Tech Won't Save Us - Why We Need a Luddite Politics of Tech w/ Gavin Mueller

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Gavin Mueller to discuss who the Luddites really were, what they can teach us about how we think about technology today, and why they show the need for a decelerationist politics of the future.Gavin Mueller is the author of “Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job.” He’s also a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine. Follow Gavin on Twitter as @gavinmuellerphd.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:An excerpt of Gavin’s book was recently published in Logic Magazine, and previously criticized fully automated luxury communism.Gavin recommends E.P Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class”Courts ruled that Uber drivers in the UK are workers, and Deliveroo couriers in Amsterdam are employees.Support the show

I think we're actually in a more Luddite kind of moment than we were a few years ago. Popular sentiment about technology in general, about Silicon Valley, in particular social media, has really turned. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Gavin Mueller. Gavin is the author of a new book from Verso called Breaking Things at Work, The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job. He's also a lecturer in media studies at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine. In this episode, we talk about Gavin's

new book and how it presents a different kind of politics of technology that is very much in line with the goals and the politics of this show. Gavin explains who the Luddites were and why they weren't just the anti-technology workers that is often associated with that word today. They saw how technology was changing their communities and the way that they worked in a way that diminished their skills, reduced their incomes, and changed their lives for the worse. And they didn't just start by smashing this technology. They tried other means to avoid what was happening but got no response. So naturally, they smashed the machines. And Gavin explains how this wasn't

just some event in the 1800s, but there have been similar movements and approaches to technology before and certainly far after them. And that if we want to think about how technology can serve the public good and create a better society for the working class, not just the billionaire class, then Luddite politics can provide a really important way of thinking about this. and create a better society for the working class, not just the billionaire class, then Luddite politics can provide a really important way of thinking about this. I say this to Gavin at the end of the interview, but I think our previous episodes with Aaron Beninov and Thea Riofrancos fit really well if you're looking for more episodes kind of in this vein that kind of look critically at technology and also present a different kind of future that we should be shooting for once we've recognized that technology isn't

just this kind of depoliticized positive thing that can be wielded in any way for any ends. And that maybe our ultimate goal shouldn't be to just continue on this capitalist treadmill of ever greater accumulation, but actually rethink the effects that capitalism and the way that capitalism has wielded technology has had on our societies and whether we really want to continue that in a socialist future. I had a great time chatting with Gavin, and I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. And obviously, I highly recommend picking up his book. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada.

You can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would like it. Every episode of Tech Won't Save Us is free for anyone

because the work that I put into making the show is supported by listeners like you. So if you like the show and want more critical interviews on technology and its impact on our world, you can join people like Will Crum and Andrew by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy the conversation. Gavin, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for reaching out. It's great to chat with you. With Silicon Valley gobbling up even more of the economy every year, to be a Luddite is assumed to mean that you are anti-technology or technophobic. It's an insult that any tech bro will throw at you if you criticize their latest stupid idea,

right? But in your book, you lay out what it actually means to be a Luddite and how that thought has influenced workers for more than two centuries. So to start, I wanted to ask you who the original Luddites were and what their motivations were. Were they just like against all technology as capitalists want us to think? Or was there something more that they were trying to get at? The Luddites were textile workers. So the UK had a large textile industry, and it was primarily done by people who were kind of skilled crafts workers in a kind of guild-like structure all through the North and Midlands of England. And we're talking about the Luddite movement. This has been going on for a while, but the Luddite movement comes to a head in the second decade

of the 19th century, which is actually globally a very tumultuous time period. So they were textile workers. They created textiles. They created some kind of articles of clothing. And, you know, the idea that they were anti-technology is kind of put to rest when you realize that to do the work that they did to spin and weave required, you know, what was for the time fairly sophisticated instruments. What they specifically opposed were new kinds of technology that sort of did an end run around the entire way that they had structured work in this industry. These new forms of doing their job, things like the gig mill that essentially relied much less on kind of skilled craft work, which could be substituted for unskilled labor, which really specifically at the time meant the labor of women and children

who could be paid much lower. And so this is actually what they were opposed to. They were opposed to this restructuring and these new technologies that they immediately realized posed a kind of existential threat. So if you were a textile worker at this time, you know, you weren't wealthy, you weren't an aristocrat, right? But you know, you had a decent living and the people around you, you know, tended to work in that industry. And they had, you know, strong and actually very vibrant communities. They had recognition from the British crown, which, you know, said, yeah, you have the right to kind of regulate your industry the way you want to do it. So as soon as these these new kinds of technologies come out that say, okay, well, we're not going to need your skills anymore. Instead, we're going to be hiring other kinds of

