Tech Won't Save Us - Tech Refusal Has a Very Long History w/ Thomas Dekeyser

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

We are often told that resisting technological development is impossible and ‘progress’ is inevitable, but history says otherwise. Thomas Dekeyser joins Paris Marx to discuss how understanding radical resistances of the past can help us rethink our modern relationship with technology and reshape our vision of the future.Thomas Dekeyser is a lecturer in human geography at the University of Southampton, author of Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, and co-creator of the documentary Machines in Flames.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Support the show on Patreon.Also mentioned in this episode:You can now pre-order Paris’s new book Hyperscale.Shout out to friend of the pod The Luddite Club.This article by Saul Levin and Astra Taylor discusses the growing bipartisan opposition towards data centers.Support the show

You know, we need to ask the much bigger questions, and in order to be able to ask the bigger questions, such as how can we make tech work actually for people, for the majority of not everyone, how can we actually make it work in favor of radical emancipation, how can we make sure tech is not reliant on extractivism and all those things? Maybe we need to, you know, negate our concurrent technological imaginations to even begin to think outside of our present.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made a partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Thomas DeKaser. Thomas is a lecturer in human geography at the University of Southampton, the author of Technonegative, a long history of refusing the machines, and co-made a documentary called Machines in Flames, which, honestly, when we started recording the episode, I hadn't realized he had helped make, and then he had to tell me, and I felt like a real idiot. But that's it. I would recommend checking it out.

an interesting documentary. But in this conversation, we're mainly talking about Thomas's book, techno-negative, because it is this fantastic history and philosophical and theoretical and theoretical interrogation of the refusal of technology, right? What it means not to say, let's reform technology, you know, let's try to make technology better, but to just say, you know what, these technologies don't work, let's smash them, let's break them, let's refuse them, let's not use them. You know, this is a fantastic history of that. And there are so many examples through history, not just of individuals and groups and collectives trying to push back against technology, but even states just saying, you know, these technologies do not work for us and institutions as well,

including, you know, say the Christian Church or the Catholic Church, to actually refuse technology. And one of the things that really stood out to me in reading the book was just how much of a history there is here, how much of this there has been, and how little that really plays in our modern narratives of technology. right? You know, because so much of it is about inevitability. And of course, the industry is going to create this new product and we just all have to use it and accept it. But is that the case? Well, it hasn't always been in the past. And actually, we as humans have a rich history of refusal of these technologies. And I think that this is something that we need to remember and learn from as we think about the path forward. Certainly the Luddites are in this book and part of this

history, but they're far from the only one. And actually, I feel like the history, that Thomas gives us, allows us to look at the Luddites in a slightly different way or to perceive, you know, the role that they played in this history slightly differently and seeing how they represented even potentially a shift in how refusal worked before and then how refusal potentially even evolved after, right? You know, there are a moment in this history that can be very instructive to us, but there are other moments that I think that we can learn from and should learn from as well as we think about the right approach. to the technologies that we face today, this all-powerful industry that is behind these digital technologies in particular, and how we respond to that and what it means to build a better world, build technology that actually works for humanity rather than just these companies, in a way that maybe we don't talk enough of right now with the discourses that we have around

digital technology and the ones that this industry tries to promote to serve its own interest, really, at the end of the day. So I think that this is a fascinating conversation. You know, we dig into a lot here, but there's also a lot that we couldn't get to just because there's a lot of, you know, interesting history and discussions within Thomas's book. But I still think you're really going to like it. If you do, of course, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, and you can share the show on social media or with any other friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work, that goes into making tech won't save us every single week, so I can keep having these conversations to try to

inform you and hopefully, you know, broaden your perspectives and your horizons on discourses around technology, the politics of technology, things like that. Well, you can join supporters like Patrick from Montreal and Adrienne in Alaska by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Thomas, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hi, hi, Paris. Good to be here. Absolutely. It's great to speak with you. And to have you on the show, you have this fantastic new book techno negative that I think will really resonate with the audience of this show in particular, you know, as people who are, you know, critical of the tech industry, who often oppose a lot

of the technologies that, you know, are kind of rolled out in our lives, you know, seeing the negative social effects that can come of this. And so I'm really excited to have you on the show and to dig into this further with you. And just to start, like I wanted to ask why this is a book that you wanted to write. Why was this a subject that you wanted to dig into? So I think the main reason why I became interested in writing this book was a sense that the way we understand technological politics today is very, I would say, quite limited. It's very often about, for example, how can we legislate something a little bit better? How can we make sure that we adapt the technology in such a way that it does less harm, for example?

And I always felt like, that's interesting, but surely there's more to technological politics than just a sort of a change in legal framework for how we deal with technological innovations. And so I became particularly interested in kind of looking at the long histories of resistive technology to start looking at how have people maybe resisted technology otherwise in the past. And it was really a very particular group, a collective and anti-tech collective from the 1980s that I stumbled across and that really made me go, oh, now, this is interesting. And I made me sort of wonder what else is out there. And so this group was a group that's called Clodor, which stands in English for

Comity for the Liquidation or Subversion of Computers. And they were a French group active in early 1980s, France. They were active for three years. And as their name suggests, they were all about kind of attacking tech. And specifically, they bombed computers. companies. So they bombed computer companies like Phillips, Honeywell and other sort of American companies, also other companies. Yeah, so they were very much kind of using these really radical means to resist technology. And that really kind of, when I just accidentally came across this sort of

interview with them and it made me really go, oh my God, like, how is that not something we know more about? And so the book kind of emerged from that feeling that surely there is so much more we can learn from the resistant technology in historical terms than what we already know today. Yeah, and I think the first time that I had heard of, Clodo was watching, you know, a film that you co-created called Machines in Flames. And I was, you know, as you talk about that, I'm just thinking, like, it must have been fascinating to kind of embark on this effort or this adventure of going into this history and understanding more about technological refusal over the past, you know, several hundred years. That must have been really, I don't know, a really interesting kind of quest,

I guess. Yeah, I really felt a little bit like, felt a little bit like a detective sort of going into the archives. And in particular, because so much of this is a history we don't know, people, maybe listeners will know about the Luddites who were sort of workers, loom workers, who in the early 19th century decided to fight against automation of their labor. And so they're based in Northern England. And so a lot of people will have heard of the Luddites. They may even know a little bit about that they were about, that there was a worker struggle, that it was against automation and so on.

