent issues around copyright and so on. But so they were like 10 years before then, they were already saying, no, that's not going to happen. That is just not how it's going to work out. What's so kind of funny, because I feel like a lot of those concerns ended up being very prescient, I guess. Your book goes back quite far before, I think, what a lot of people would consider even modern technology, even back into antiquity. What did the earliest resistance to technology look like?

So kind of a very simple kind of reason for kind of going back earlier is that it just kind of emerges from the curiosity that I had, which was a lot of people know about the Luddites, you know, these people, these workers. frame who worked with kind of looms in the early 19th century, breaking machines, threatening, factory kind of directors and so on because machines were coming, they were going to automate the labor process and that meant people were going to go unemployed. It also meant a loss of craft and so on. Anyway, so this is kind of quite a familiar story. There's been lots of books about this. Brian Merchant's written his book, Gavin Miller, lots of other people have written about the Luddites and they're really interesting to me. But I always felt like there was something missing in that. Technology in various forms, included very automated forms, has existed, you know,

for centuries before then. So on a very basic level, I was just interested in kind of exploring what else might exist and therefore what other lessons could we draw from history, maybe for contemporary resistance to technology, if that's what we're interested in. So it's on a very basic level, sort of kind of interested in seeing what was out there. And just because I also feel like that might tell us a little bit more of a diverse story in terms of the reasons that people might resist technology. Because if we talk about the Luddites, we have to be careful and understand that as specifically workers resisting the automation of labor. But that is not the only story of resistance to technology we might tell. And so this is another reason why I was like, I want to look at

other groups who might have resist technology and why they might have done so. So who is the first group that you found that was really meaningfully resisting technology back in history? Who did you ultimately choose to start with? So I start in ancient Greece, and I start with Archimedes, which for those of you who know about this figure, he was actually known as a very famous inventor of his time. Louis Mumford, the kind of famous critic of technology from 20th century, he wrote about this.

And so he actually showed that Archimedes, although he was his famous inventor, he was also what I would call the first machine breaker, and that he would always ask the machines that he built, to be destroyed afterwards. Before they were kind of used, he would actually ask them to be destroyed because he was like, they might be put to like bad uses, so we should actually destroy them. That's on quite an individual sort of level.

And then I also look at much later groups in medieval Europe, mainly religious groups who were sort of resisting various kinds of technologies because they felt like technology, you know, might replace God in the sense that they might allow people to kind of change the world around them, as if the world and the cosmos isn't already produced perfectly by God. It's interesting to kind of hear that discussion about religion, especially when the Pope today has been such an outspoken critic of artificial intelligence technology. And I feel like religion is intersecting with technology more and more, as people believe that AI is potentially some sort of God.

How were they resisting technology? And what kind of technology were they resisting even back then? So of course, a very long time ago, of technology meant something very different to now. They weren't talking about AI with potential super intelligence. They were talking about quite simple tools often. So tools used both in the arts. So they were sometimes very suspicious of like the use of particular tools and like creating statues and so on. They were also suspicious at least some groups, some movements were also suspicious of tools used in kind of agricultural labor. And so that mainly the

The groups of that era that I focus on were groups who were like specific monasteries. So like the Cistercian order is like one example that I focus on and they were very, they were very critical of, you know, how technology might distract people from their religious belief and they might make them a little bit vain. Like it might mean that they end up becoming a little bit self-absorbed in the sense that, oh, humanity is the most important thing and look at us, we can do all these things. Whereas for those movements, actually, the way to live with. life was in praise of God and was in, you know, it was the opposite of pride, right?

It was supposed to be a modest lifestyle and they saw technology as threatening that in a way. But what I think is worth emphasizing both about that kind of the religious groups of that time, but also the ancient Greeks is that resistance to technology wasn't some kind of revolutionary practice in the way that maybe it was for the Luddites. It was very much a way for them to hold on to the power that they had. And I'm not sure if we can say the same for our contemporary moments with the Pope being sort of visibly anti-tech. But I think there's something interesting about resistance to technologies often also, at least historically, often being used as a way of actually holding on to religious power, for example, and religious influence. So it isn't, you know, being against particular kinds of technologies doesn't necessarily mean that you have the well-being of the general population sort of, you know, in your spotlight.