people and paying them much less. Their livelihood will be completely undercut, right? And their entire communities, not just individual workers, entire communities would be threatened by this. And so they had to stop this, right? If you're faced with an existential threat, you meet it or you cease to exist. And so they organized to prevent the advent of these new technologies that were kind of the sort of advance guard of a host of new kind of industrial technologies associated with the industrial revolution, associated with the factory system. So they're most famous for not just opposing the technology, but for breaking it, right? Smashing these machines, vandalizing factories. And justly so, that was kind of their most

historically remarkable kind of tactic and something they were quite successful at. But it's important to contextualize this. First, smashing machines was not the first thing they did. The first thing they did was they tried to work through legal means, right? As almost any kind of workplace struggle does, you know, you say, hey, like, actually, there are laws here, you know, you can't violate the laws, we had recognition from the crown, we're gonna go petition our members of parliament and say, hey, we can't do this, right? We're going to write you letters to explain the situation, right? It didn't work, though, because the global context of the time, the British crown, they're fighting wars across the world. They're fighting Napoleon in Europe. They're fighting the US in the New World. There's rebellions throughout all the colonies,

right? So this is a time of strife. Related to that strife is food is scarce. Basically, the empire doesn't have the time or the will to say, oh, yeah, let's pay attention to these weavers, particularly if the weavers are like, we're opposing the cheapening of textile work. So they just ignored them. And so they had to take matters into their own hands. And that's when the night raids begin, where they essentially would organize. Oftentimes, they would target factory owners who had already been approached to say, you need to shut things down. You can't do this. You're going to destroy our town, etc. The next step was, let's go and smash it. And this kind of accelerated to the point where

you had these kind of night raids basically almost every night where you'd have a band of Luddites who would go in and smash up all the equipment in a factory, and they kept targeting larger and larger operations. So the idea that they opposed technology is a bit of a misnomer, right? They opposed a particular kind of technology that was going to destroy their industry, restructure labor along much more exploitative lines. An underrated thing that the Luddites complained about was the quality of textiles that came out of these new technologies was far inferior to the work that they just true. Like the socks you would get out of these things, they would rip immediately. But that's not so much of a concern. If you're in power, you can, I guess, afford the good socks. But if you're in the British Navy, you're stuck with the new crappy ones. So they opposed like

the coarsening of the products of their industry and the overall kind of, you know, this kind of existential threat to their communities, right? Like if this industry goes, the towns will go. And in fact, that is what happened. You can read a book everyone should read. It's very long, though, so it's hard to put people up to this. But E.P. Thompson's Making of English Working Class, right? Very evocative descriptions of what happened in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. By some kind of more contemporary historical research, it seems that living standards, right, this is the other thing that the Luddites get sort of tarnished with. Well, you were holding up inevitable progress, right? Because this is like the opening kind of salvo of the Industrial Revolution, which, you know, we are taught in

school has given us all these great things. What do you want to go like, go back and like live in a cave or something? No, of course not. We have cars and computers and the internet and on all these nice things. And it's all because of the Industrial Revolution. Only a fool would have opposed that. So because they're kind of located in this early phase of that, it's easy to see them as, you know, this kind of retrograde kind of movement. But some people have kind of looked and said, well, everyone says, you know, industrial revolution, new technologies, okay, there were some bumps in the road, but living standards rose. And that's why, you know, global north is, you know,

has such high living standards, etc. But in the immediate aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, you actually had a decline in living standards for most people, by some accounts, two generations. So it's not like people were, I don't know, if someone told me, like, well, it's going to suck for you. It's also going to destroy your kids' lives. But your grandkids, well, we could be talking about a different situation. I don't know, it would be hard for me to kind of assent to that, right? I would probably say, you know, not really convinced by that argument. I think I might choose to oppose this. And that's what the Luddites did. And I think that, you know, you can look at it and say they were completely justified in what they did. And what I try to do is go a little bit further than that and say that

the values that they stood for, once we can clear up some of the kind of pejorative myths about the Luddites and kind of understand them in their specificity and in their particular context, there are actually lessons that we can learn, not just to take kind of Luddite strategies wholesale, but we can actually see a lot of the motivations that the Luddites had for doing the things that they do are things that color contemporary labor struggles. The idea that you need autonomy over your work, that that gives you a kind of power and control. And that's also linked not just to conditions when you're on the clock, but the conditions of your life and your entire community, I think is absolutely relevant kind of takeaway

today. And I think I'm also keen to liken it to the Luddites because I think we're actually in a more Luddite kind of moment than we were a few years ago. But you can see how this idea of technological progress is often kind of leveraged against labor struggles, right? You know, oh, you're holding back progress. Unions are only trying to protect their members at the cost of like larger societal benefits. These are still arguments that people make, particularly coming from, you know, Silicon Valley and other kind of advanced technology sectors. So I think that there's also a kind of lesson that we can take from that. And that we, if we see the Luddites not as this kind of retrograde movement that we have to kind of, you know, scorn, but actually perhaps part of a longer tradition that we can see ourselves taking part in, that we can learn from that.