But besides that, there's very little kind of known about these archives. So it really felt like reading about these things, really felt like kind of going into unknown territories to some degree. Obviously, there's a lot of work, particularly by kind of historians that already touches on these things, but they're sort of hidden in academic articles, right, behind paywalls, and it required someone like myself with quite a bit of patience to kind of go through these things and start collecting them into a bit more of a, I guess, a coherent narrative, right? Yeah, it makes me think that, like, if I had the time, it's something that I would love to,

like, endeavor and do, but I'm at least happy that you have put together this book so that, you know, we can kind of collectively get a piece of that through the work that you have done. And I guess I'm wondering, you know, as I hear you discuss that, you know, there is a rich history as your book lays out and as we're going to talk about. Why do you think it is that we're so ill-informed in general about this history of technological refusal throughout our societies and throughout the world? I think it's a wider problem of how stories of resistance are often not. known and in part is because history tends to be written by the powerful. It tends to be, we have, let's say, the, whatever, the parliamentary minutes from the 17th century,

and that is held in some state archive somewhere and then, you know, academics and others, amateurs can go and look at those things and write histories on those bases. And so stories of resistance very often don't feature in the archives. particularly if it's not resistance that takes the shape of full-on warfare. Because full-on warfare will have been documented heavily by the state, right? And the sort of archivists of whatever era you're sort of looking at. Whereas more kind of bottom-up forms of resistance are usually, even if they are noted in the archives, they are hidden.

And it's also not in the benefit of those who are, let's say, managing the archives or are interested in producing sort of official state narratives to bring these to the four rights. So they remain hidden. And they require people to do a lot of digging to get to them. And so it's most often only really when resistance really ramps up, like with the Luddites, where the British state thought that there was really an insurrection potentially that was about to happen. And so the military was sent in and, you know, sort of, it's almost like a close to like a scenario. of warfare. So that's in part why that history particularly does feature in, to some degree,

in the public imagination, even if it's still limited. You know, maybe two of us and listeners of this podcast are not necessarily representative of the wider population. But I would imagine, you know, compared to at least some of these other histories that I talk about in the book, it's one of those that's much more well-known, I would imagine. Yeah, I would definitely agree. And even when you talk about how, you know, those impoundings, write the histories and what we know about them. Even when it comes to the Luddites, like the way that the term Luddite is often understood to many people is just like, you know, someone who doesn't want to have to deal with technology

at all, right? You know, it doesn't deal with the complexity and it's a, you know, it's kind of a rewriting of the actual motivations of the Luddite in order to try to, like, in order to try to smear what this group or this movement was. So even then in this history that is a little bit more familiar to people, you already have this kind of rewriting of what happened to make it so that people are intentionally misinformed about what it was, I guess. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

I think there's a sort of, however, I don't know to what extent is conscious, but there is definitely a misrepresentation of groups like the Luddites. And I think in part, if there is a sort of motivation behind it, is that to be able to tell the history of technology as some kind of smooth history, that's almost like something that we can't stop whether we want to stop certain parts of it or not. So it's beneficial to be able to tell a story the void of refusal, the void of resistance, the void of slowing down. So the narrative of technological kind of progress as a sort of smooth linear process is one that's beneficial, right? And I think that helps us in part that helps us understand why some of these histories are not well

known is because those that have the sort of, you know, power to write these histories may not have, might not benefit from a history that's presented as much more contested, one that's much more with so many different sides, that was much more kind of messy than just the usual story, which is, oh, an inventor came up with a new machine. And then 50 years later, someone else, another dude came up with another machine. And that's sort of, and that built on that previous machine, right? And that's the kind of story that I think, at least in the public imagination, sort of is often kind of narrated. And I think today and in the past, it was beneficial to repress the notion of that actually being a fallacy. It's historically incorrect to think that that is it, that that was just a sort of smooth

process. It wasn't. It was forthover very intensely often by lots of different parties for very different reasons often, but it was a messy, sometimes a bloody process. And I think, we often forget that, particularly if we ignore these histories that I think are so important. Yeah, I think really well said. And as I was reading the book, like I was thinking about why, you know, we hear this narrative regularly, right, about why we see technology as inevitable rather than, you know, a contentious kind of history or a contentious process. Do you think that is why we tend to see it as inevitable, or do you think there's a larger reason for that? Yeah, I mean, I think there is, the story of inevitability is one that benefits people.