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That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.cair.com Yeah, I know, it's interesting to kind of consider those movements compared to the current technological movements and also just like, as you said,

it's not like the church back then was interested in the liberation of the masses in any sort of way. Moving from sort of like medieval times through the leadites and all the sort of movements you studied, which do you think had the closest sort of like corollaries to today and which stood out to you as like, you know, when you're doing a research of like elements that were similar

to kind of maybe today's resistance to technology or elements of past technological landscapes or innovations that draw like parallels to kind of what we're experiencing today. So the group closer that I ended with is closest in terms of the kinds of technological forms and infrastructures that they're resisting. They were attacking computers and obviously computers back then, like I already mentioned, were very different to what computers are now. But so in terms of the technological landscape, it's not too dissimilar from what we have. And you know, they were attacking computers in early 1980, which is almost 30 years after AI

was invented, you know, as a term. So it's like in some sense they were operating and they were resisting technology in a context that's not too similar to our own. Obviously a lot of things have to changed. While the technological landscape is obviously very, you know, is not too dissimilar of our own. There is very much a, the way they attacked is obviously very, very dissimilar to what we have now. There's very few people engaging in acting and actually conducting things like sabotage, right? You know, you might have someone throw a malt of cocktail at Sam Altman's house, but that's not, there isn't that kind of strategic sabotage, at least not on that scale compared to what you had back then, not just by groups like Claudel, but other groups around Europe were sort of very

You had a lot of groups, very radical groups in the 1970s, 80s, often armed groups that were also attacking similar kinds of infrastructures. But in terms of other movements that are maybe similar to our own, I do think the Luddites stand as a good example just because so much of the conversation around AI and more generally big tech today is around what it's going to do to labor. So the Luddites, they were workers in the textile industries in the early 19th century, and they saw that their labor was under threat by automated looms. So basically the automation of work, right? And so as they saw these automated tools, these automated loops coming in, they realized that they might lose their jobs, but also that their crafts, the skills that they had developed over so many years.

And literally over centuries, you know, might just vanish, right? And so they were pushing back against the automation of labor. And that took quite a few years. They ended up attacking factories. They ended up breaking machines, quite literally. They ended up threatening the people who had the kind of factory directors that had introduced these tools. So yeah, they were very, they were quite violent at times, but the response was even more violent. You had the military being brought in and going after them with guns. Lots of people ended up on the scaffolding. They were, There was this Breaking Frames Act, which meant that being caught in machine breaking meant you would receive a death penalty, basically.

What is interesting about the Luddites is at least two things. First is I think that they sold the value of collective organization. It wasn't just an individual who went out and sort of expressed discontent with what the technology of the time might do to the workplace. They realized that they needed to get together, act together. And you know, they were such a threat that in the end, the army was sent in and to repress them and lots of people died. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.com. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized.

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You can also get my newsletter on Patreon. Once again, the links to everything are below in the description. Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. I'm curious, kind of like looking back at all this resistance to technology. Like, there's this idea, especially today that like people that resist technology, like, you're standing in the way of progress. And when you look historically, I mean, even the Luddites, although obviously they were correct in their labor movement, like they were being displaced. What happened to them was horrible. But also automated looms are more productive and allowed us to like,

Like, you know, you distribute lots of textiles. And like, I don't know. It seems like technological progress has been good. I think in your book, I read somewhere that you talked about people like smashing lanterns. Like, it seems like a lot of the technology that they were trying to destroy in the past ultimately ended up kind of benefiting humanity. And so I'm curious kind of when you look back on that and especially thinking to today, like, are we naive?

Like, is this technology ultimately going to benefit humanity? It feels like it's not. But I don't know. Like, you know, looking at history also, I'm like, well, all of those. inventions turned out to be pretty useful. Yeah, I think I would broadly agree with that. I think we have to look at very specific moments, right? I don't think we can have a sort of general statement around technological progress as

necessarily benefiting people. The question I would always ask of each particular moment and each particular act of resistance is who's benefiting at a particular time from the introduction of a particular kind of technology. So when the loser being introduced, they weren't introduced for the benefit of humanity. they were introduced because they would increase productivity rates, which in turn would increase capital, which would in turn benefit those, you know, the factory directors.

And we could say something similar about our contemporary AI moment, even if it might eventually be beneficial. So people, the political economy around it, so basically who's benefiting from it? Towards which ends is the ultimate question. And I actually think that our current AI moment is quite unique in that it often, particularly if you believe the narrative put forward by AI firms and big tech CEOs, they're actually very blatant about what this is about. Like, they're very clear that this is going to lead many people into unemployment.