And we can also have a kind of, I don't know, historical courage. But I know I always I think it's really important for people on the left, particularly in our current moment, where a lot of our, we've had a lot of our history taken from us, right? In part, because labor struggles were defeated and were very submerged for a long time, including arguably to this day, but also, you know, through education and through other things. So it's really important that we see ourselves not just struggling in our current condition, but part of a larger historical trajectory, right? And I do think that one of the goals in this book is to kind of assert that there's a longer tradition here of people opposing technology in totally justified ways from the perspective of workers. Absolutely. And, you know, I think you've described who the Luddites were and what

their motivations were really well there, and also kind of shown how that is applicable to the modern day, right? I think a lot of people listening, as you described, kind of the experiences that they were going through, seeing their kind of communities and their way of life change in order to serve these companies at the time and, you know, the new industrial processes that were being put into place can really see how that is still relevant today with how things have been changing in our communities for a number of years now, in particular, you know, in recent years with implementation of these new technologies in the workplace. But I want to kind of veer off from this history for a minute to kind of dig into what is motivating this and how we should

understand it, right? Because I feel like, you know, obviously, this is a left wing podcast. And there's this notion that Marx wrote about technology and Marx was this technological determinist who believed that we needed to kind of integrate all these new technologies. And that was kind of the path toward a communism at some point down the road or something, right. But in the book, you argue that one of the goals that you want to achieve is to show that, quote, to be a good Marxist is also to be a Luddite, end quote. And so I was hoping that you could kind of explain the different interpretation that you give of Marx's work and how that shows that Marx had a different perspective on technology than I think is the more commonly accepted idea that we have. I think Marx's overall perspective on, you know, what's the role of technology in class struggle,

right, is somewhat ambiguous. He does have these moments. And I think there's a lot of good research coming out that really does, like they're retranslating Marx, going back to the manuscripts and really sifting through. And they are kind of uncovering, I think, what I think is someone who is, you know, brilliant, but far less dogmatic, and someone whose ideas changed as they analyzed, you know, one of the most tumultuous centuries of human existence, right? How could it not if you were like a good intellectual? So you do have moments in Marx where he does seem to kind of suggest that, okay, technology advances due to various dynamics, laws of motion of capitalism, and that this creates some kind of potential for the abolition of class society, right? And often this is understood in terms of, you know, technology creates a material abundance,

right? This is the argument of fully automated luxury communism, right? That we need abundance. You know, it doesn't make sense to like share scarcity. We need to share abundance. Incidentally, this is also the argument of the Chinese Communist Party, right? They're like, we're, you know, when people say you're capitalist, they say we're capitalist for a reason, because we're building socialism.

We have to get people out of poverty. I mean, there's a logic there, right? But I think there's another part of Marx, right? If you read Marx as like some kind of theorist of abundance, and that's his approach to technology, I don't think that's really the kind of object of most of his research. The object of his research is is what is it going to take for human beings to come together to abolish this very particular kind of economic system that has very particular kinds of features, right? So he's interested in class struggle, right? And the

struggle that overcomes this mode of production. And so if you look at his commentary, right, we can look at like the Communist Manifesto, where he's like extolling the bourgeoisie, oh, that's wonders greater than the pyramids, right? He wrote this when he was 30. He wrote this like during a revolutionary ferment that ended up, you know, not really working out. In many ways, right, his work after the manifesto is like coming to terms with, well, we were actually kind of wrong in some things, you know, why didn't it work out? If you look at his more mature work, you see that he starts entertaining ideas like, well, you know, there's other things, other places,

other ways to kind of conceptualize it. I mean, the value of capitalism in creating a potential for the abolition of class society, from my reading of Marx, is not so rooted in abundance. It's rooted in how capitalism brings workers together in a particular way so that they can conduct a particular kind of social activity. But we can also think about ways that technology is quite hostile to people coming together and in particular social formations that give them a kind of power, right? So yeah, on the one hand, we have a moment where people come together. They're, for instance, working as part of like a larger kind of logistical supply chain. So in that sense, their work is socialized. They're literally like in the same

boat. They have nothing except their labor to sell. So they have a kind of commonality there. Right. These for Marx are all conditions for creating like a really viable and powerful kind of class struggle? And if that's our way of thinking about things, then it's completely within our purview to say, actually, there are many technologies that seem quite hostile to this. If you look at, I can only imagine you have contemporary research on the gig economy, right? This is where jobs have been created. The past decade of job creation has largely centered in these extremely precarious platformized gig economy jobs, right? Uber and Deliveroo and the like. And one thing that researchers continually come back to when they're looking at what's