It allows someone to say, you have to get on board, whether you like this particular technological object, infrastructure, whatever it is, whether you like it or not, you have to go on board. So I think there is a, there's a political motivation that underpins that narrative often. I think that said, I think people often reproduce it because it's a simple narrative. It's a really easy narrative. It's much harder to think of history as something that's multi-layered, that's contradictory, that's not just like 1963, this happened, 1965, this happened,

and it's sort of really that linear narrative. I think it's a very easy narrative, but it's one that's unfortunately, unfortunately, just generally speaking for how we understand the world not great, but particularly unfortunately for those of us who want to resist these technologies, means we're up against a really powerful discourse of that kind of linearity of it all, whereby we are sort of seen as those who are kind of a historical almost, just like coming in and trying to resist something, whereas, oh, in the past, people just accept technologies, and, you know, and look what all these things are broader, look, it was great,

and it sort of allows us to be sort of marginalized in many ways. So I think one of the key things discursively that's really important for basically anyone who's kind of interested in resisting technologies is really trying to break that discourse again and again and again because it is possible to break it. Discourse is going to be broken and they have been broken all the time. So I think this is something that we kind of need to keep in mind when we think about contemporary resist technology as well. Yeah, I definitely agree. And so I want to dig into some of the history in the book, but obviously the title is techno negative, right? So in your view, what does it mean to be techno negative? So I use the term techno negative as

almost as an umbrella turn. So I use it on the simplest level as holding a negative relationship to technology. I mean, the name suggests that, right? And so a negative relationship is distinct from, let's say, a relationship which says, yes, I like that technology. It's also different from a relationship, which is,

yes, I like that technology, but we need to change it a little bit. That would be a kind of reformist sort of relationship to technology. And I'm interested in a relationship that's neither a yes, nor the yes but, but the no. And so I'm interested in historically and in the present ways of resist technology that don't rely on the yes. And so that means people, groups, individuals, collectives, who are interested in a radical resistance of a particular technological object, infrastructure, even technological ID, a technological imagination. There's much more a kind of a radical negation of those things rather than a simple sort of taking for granted of a particular technological idea of a particular imagination. particular technological presence. So I'm interested in what's outside of that. And so for me,

so what I do in the book has traced these, the more radical negations of technology throughout history. And in part, this goes back to what I was saying earlier, where I was sort of looking for a widening of our technological imagination beyond just what the tools that we seem to have available to us right now, which is one that relies on the idea that the present that we have is one that we need to stick with. And maybe there's a little bit of wiggle room to move things a little bit more this way or that way or to prevent that very particular articulation or the very particular data set for being sort of unevenly distributed as it is.

So, Tengue negative is my way of trying to break out of that. And I try and do that historically, I guess. Yeah, like even as you were starting to describe the concept, that's really what I was thinking, right, is that it does feel like the discourse that we have about technology. today is very limited, right? In that, you know, obviously you have the boosters of the technology, the people who really want us to adopt it, and they have a really important, you know, role in setting the narrative around technology. And then, you know, a lot of kind of the counter to that is to say, okay, this technology is here, but how do we at least make it a bit better? How do we reduce the

harms a little bit of how it might work? There's a lot less of that, just get this technology away from me. We shouldn't have it. Let's get rid of it. Let's get rid of it. destroy it, like, whatever, right? I feel like, and I wonder your thoughts on this. I feel like we're seeing a little bit more of that, maybe in the past few years, but I feel like that's a distinct change from what we've been seeing for a while. I think you're right, and I think I should also emphasize,

I understand the impulse to go, okay, these technologies are here now, so let's just try and make them work a little bit better for us. I understand the impulse, and I'm not saying that people are completely misguided in going down that path. I just think it's too limited and it's lacking bravery. I think, and I think some of that,

bravery is indeed what we've been seeing in the last few years. I think it's at least unique within the last few decades what we're kind of seeing with, I guess, the popularization that came with new innovations in AI. And I think the kind of really strong push both on the state and the corporate level towards the introduction of AI in every single possible domain you could possibly think of means that people are a lot of people at least are like even if we make this slightly better like this is not going to get rid of the problems that are inherent to it or at least that are a very important component of it which i think is why we're seeing some people kind of moving beyond just a sort of reformist relationship to tech i think it's just the intensity and the

brutality with which the stuff is being introduced that means that people are like hold on Maybe we need to hold a slightly more negative relationship to this, then maybe we help with social media or the introduction of the commercialization of the internet. Yeah, I definitely agree. And I also feel in a sense it's also like a building on, right? It's like there are so many harms that have come so far. And now we're being like presented with a whole new wave. And it's just like, no, this is too much, right?

It's gone too far now. But you mentioned the state there. And I wanted to start to get into this history because it was really fascinating to me to start to read how you were laying this out. And it was interesting to see that, I think today we associate opposition to technology with individuals, right, and maybe with certain groups. But actually in the past, the state was actually very invested in trying to constrain the rollout and the adoption of certain technologies. Can you talk to us a bit about that and why there was that incentive to try to stop technological development in a certain period

of history. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. I think this is a very important shift that I think we see historically, and I would say kind of the shift really happens with the birth of capitalism. And people disagree over when exactly the birth of capitalism is, but I'm going to say late 18th century

in the Industrial Revolution. And that really is a shift, in my reading at least, is a really important shift that we see in the history of resistance technology. So before that moment, most often resistance to technology, so what I call technology activity, was sort of wielded by those in power. And that could be a religious elite, that could be a social elite, and that could be a political elite.

And so amongst that were sort of states who were particularly kind of the late medieval times, but still before the birth of capitalism, you actually had a lot of states, both on a kind of national level and on a local level. very strongly pushing back against specifically automation of labor tools, but also more generally particular kinds of technological innovations. And the reason why I mentioned that this in relation to capitalism is that within that period, the sort of dominant economic model was sort of mercantilism. And mercantilism is very much set up around, at least one of the key features, is that it's very, it wants to make sure that people stay,

in work and have stay employed because they were very afraid of of having a kind of insurrection happening and so resisting technology particularly technologies that would people would make people unemployed was actually a way of making sure that people were not left hungry on the streets and ready for an insurrection so actually so here like before the Luddites so before the birth of capitalism you have places like Hamburg in Germany where they did public of machines, like the state, the public burnings of machines, like, imagine this in 2026. Imagine a local council going, actually, we're going to set this data center on fire because

we're afraid that it's going to render people unemployed. So you had this. Maybe we're slowly heading back to that relationship. Maybe we are. Yeah, that's just one example of that kind of public burning. At some point, you even had an inventor that was being strangled and which was sort of by at least one archivist sort of read as actually ordered by a local government. So he had a really strong pushback against tech in that period.