And there's something sort of very, like, brazen about that that I think is, even if historically maybe there was a sort of claim that maybe it might be beneficial for humanity at some point. There is now it just feels like quite far removed from even that kind of positive intent. And I think that in part explains why people are responding to it often so kind of aggressively because it feels like, you know, the kind of claims around it don't feel like it's going to serve the many, at least not any time soon. People might lose their jobs. The local environments around data centers might be heavily extracted and might lead to also problems for people in local communities and so on. It feels like it's very, yeah, that kind of brazeness, I think, is quite unique.

Yeah, I feel like they do just constantly say it out loud. I was talking to somebody at one of these big AI companies recently who, of course, feels like they're unfairly maligned. And they were saying that, like, actually throughout history, people haven't been as open. And some of these people, you know, they've promised too much. They've said, oh, it's going to be this amazing thing. They haven't been clear about the downsides. Now that some of these AI companies, although they seem pretty giddy about the downsides, but they've been very clear about the downsides. They're saying, like, well, look, we're trying to warn people. We're trying to let people know. We want to be open about the sort of transformation

of power of this technology. So I guess like people shouldn't be, I don't know, as worried. I'm curious kind of like, are there certain things that you noticed about when new technologies are introduced that provokes backlash or doesn't provoke backlash? And do you think it is just like the CEOs being evil at certain times? Because I think if you ask these AI people, they're like, well, we shouldn't be getting the backlash because at least we're honest, all these other people from history were lying to you. I mean, I think just on that kind of discourse that exists.

around the pro-AI crowd, including sort of the, you know, these CEOs, like the story they like to tell is one in which they are very honest, right? They're transparent around both the good and the bad. And I think this is very strategic. Like, I don't read this as some kind of, as if they feel like they have some kind of moral obligation. And this is sort of like a moral statement that in which they're just, you know, they're better people than those in the past were in the past they were lying and now they're being

honest. I think this works really well for them in the sense that I think. I think it helps squash any kind of critique. It ends up presenting critique as this sort of irrational view that isn't in line with reality because the reality is the one we put out, which is this good and there's bad. But actually when you start pushing, you actually realize, like, yeah, they might say that there's negative sides to it, but what are they actually doing about preventing those negative sides, those negative impacts from generalizing?

Like, what are they doing in terms of protecting workers' rights? Like, very little. They might say, like, yeah, we might need. to change how industries operate and we might need to move towards something else. But you know, that might be the thing they say in the morning right before going to work and then they go to work and they just keep pushing these technologies down our throats, right? So I think there's something, we have to take what they're saying with a pinch of salt and we have to understand that that kind of ethical narrative that they like to bring is one that that suits them

well. It doesn't mean that there can't be any truths to it whatsoever, but I think we have to be very careful in terms of, you know, what their intentions are when when billions are at stake, right, in terms of, you know, the kind of investment that comes of it. It suits them really well to just be like, you know, I'm being very honest. Yes, there's bad sides to it. And then it can kind of go, okay, we've said it. And now we can just keep going. Well, yeah, right.

Because they argue that it's the government's job to fix those things. They're like, we did our part. We said all the bad things are going to happen. So if, you know, the bad things happen, it's not on us. It's on the government. Why didn't they react? Why didn't they take us seriously when we said it, et cetera, et cetera. Exactly.

Yeah. But it's like, if that words that, actual interest, if like state regulation was their actual interest, they wouldn't be supporting the political figures they're supporting. Literally, because then they turn around and support the government. I mean, it's like when Sam Altman put out that, I think it was opening I put out that big statement recently about UBI and how we need to like provide for each other in society and all this stuff and sort of like people were like, wait, this sounds very like socialist,

but then if you look at, I mean, I just wrote a story last week on the super PAC that Open AI is funding and all these other tech execs, they're just funding complete deregulatory. They're funding people that want the opposite of all of those policies. So it's very silly. As you said, I don't think they're being quite honest in a lot of that stuff. No, and I think more generally speaking, not all of them, but quite a few of them are very suspicious of democracy and, you know, democratic regulation. And I think that is, we need to keep that in mind, you know. So yeah, they're not very simply put, they're not interested in being democratically regulated.

They want to maximize whatever it is they can do without state. intervention or with, you know, sort of state intervention. They want to stay intervention, maybe to come at some points, but not anytime soon. Yeah, certainly not in a way that affects their profits or growth. I guess like, what do you say to people that would be like, oh, well, he's just a technology hater who's against progress and look at all the amazing things. I mean, I love technology. That's why I'm a tech reporter, right?