And the birth of capitalism obviously came with a much sort of a tightening connection between on the one hand, obviously the new kind of capitalists, a new ruling class of capitalists who own the factories, who own the means of production, between them on the one hand and the kind of state on the other. So the birth of capitalism was in part a kind of illegal transformation whereby private property was really deeply sort of written out in law, wage contracts, like labor contracts, as we know them today, were really kind of, at least in sort of Western Europe, but really sort of written out properly at that time. So increasingly you get a very strong connection between the state and capital on the other hand. And that means that resistance to technology was no longer taken by the state because they had a benefit. They didn't see people losing their jobs as much as a problem anymore because they were much increasing on the side of capitalism and the capitalists.

And so at that moment, I think of that as a sort of first, the Luddites really is the first moment whereby resisted technology really becomes a matter of resisting power and power relations. a resistance against the dominant dress before, and I haven't talked about any of the other examples, but before even the kind of the examples I talked about with Hamburg, for example, in the sort of states and local states resisting tech, even before then as well, it was very much sort of religious communities saying these technologies have to be banned because it prevents you from properly praying and it makes you too proud and blah blah, blah, all these things. But so it's really kind of birth of capitalism that really, for me, at least, very much kind of moves us into a different kind of phase of technological resistance,

from a kind of weapon of power to a weapon of kind of resistance. Yeah, definitely. And I think I want to come back to the religious piece that you just touched on right there. But I want to stick with what you're talking about in this kind of transition, right, from mercantilism to capitalism and how that changes the relationship to technology. Because it really stands out then that if you look at the Luddites, as you're saying, these are people who are resisting technology and the state is really trying to repress that resistance, which is a real difference from what had happened before. But you also mentioned private property and kind of the property relation and how that develops through that transition and how that's

really key in redefining that relationship to technology and the state's role in relation to it. Could you maybe expand on that piece a bit, especially that property piece and how that's really key in that transition. Yeah, so with the birth of capitalism became an increased sort of ownership of the means of production within the hands of quite a small band of people, let's say in the case of the Luddai, it's the factory owners. And so resistance to technology, so for example, in the case of the Luddites, actually attacking machines became an attack on the property of the capitalists. and so it became, in purely legal terms, that was like, oh, but that is those tools, those machines are owned by a particular group and they're under attack by another group. So it was very easy to sort of draw a clear line, whereas before you didn't have that sort of mass organization of the economy around capital and around sort of private property of the capitalists in the same way.

And so you really see this and the French philosopher Michel Foucault really goes into sort of how the law sort of changed around that period to really present the worker as a potential predator, as a potential thief as well. And so, and that could be the worker as someone who might conduct sabotage, who might attack your private property, but also it might be someone who steals on the workflow, who takes things from you. And so you really see this sort of this much stronger, at least in legal terms, but also in wider kind of political terms, this really strong attack on the worker as a potential threat to private capital and with that to the sort of means of production. And I think you're right.

I think this is a really important shift in terms of understanding the history of this technology because it really becomes, you know, the Luddites is really the point at which it became a capital felony to attack machines. And lots of people, you know, got publicly executed, right? Lots of the lot of it's got publicly executed. They got shot as well. All sorts of things happen. And it's really like that was written, I think it's called the breaking frame or

the frame breaking act. It was really written in law that to attack a machine was to conduct a very, very serious crime. And that would have not been thinkable a century, two centuries before then, where there was a much more kind of protectionist. relationship between the kind of state and the worker. So yeah, I think you're right. I think this is really important to kind of keep in mind, particularly if we're thinking about the present as well, like who owns these tools today and what it means to resist these tools. Yeah, I think it was really fascinating to read that kind of distinction and that transition in your work to understand

how that was happening, right? Because, you know, many listeners will know the story of the Luddites, right, and how they did try to appeal to Parliament, and Parliament wasn't very interested. until the capitalist went to parliament and said, these people are breaking our machines, vandalizing our factories, and then all of a sudden, you know, the military was rolled out to deal with this, right? And so you could see the constituency that they were interested in. But then, I guess, looking back at the kind of mercantilus period, as you were talking about, you know, in that period the state was interested in keeping people employed.

But I guess, you know, the kind of actors were different too in that you had the kind of artisants and the guilds. And, you know, there's a very different kind of relationship to power and to production. I guess. And that is really important in understanding this shift, I guess. Yeah, I think it just reminds me that we have to keep thinking about the relationship between technology on the one hand, the state and capital on the others. And not just historically, because you're right, that relationship shifts will radically shifts throughout history and depending on when you're looking, which period you're looking at, which place you're looking at, but also in the present, right?

Different technologies will be situated differently within that, within that relationship. And then that means resistance to those technologies might look very differently, but also they might be repressed in different ways or to very different degrees. So yeah, I think that relationship is really important in terms of understanding where power lies, but also where the kind of space of resistance might be. Yeah, I think really well said. And just to pick up on that religious piece very briefly, you know,

I think people will be familiar with hearing kind of, you know, say the Catholic Church or something like that be warning people about using the internet or back in the 80s warning people about using personal computers, right? And how religious people should not be using these new technologies because of the simple nature of them or whatever. I'm not going to know the exact argument that was made. Can you talk about how that is distinct from the way that it would have been approached much further back

in kind of the history that you're talking about and the role that, say, the church and religious organizations would have played in suppressing technology in those periods? Yeah, so the period I look at is the kind of medieval periods of 12, 13, 14th centuries where the Christian church, both sort of on the fringes, but also very much at the core of the Christian church, there was a pushback against different kinds of technologies. Obviously, technologies around that time was not necessarily kind of automated machines.

It was more sort of like basic tools, whether it's used within architecture, arts, labor, things like that. One particular text I find really interesting by Pope called Pope Innocent the Third, who wrote a book, which I think is one of the best titles of book ever, which is on the misery of the human condition, which is just like, in which he just kind of goes through how everyone is miserable, not just the poor, yes, the poor and miserable, but the rich are also miserable, and everyone's miserable. It's a fantastic book. But anyway, within that book, he talks about the kind of futility of technological innovation in the face of kind of gold.

And one of the things that I've noticed within that particular text, but also within kind of very specific Christian orders, such as Cistercians and some other kind of groupings in the kind of continental Europe around the time, was a feeling that technology was a potential threat to God's civilization, whereby we as humans suddenly think that we can be creators. and as if the divine world isn't already perfectly created by God. And so it's a very religious argument against tech, right? And on the basis of that, there's a banning of certain tools. It was really seen as like the embrace of technology and specific tools was really seen as a sin, almost as a deadly sin. It was to become too proud. It was to embrace pride, you know, one of the sins.

Yeah, within that period, you really get this strong, kind of push back against various technological forms. I think this is really interesting because this is again similarly to the states that we talked about earlier. This was, in my reading at least, was a way for these communities for the Christian church to hold on to the religious power that they had, right? They wanted divine influence. They wanted divine rule. And so technology was seen as a potential threat with that. And we haven't really touched upon this. yet, but a key argument that I make in the book is that technological innovations offer altered what we think of is the properly human, or is the sort of the proper place of the human

in the world? And with these Christian communities, we see this very clearly. So the emergence of these technologies and the use of these technologies is seen as a threat to, you know, a Christian idea of the human, whereby the human is sort of subordinate to God. And within that, you have sort of priests are sort of like in between and other figures that are sort of in between, but it's a sort of threat to like the proper place of humanity within the divine cosmos. And I find that really fascinating. And I think we still see some of that today within or echoes of that. So I think, for example, when the Pope put out his sort of anti-AI statement, which I think is great, you know, I think it's interesting. But even within that, you see, you still see echoes of that whereby,

It's, yes, it's about big companies and, like, you know, he has some kind of like a very light touch anti-capital critique in there. I mean, very, very subtle. But it's also about kind of protecting a particular kind of religious way of life that they see, that he sees as potentially the threat through the introduction and the mass popularization of AI. And I think, you know, I think this is interesting because this allows us maybe to unpick some of these texts and pick some of these arguments and go, which of the. these do we actually want to follow? Which of these do we think problematic? I'm not saying that and here the religious critique of technology is bad, but I think there's often a kind of self-interest in resisting tech as there is in embracing tech. And I think we need to have tools. I need to do a lot of sort of self-reflection to think about why is it that I or someone else or a group is

pushing back against certain technologies? Because I think something I've sort of definitely seen in the last decade or so is that people I fundamentally disagree with resisting the same things that I might want to resist. So like, you know, you might have eco-fascist groups resisting modernization, full stop, wanting to return to trap for wives and traditional gender relationships. And so they might be critiquing the same thing that I might be critiquing, but for fundamentally different reason. I think the reasons are really important because the reasons give us a sense of what would happen if they were successful. And I think often with like the eco-fascists, they have only a very particular group of people in mind that they want to see benefit from their resistance to tech.

And I think this is, you know, this is an extreme example, but we might see sort of various versions of that in communities that maybe we are related to. And I think this is sort of, for me, kind of reading these histories, is sort of reminded to think carefully, is the resistance to tech a way of holding on to a particular power that you and maybe a particular select group of people have, or is it actually about universal emancipation? And if it isn't the latter, then we have some work to do. I think it's really fascinating that you bring that up, right? Because we certainly have seen, you know, a lot of far-right and fascist figures become increasingly critical of technology. And sometimes you do see kind of liberals and even people on the left, you know, occasionally kind

of give them credit for some of these arguments that they're making because of how they might align with, the types of things that we're saying about technology. But even when it comes to the Pope, right, and the Pope kind of putting out this encyclical on artificial intelligence, it really feels that at a moment where there is so much kind of incentive to adopt this technology, having this figure that is so prominent, that does have so much influence over, you know, a large number of people in our planet, that to have someone like that making arguments that at least have echoes of some of the kind of refusal that other people are hearing, it's like it feels like it's at least welcome, right?

Even if the motivations are not the same as the motivations that, you know, kind of we might have for wanting to oppose artificial intelligence or generative AI or what have you. But I also wonder, like, it seems like it speaks to the moment as I was asking you earlier about the fact that like refusal as an option feels like it's something that is becoming more common when you even have a Pope kind of like actively speaking out against artificial intelligence and people who are very secular and who would have never given much thought to the opinions of the Catholic Church on something, are saying, like, do we need to start taking the Catholic church seriously again?

Like, it feels like a really wild moment, right? Yeah, 100%. I think at a moment when the kind of cultural narrative, whether it's in our sort of within the media or within our own workplaces or if we're in school and our universities, wherever it is, when the narrative is so saturated with a feeling that you have no option but to move along with it, with AI specifically, to have someone come in and kind of break that narrative. Just like even if it's just literally one text dropped online and then the Pope never talks about AI again, even if that's the case, it feels, I think, for people like a kind of, it's almost like a

release valve. It's like, okay, it's sort of like, okay, we can have to breathe for a moment. Like this, temporarily at least the space has been created in which I no longer feel like I am fighting against this on my own. And I think in part, this is a failure of our, our failure to kind of collectivize technological critique in many cases, the fact that we need a very very, very, very, very powerful figure to come in and tell us, yes, you can keep resisting tech. That's great. And again, and I'm not saying that these things aren't welcome,

but I think there is something about, it tells us something about kind of where we're at, which is that we still very often feel and often is actually the case that we're kind of resisting these things on a very individual level, right? I do think this is changing to some degree. There's a lot of collective organizing beginning to happen, But I do think that's quite recent.