Like, look at all the amazing things that technology is done for our world. And I'm curious, kind of like your response to people that might have that, like, feeling or sort of initial response to some of the the stuff that you're putting forward. I mean, I think first of all, I would ask people to read a book and actually engage with what I'm actually saying. When I say, my book's called Ticna Negative, but it's not an argument for necessarily for techno negativity.

It's a historical tracing of resistance to technology. And like I already mentioned earlier, there's lots of cases where resistance technology was actually really problematic. It was an attempt that attaining more power, attaining greater wealth. Like resist to technology isn't inherently emancipatory. And technological innovation isn't inherently reactionary. You know, these things can sort of, you can have, depending on the particular context,

technologies can be absolutely incredible. They can increase the well-being of people. It can be, you know, it might make things that are really dull, much easier to deal with. And you know, it can have positive sides, obviously. But what I'm interested in is, and this is partially what the book is trying to do, is to try and parse out which forms of resistance to technology are, I'm not going to say legit, but are like,

are I think in service or aim at changing the world for the better and those that actually close that opportunity down. So, so when I mention technical negativity, I'm interested in how we might, you know, when I make a case with technical negativity, it's in those cases where I do feel like technologies end up being particularly violent or they end up particularly serving authoritarian purposes. So the book isn't a sort of how to guide on how to resist any technology because in fact I don't think it's possible to resist technology as such. I try and write about this. I try and write this about this quite carefully because I think when we say technology, you know, it can range literally from something like anthropologists have written about this like speech and writing

things down to, you know, a particular tool like a phone to something like a very complex internet infrastructure. It can be all those things and I don't we can't separate like humanity has never existed without technology. So I don't you cannot be against technology as such. Even if you're, let's say you're against civilization and industrialization, even if you were that even then you would still be reliant on things outside of ourselves, whatever tool that might be, whatever infrastructure that might be. So for me it's about tracing what forms of technological innovation, making sense and aren't just for kind of authoritarian purposes, surveying purposes and so on, and those that are. So I would push back against any kind of characterization of, I guess what I'm

trying to say as just like, oh, a kind of primitivist account where it's like, oh, we have to be against all technology. We have to be against modernity. That's not the path I want to take. And I think actually those paths can be quite dangerous. You know, I think they can be very reactionary and they can be, you see it in certain forms of things like eco-fascism, where it sort of returned to a supposedly pre-technological era, which has never existed, by the way, but, you know, that kind of romantic notion of supposedly living in a community without technology is often deeply tied to, like, particular ideas of who belongs to that land, what the role of women should be as tradwives within that. And I think that's what I'm interested in is, like, how do you parse these various

forms of resistance out from each other and then on that basis like what you know what can we learn right what might be a useful way of organizing for example could AI help you do more of what you love workday is the AI platform for HR and finance that actually knows your business we help you handle the have-to-dos so you can't-wait-to-dos it's a new workday yeah I report a lot on like moral panics and especially like a lot of moral panic around different technology and media, mostly like new forms of media like comic books or novels or whatever, but also phones and the internet and et cetera. And so often those that like they are leveraging this like very real resistance to technological progress or, you know, new forms of media to push like extreme reactionary

movements and are really regressive laws that are ultimately like really bad. I talk about this man, Jonathan Haidt. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but I don't even know how to describe my mother than a grifter. He wrote this, like, bestselling book called The Anxious Generation, but it's all about how, you know, phones are destroying the world. And of course, he just went on a podcast this week and said, actually, everybody, conservative parents had it right. They keep their kids away.

They don't let their young women, you know, realize that they might be gay by using the internet or something like that. And so I feel like it kind of scares me. It's like on one sense, I feel like we're getting this AI technology that's exploiting people, that's terrifying. So there's so much bad, there's so many bad. actors in the tech space, but also resistance technology is often just sort of a gateway into these more reactionary movements.

So I'm curious kind of like in all the research you did, like when you look at movements today that are sort of pushing back against harmful technology, where do you see things being productive or going in a good way? Like are there any groups or movements today that are resisting new technologies that you think are doing it well? Yeah. So I would say I think I am equally like you am suspicious of particular strands. within a sort of AI, anti-AI domain.