Yeah, and I want to pick up on what you're saying there about kind of the individual and the collective and that sort of thing, right? Because we've talked about the relationship to the state and of institutions and how that has evolved over time toward technology. But, you know, obviously when you get to the Luddites and you start to tell the history beyond that, you know, you mentioned Clodo earlier. We're talking a lot more about, you know, individuals and people being motivated against technology and what their motivations are. And so I wonder what you see and kind of how the approaches of people and kind of, you know, groups that come together to oppose technology, how that shifts over time and how motivations can be different in different moments. I think you're right to point out that there is a quite an insane level of diversity between some of these groups. We already talked about kind of religiously powerful groups, sort of deciding to ban particular tools in a monastery to ultra-level. leftist bombing computer companies in 1980s, France.

You know, very broadly speaking, they each have their own kind of critique of what is considered technology or technique, to use the ancient Greek word, around that time, what is sort of the artificial in that moment. From my understanding, I think 20th century was really the moment when we have to sort of further acceleration of capitalism and eventually kind of neoliberalism, the same way that sort of society, there's a sort of individual, visualization that takes place. Resistance often began to take that forum as well. So I think a lot of the resistance that we that we see, whether it's in terms of people kind of withdrawing into

anti-tech communes, to live there with 15, 20 people and sort of try and build a different lifestyle outside of kind of Western modernity or whether it's more just kind of in terms of, oh, how we're just technology is about whether you decide to use the computer or not. So I think there is a, the Luddai, sort of anti-thesis to that. Not just was it the workers coming together. You had it on a kind of wider societal scale that people were very supportive and were very vocal, which is why it became a real threat, right? It was not just these specific loom workers.

And in the beginning it was, but eventually it became much wider part of society. And I think, thinking in 20th century, that sort of became, it was a sort of individualization of resistance to tech that I think is inseparable from the sort of wider, have a relationship between the individual and society and capitalists, sort of European, Northern American sort of societies. I think what is unique

about our contemporary moment is the specifically really AI, just how many different people feel affected by AI and how, and why, and they have so many different reasons for wanting to negate

AI within their lives and the workflow, or on the work floor, wherever. And it goes from someone who feels like, oh, a data center emerging in my area is going to be really bad for my property values. So sort of like, you know, a petty bourgeois sort of like notion of like, okay, I want to be able to hold on to my private property

and it's a maximization of value to an environmentalist who might resist the same data center for fundamentally different reasons, to a worker who might eventually lose their job if these data centers keep being developed in the way of the being, developed and therefore automation of labor becomes even more sort of normalized and prominent. And that means we're no longer speaking just about kind of individuals. And I think what is interesting is that we do increasingly see people kind of linking up. We're not at the United States

but I think we are kind of moving beyond the sort of very individualists. Oh, I'm just going to decide to use JET or GBT or not. Surely people are, some people are still going to do that. and maybe the majority of people are not going to get actively involved with a collective struggle. But I think what is unique is precisely because it is so omnipresent, so many people feel affected by it, even if it's just sort of discursively for now, they feel like they keep just being told to use it, even if it's not yet threatening the current job that they have.

There is a sense that across the diversity, there's a sort of shared target. There's a shared object of critique, which kind of in my hope, at least, a sort of like might be a moment that which we kind of move away again from a sort of ego centered way of resisting tech towards something that's collectively

much more more intense and to go back to something I was saying about kind of eco-fascist that doesn't mean we need to sort of embrace everyone who has a shared target. We need to do careful work but I do think it means like for the first time in a long time we have a

something on which we can kind of build the wider, hopefully why the social movements. It is interesting to hear you describe that, though, right? The thought of there was this kind of collective movement in the time of the Luddites, and then things did get much more individual or, you know, kind of like, as you were talking about, the retreat into communes or these small groups kind of bombing computer centers or computer companies or things like that, which I guess we can debate the effectiveness of maybe, you know, whether they actually won things in the end.

Obviously, we know that the Luddites were crushed by the state. But maybe if we see people coming together more today, that maybe means that there's a greater chance of actually pushing back and resisting and kind of halting some of these technologies like artificial intelligence or hyperscale data centers. Yeah, I fully agree with that. And I think to the question of how effective these groups, so I think this is an interesting, I think this is an interesting, it's an important question. I don't give a sort of moral evaluation of different groups or even political evaluation necessarily.

of these different groups in the book, but I think what I like about those groups, even though they were very much on a kind of micro-level, the way which they were operating, is that within the kind of conditions that they were working, so let's say, Cloddle, they were able to get local and national press to discuss the arrival of computation at a time when the personal computer didn't even exist yet. So they were like, you know, between 1980 and 1983, they were active, like personal the computer either wasn't there yet at all or was just very slowly beginning to emerge. So at that time through the really radical acts of sabotage, they actually were able to get these things talked about. Even a decade before the kind of internet utopians came along in the 90s and

who were like, internet is just going to mean a decentralization for everyone and we're going to be able to avoid captured by the states and the market and we're going to have these amazing utopian kind of communes and I'm simplifying. But like before that kind of more positive utopian now, narrative, they were already saying, actually, computation is going to be a dead end eventually. They were looking specifically at the link between the computer and how it was sort of used by the state, by the military, and by the police. So again, very particular context in which they were active. But I think we also have to understand them as sort of pushing back against a moment on the left where the only people really who had a critique of tech were the communists, was a communist party.

And for the communist party, and I think this is still the same. for a lot of labor parties within various kind of contexts today, is that their understanding is just, oh, tech, if we have control of it, if it's publicly owned, and this would already be a more radical party. Most would just say we just need better regulations. Some might say it might need to be collectively owned or it might even have to be owned by the workers.

But there is an assumption there that once that's the case, we get rid of all the problems. And Clolo was saying, no, no, no, no, you've got this all wrong. Even if the workers have control of these tools, we're still going to have surveillance. We're still going to have all these other problems. We're still going to have these users within the military. We're going to still have all these problems. And I think this is something to think about for us as well, is sort of, you know,

how do we relate to arguments for not just reform, but also kind of, you know, these infrastructures becoming publicly owned. Is that where we want to draw a line? Maybe it is, but I think we need to think carefully about whether that's sort of our end goal, or do we have something even beyond that? Yeah, I find that that is still an issue today, right, when we have these discussions, especially on the left, where you do have this group of people who especially point back to Marx and say that we should want to kind of use these technologies, see the technologies develop,

because then we can seize them and use them for the benefit of workers, of the people, of whatever, right? And then this other view that I think is more represented by the things that I would argue the things that you're arguing that would say that, you know, we need to look much more closely at these technologies and not all these technologies can actually be seized for, for better ends or better uses, right? Whether that, you know, is the French Communist Party that was saying it back in the 1980s, you know, that we need to kind of use these technologies for good or we can use these technologies for good. Or even today where we have politicians like Bernie Sanders saying we should take half of the air.

AI companies into public ownership and people pushing back and saying, well, maybe the problem is not who owns the AI companies, but the tools themselves and what the technology is doing, right? Yes, I think this is important because it allows us to push back against this notion that these are just neutral tools that can be ceased and to put to any use. And I think this is philosophically and politically flawed because it assumes that you can just take a technology and cut off everything that sort of went into it originally and that keeps. feeding into it and you can just sort of take it out as if it's some sort of pristine kind of pure thing that can just become put to you somewhere else as if it's not going to bring all the baggage

along with it so for example you know we have to understand that um kind of computation and kind of infrastructures were originally military infrastructures right and so that doesn't mean that um you know that means that oh just putting the internet into the hands of just a wider population doesn't mean that you get rid of, let's say, the surveillance infrastructures that are part and parcel of the very functioning of these tools. This is why in the past pushed back against things like, oh, we just need to nationalize things like Facebook. And again, I get the impulse.

But then my second question is, like, what do you do about the inherent commodification of social relationships at the heart of these tools? What do you do with the fact that it's built upon and reliant upon surveillance infrastructures without surveillance mechanism? Like, it can't function. without the data capture, it can't function.

And so the question then is, do we need these tools? Do we need to abolish them? And then actually think about what would be a technological environment, a technological future that actually directly benefits us rather than just go, okay, let's just use what we've got and try and make to. And I think this is the speculative challenge, right?

What does it? And I end the book with a kind of an argument speculatively for like an abolitionist politics of technology, which is to try and find an outside to that reformist or just kind of communist argument for it, to go, you know, we need to ask the much bigger questions. And in order to be able to ask the bigger questions,

such as how can we make tech work actually for people, for the majority of not everyone, how can we actually make it work in favor of radical emancipation, how can we make sure tech is not reliant on extractivism and all those things, maybe we need to, you know, negate our current technological imaginations to even begin to think outside of our present. And this is, again, this is a difficult task. This is a complicated task that needs to be collectively kind of worked through.

But I think this is, for me, at least, the kind of the real challenge of our moments. How do we not fall into the kind of the easy answers? Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I want to pick up on something that you were saying a little bit earlier as we start to to wind down our conversation. In the book, you mentioned humanity earlier, right? And what understanding this history tells us about humanity or humans or, you know, about us, right?

You wrote in the book that this history of refusal actually helps us kind of understand ourselves, you know, as a whole better. How so? Like, how is that important? How is understanding our refusal to technology, something that actually helps us understand humans and humanity? So the way I approach this is by, so I understand both technology and resistance to technology as something that's more than about, you know, the question to use the technology to introduce it or to resist it

is about much more than just kind of practical questions such as, oh, is it going to make something more efficient or even more of questions such as, oh, do we actually, does this raise any like ethical issues or not for a particular group or not. I actually, what I've seen by going through the archives, is actually that the struggle for and a kind of against technology and everything in between, it often takes place on that almost philosophical level. And by that I mean that I mean that when a new technology is introduced,

it often challenges what in that moment are sort of dominant ways of understanding the human. So earlier I mentioned the religious groups, groups in medieval times. So their understanding of the human for that population was very particular. It was very much about the kind of modest position of the human and the faiths of the sort of all-knowing God. And so their technology becomes a potential kind of negotiation or threat or a challenge to that. And we see this throughout the history of technological refusal is that there is at least

impart this kind of philosophical battle that takes place, particularly when, like radically different technologies get introduced. And I think the reason why I think this isn't just a sort of intellectual academic exercise. For me, this is because this is a political question. Because being able to or settling on a particular definition of what it means to be human is a deeply political thing. So being able to say, for example, with AI, and this is a little bit of belief, but with AI that like AI obviously poses sort of threats to what we think of us as what it means to be human in the sense that it automates things, it's able to think something that both people

would think of as sort of uniquely a human capacity. Like a big part of that is that on the one hand, there's this argument that AI might be sort of kind of blurring the line between the human and the non-human, and that's a good thing. But actually, when you look more closely at like the AI Evangelist, actually what they have in mind is for a particular set of people, tends to be white men, to be the kind of the superior group collective within the world. they're the ones who don't have to deal with all the clever damage. They're not the ones having to do the extractivism in Congo.