I think those who are really obsessed with AI as for example an existential threat to humanity, I think lends itself can lends itself quite well to conspiratorial thinking that I think can be, you know, can be gateway into all kinds of other politics that can be deeply reactionary. So for me, I think when we're thinking specifically about AI and anti-AI resistance,

I think, I'm not going to say those AI for where it is, but I think AI needs to be understood in terms of a political economy where you have particular companies making a lot of money of particular kinds of narratives. And I think those movements and groups that understand AI as more than just a particular kind of technology, right? It's a political paradigm. It's an economic and it's an investment strategy. It's all those things. So for me, I'm interested in those who actually see that kind of broader picture rather than just falling into the trap of thinking that AI is this entirely revolutionary technology and it's purely a technological thing that's going to then replace us,

for example. So I think we need to understand when we're resisting AI, we need to understand it in terms of those, you know, at terms of the political economy, you know, maybe that makes me a little with Marxist, but I'm like, these are, you know, what happens to labor, what happens to wealth, capital accumulation, who benefits from all that? I think those people, those kinds of questions are for me at least the ones that I think have got it right, you know. But also I would say kind of environmentalist movements who are really seeing kind of on the ground what things like data centers are doing and so on are actually, I think they're using kind of anti-ta-ta-i resistance in really productive ways as a way of kind of building broader movements.

And I think that is actually political movements rather than just movements based on like an anxiety that AI is going to, you know, take over and we're just going to be this sort of, you know, slaves of robots. I just, I don't, I don't think that's particularly interesting, nor do I think that's going to happen. I don't think, I think it relies on the misunderstanding of the technology usually. Yeah, those people, those people drive me insane. And I think it's also too important to note that, that those people, the sort of existential

doom people, a lot of them, while you might believe them to be anti-AI, I mean, I saw Bernie Sanders even doing something with Eliyzer Yudkowski. But they're not anti-AI. They just want to build, they actually want to build like a super intelligent aligned AI or something that's like aligned with humanity. And I don't know, my former colleague Natasha Tiko has done a lot of reporting on that. But I think some of those fakers are not even as anti-AI as you might believe. They sort of operate in this like religious theoretical world around super intelligence or AI when, as you said, these are corporations at the end of the day. And we can regulate corporations. And what their building is not, it's technology, the way that we've built technology for decades,

you know, like it's, yeah, they're not, it's not some like magical, mystical new thing. Yeah, I think we need to be wary of those things. I think we need to have tools for like understanding what these movements are doing, but also not just what these movements themselves are doing, but also to the kinds of groups and ideas that might infiltrate that. I think a lot of this stuff is actually really well meaning and comes from a genuine sort of like feeling of actually this is quite, you know, I'm quite anxious about this situation. But I think that is, that makes people quite kind of vulnerable and means others can sort of

tap into that with, you know, try and pull them into a, you know, let's say, why they're conspiratorial, maybe even like far right ideology. And I think this is why I think we need to pay attention to these things, not just because of what these people are saying, but also because of how they might then be kind of used if that's the right term towards different political ends. And I think this is why for me, you know, the actual politics of things like labor and so on is so important because it's quite hard to move from that to, at least in my view, to sort of an eco-fascist ideology. That just doesn't, like, that's not easily aligned.

Whereas conspiratorial thinking of, oh, there's some kind of elite out there that wants to introduce robots that are going to enslave us. That feels like that's very close to existing conspiracy theories. You know, there's kind of this band of elites that exists in order to whatever. to get rid of us. So I think there's a lot of alignments there. There's a lot of potential, sort of easy jumps to be made that I think we need to be very careful with when we sort of think about AI, for example. I mean, so much of the way that these products are adopted is sort of like forced on us

all. And I mean, I hear from so many people, especially now, it's like they have to use AI for their job or they're sort of like they end up using new tools because the old tools have been so degraded and then chittified and kind of. become so bad that they sort of are now relying on this new technology. And I'm curious, like, how would you suggest that people kind of evaluate, like, which technologies to resist or not resist? And, you know, how can people operate in this world that it feels almost so impossible to fight back against this like wave of what's, I don't want to say progress, because it's not

necessarily progress, but kind of like what's happening? Yeah, this is a question I've gotten a few times already. It's sort of like, what do you go and do? And I think I would start by saying, first of all, acknowledge how incredibly hard it is. You know, I've given talks at universities and I've had students come up to me afterwards and feeling just really awful that they don't, that they do remain addicted to these platforms and these devices and they find it really, they really struggle with it. And my sort of initial reaction is like, it's not your fault, you know. These are technologies and devices that are meant to be really hard to resist, whether

by design or by the kind of general discourses around it that make them seem inevitable. So that's one thing. And secondly as well, I think any kind of resist technology isn't about what you as an individual just go and do. It's about, I mentioned the Luddites already, but it's about collective approaches to understanding these technologies. And it isn't about individually necessarily deciding which particular object do I want to use or not. Also because that doesn't really make much of a change. I think that's a very kind of individualist approach to technology and resist technology that I don't think is necessarily that. helpful. So I think it's about, you know, if we're thinking about how to resist, I think it's

about creating spaces and which we can actually think these things through collectively, whether it's on the work floor, whether it's just, whether it's online spaces, wherever, really it is. But I think it is about moving beyond a kind of feeling of individual responsibility when all this, precisely because these tools are very hard to resist, but also because we don't want to reduce politics to just individual choices. I think we end up in a trap by doing that. I don't think that would be our way of overcoming the current problem. I think we need much kind of bigger structural changes. And I do think that starts for like everyday people that start from actually having conversations with each other and trying to tap maybe into existing movements

that already exist, go join a local group, whatever it is. But like thinking anti-technological resistance in terms of the collective, I think is a good place to start. I know it's not a direct answer to your question, but I think in terms of approach, that's how I would go. about it or how I personally try and go about it. I think it's so helpful. I think right now people feel so sort of overwhelmed and hopeless. And I do see a lot of the like individual attacks on people online like, oh, did you use AI or that person's like, I didn't use AI or whatever, you know, or like I think of this

a lot. I did a video recently on AI companies targeting women and how many new moms are relying on things like chat GPT for information or whatever, mostly because Google's been sort of obliterated and being a new mom is really, really lonely. And I think it's predatory that these companies are doing this and sort of trying to get young moms like hooked on these technologies that they're going to profit for and then ultimately try to sell them baby formula or whatever through chat CBD. But at the same time, I don't think it's helpful to go to the Instagram comments of some mom and, and like berate her for doing searches on AI at 3 a.m. You know,

with her daughter. Like, it's just, it's very silly and unproductive. But I think it comes from people feeling like helpless almost. I think any kind of politics coming from guilt or pointing the finger tends to not work particularly well. Just even just like purely strategically speaking, you know, you might just end up making that mom feel really crap, but that's not going to convince her. That's not going to necessarily convince anyone else. You end up building a, you know, it's, for me at least, an anti-theism of like a collective, like, generous space from which to begin to go after the people that we actually need to be going after.

It's not the users who've just had these technologies kind of pushed onto them and were actually like, oh, actually some of this is kind of helpful. I'm going to use. Those are not the enemy, if that's the right term to use. I think it's those shoving it down our throats and profiting from it and being very happy, those who seem to be quite happy to destroy local communities

and environments as part of that. And Xeroid climate crisis as part of that, it's those people who are the issues, not the individual users, you know, who often maybe start using these technology and you suggested this, started using these technologies because maybe they're in a vulnerable place. For example, you know, you've got a lot of teenagers turning to this technologies because they feel like they've not really got other people to speak to about really difficult things.

And so the problem isn't the individual teenager. It's the fact that we've seemed to not be capable of creating social structures in which young people feel like they can have those conversations. That is the problem. That is the enemy if there is one. It's not the individual students or whatever teenager turning towards those technologies. Yeah, I also try to explain to people that like, I mean, it's so unhelpful to villainize users as well, especially with these big corporations because like, for instance, with data centers,

the primary use of these products is the sort of B2B. I mean, Anthropic is growing right now because of their B2B use. And that is also what XAI is pursuing and Open AI is pivoting as well. So like any little, you know, search that you do on check. GPT, you know, a few times a day is absolutely nothing when OpenA has a contract with the Pentagon or to use that technology or whatever, you know, like the level of use is just so massive. And so we should go after these corporations that are building these partnerships to integrate their software or, yeah, the people running running these things.

Yeah. I think the analogy is, I think that I sometimes think about is like people who think that we're going to overcome the climate crisis by way of not using plastic straws, you know, Like, whereby you've got, you know, sure, as an individual I can decide to use no straws. They use paper straws. That's fine, but someone using plastic straw there is then not the enemy. It's the corporations who've known for decades and who continue to profit of a fuel-based economy that's super profitable for that.

That is the problem, right? It's not, we're not going to overcome these problems by convincing people or everyone to use, you know, use less plastic straws. Like I think we need to always, you know, it's like you need to zoom out right and actually understand the wider forces that play here. Otherwise, we end up just pointing the finger at people that are just going to feel crap as a result. And that's not actually a good way to build a movement if that's what we want to do. Well, Thomas, thank you so much for joining me and chatting today. This was great. Thanks so much for having me. All right. That's it for this week's episode.

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