They're not the ones who have to do all the brutal labor who have to deal with all these horrible effects. They themselves sort of prop themselves up as a kind of properly human as a sort of superior race. And I think this is really, this is why I think this is a political thing. So being able to propose by way of technology a particular idea of what it means to be human as a way of being able to devalue. And in very extreme cases, the dehumanization of a population is what lends itself to genocide, right?

We've seen this throughout history, see this today in Gaza, being able to portray people as other than human, whether it's animals, even objects. We saw this historically with slavery. The slave was, legally speaking, an object that allowed them to be treated like an object. So this philosophical kind of struggle

is a deeply political one. And I think this is what I sort of traced throughout history, how that struggle plays out. And again, this isn't just an intellectual thing. It's just about being able to understand what emerges with new technological innovations, but also particular ways of resisting it. And I think, you know, this is really important for me.

It doesn't mean, and we talked about eco-fascists earlier, eco-fascism has their own critique of technology, but there's a very specific idea of who counts as properly human. This, for me, is always a sign. If there's a very particular idea of what it means to be human and so many people fall outside of it, we probably have a problem. There's probably something deeply reactionary at play here. And so when we're thinking about our own ways of resisting tech,

we have to think about, you know, who's included, what form of humanity, who's included within our own understandings of the kind of properly human. And then part is philosophical conversation for philosophers, but it's also about everyday understandings of like, should certain people just be collateral damage? The people who just have to live next to the data center, like, oh yeah, they don't count as much. They just have to suck it up.

Or are the people working in horrible working conditions, you know, looking for rare materials, for Nvidia to be able to produce their chips? Like, all of that is tied up with these kinds of political and very philosophical questions, in fact. Yeah, who is actually included in these futures? who was allowed to, you know, reap the benefits of this technological marvel or whatnot

that the industry is trying to sell us, right? And that tells us a lot about their visions of what this future is, how it's going to work. Thomas, I just have one more question for you as we kind of close off our conversation. And that is very much about what we're seeing today, right? We've talked about it throughout this conversation. But how do you see this technological refusal evolving?

And what is the politics that you think that we should be holding toward technology today? So it's always a million-dollar question. Sort of like, what's the kind of way out? So I think the moment we're in today is quite an exciting one. So we've seen, for the first time, in a very long time, not just the white diversity of kind of groups and individuals, sort of deciding they want to take action against specifically AI,

but it's also just the level of intensity is novel. So the same extent that the kind of the push of AI is really, unique in terms of intensity, the level of resistance to it is equally unique. So I think this is a kind of, this is really, from that perspective, is really quite an exciting moment. And I think for me, kind of what comes next, I wouldn't want to sort of offer a blueprint or a predetermined set of like methods or practices even. But I think what I'm interested in is, I guess offering kind of tools or particular ideas to help us, maybe collectively decide how we might want to actually kind of continue the struggles that many of us are already part in Christa lot.

And one of the things that one of the source of inspiration I often go to is, it's the history of abolition. And so by abolition, I mean both abolition of slavery, slave trade, also abolition of prisons, family abolition, all sorts of kind of various versions of abolitionism. And what I find interesting about that is just the extent to which they're not. not happy with just going, oh, we're just going to, let's say, reform prisons so that they're a little bit humane. In fact, they're interested in undermining, undoing, the conditions that give rise to the prison in the first place, by which I mean, you know, the various economic, social, and political things that have produced in a world in which prisons in the way that they exist

today in the West are a thing. And so I learned from that a sense of bravery. to want to push beyond just minimizing our technological politics to just going, let's just make the horrible thing that we've got slightly better. Abolitionism, for me, is a way of breaking out of that. It's a way of breaking out of the present without necessarily immediately articulating what that future will be. But that's the sort of first move. And I think a second question that I always try and keep in mind when I'm thinking

about technological politics and how we can sort of keep pushing it towards, you know, emancipatory ways, is around that question of how do we make sure that our technological politics don't just end up reproducing a old, don't just end up kind of serving, again, a very select bunch of people. So if we're looking at AI, big tech, it's usually almost just a few dozen people who are radically benefiting from these technologies. So we need to make sure that a resistance to technology is the polar opposite of that, by which I mean it means to be radically democratic and needs to avoid reproducing a very narrow idea of which humans count within these narratives and needs to break out of these kind of categories that already exist. And I think

this technology is partially about sort of breaking out of these kind of fixed groupings that we've got. So I think those are some initial, I guess, tools questions that I think are important to keep in mind. I think generally speaking, it's about trying to. push beyond just, because we are at a moment, I think, when unique, radical things are possible. So I think really grasping that and really going, yeah, let's work towards a radically different technological imagination. Let's not reduce ourselves to just the sort of idealism that's reductive to, can we make sure that the data set is a little bit more representative of the wider population? Again, I get why people go down that route. But I think we are at a moment when

I feel like if we just reduce ourselves to that, we're just going to keep reproducing old problems that we've got. And with that, all harms, old violence, and so on, these are things that need to be kind of addressed at a much more radical, sort of profound foundational level. So, yeah, these are the kind of things that I think, hopefully also my book speaks to, to give some of these tools for thinking through a radical technological imagination.

Yeah, I definitely agree. I think that we're in a moment where like, there's a, there's a kind of hope that we haven't had for a different kind of technological politics for quite some time with the opposition to AI and data centers is just kind of taking advantage of it. You know, the book is fascinating. There's so many aspects of it that we couldn't get into just because there's so much in there. And I would highly recommend people go check it out to get more of that because I think it's exactly the kind of book that listeners of the show are really going to like and to enjoy and learn a lot from. Thomas, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. No, thank you. This was great. Thanks a lot.

Thomas the Kayser is the author of Technonegative, a long history of refusing the machines. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with the Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kylie Houston. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us and making a pleasure for your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.