it like to work in this economy? And what are the issues that workers face in improving their conditions is that the technology separates them, right? There's no common shop floor. It's just them with their phones. You know, workers do find places to kind of gather, right? And ways to come together both socially and politically, right? And that's also become an important component of this kind of research. But it seems clear to me that the technology, probably deliberately so, is creating impediments to what in the past were kind of avenues for workers to take to come together and advocate for their collective interests. These new technologies and the new way they're arranged prevents that. And I think that,

well, I think that Marx would agree with me. You can also look at like the very late Marx. Related to this, right, is this idea that, you know, capitalism, the kind of necessary phase that we have to travel through, right? Like, it's kind of like what they told the Luddites, right? Well, it's not going to be so great for you, but give it time. We're growing the pie, a rising tide will lift all boats, whatever, you know, cliche you want to deploy, right? They basically, that was the argument. Even Marx kind of says that at a moment in Capital. He's like, well, they were breaking the machines.

That wasn't so smart, was it? So this is also a kind of, you know, justification. Like, we need to let certain capitalist dynamics play out because they're actually creating the conditions for socialism, like like right under our noses. Don't get me wrong, Marx, you know, that is something he writes about quite a lot. But in his late life, in his late work, he starts getting interested in, you know, maybe that's not the case. He's getting reports from places where industrialism has not really taken hold. Right. Such as the Russian Empire. And people are saying, look,

we've got these peasant communes where like workers, like work together, they have a kind of collective social power, they're politically active. What do you think? Could socialism come out of this? Because it's not really capitalist, it's not industrialized, right? And Marx is like, I don't know that that's pretty interesting. And he starts he's like starts teaching himself Russian, you know, at the end of his life, you know, may we all be so ambitious. So he can study this because he thinks there's actually potential there, right? And he's writing to the people who are writing to him. And he's like, you know, sounds quite fascinating. And maybe there's no necessary stage to go through. And so I think that this is this is the the Marx that I advocate for, not necessarily a kind of

techno skeptic Marx,, but certainly a Marx whose priority is what are the conditions for creating like a viable revolutionary class struggle, right? And a Marx who is not wedded to this kind of crude stagism that he was in his earlier days when he's still trying to kind of emerge from this like, you know, much more sort of Hegelian kind of structure. I would say maybe his later work, he's almost like kind of post-structuralist in that way. He's like deconstructing this idea, right? There's not a teleology there, right? History is much more contingent than he thought in his early days, right? So that's the kind of marks that I want to try to retrieve in the book, right? One that is,

you know, the purpose of studying capitalism is not to predict some kind of inevitable endpoint. The purpose is to say, here's like the terrain of our struggle. Here are the laws of motion. Here are the contradictions. And we have to study that because this is where the struggle will happen. And if we want to, you know, be good tacticians and good strategists, we have to understand that, right? And one thing I do is I go through the history of Marxist movements, and I try to identify where they weren't so good at that, right? They did kind of rely on a crude kind of stagism, you know, socialism is inevitably emerges out of capitalism, we have to kind of go through in this particular way. Technology is a part of that. You know, I think that that was ultimately

it did not work out. Well, clearly it didn't work out. We're not living under socialism today, but it was a theoretical mistake that led to strategic and tactical mistakes that I think that we need to learn from and take a different approach into the future. Yeah, no, I think that's a fantastic point. And I want to return to what you said about, you know, the gig work and how that allows for even greater control and kind of breaking up the ways that people work to make it difficult for them to organize and actually push back, right? But what you're describing here, and especially, you know, what you were just saying about how some Marxist movements may have made mistakes in imagining the right way forward, right,

the right way to socialism, I feel like that kind of resonates with what you were writing about Taylorism and the implementation of Taylorism, you know, through the 20th century. In particular, you know, I found it interesting that, you know, workers were in the factories or in their workplaces kind of opposing the implementation of these Taylorist ways of work, which kind of, you know, radically changed how work was performed, you know, by breaking up the various tasks of work and making it so workers had less time to kind of slack off or have any leisure or enjoyment of their work. And you write that Marxist groups,

a lot of unions, even the Bolsheviks were in favor of implementing these Taylorist practices because they believe that that was key to kind of creating the productive forces to kind of move toward, I guess, a later stage, right? Whereas the workers were opposing a lot of these things being implemented. So I wonder how you see that divide between various groups who are not necessarily on the shop floor themselves and then the people who are actually doing this work and who are saying, like, you know, this is terrible. Like, why are we allowing this to happen to our workplaces and to our work? Yeah. You know, my overall approach is you always want to pay attention to what workers are saying and what workers are doing, right? My position as an intellectual is not to tell people what to do. If you want to be like a socialist intellectual or a left intellectual, you do have certain

responsibilities, right? You shouldn't sort of disavow, you know, your role. But you have to say, like, if the goal is a kind of liberation from below, then how are you going to go about that without knowing the precise kind of needs and wants and interests of those people that you claim to speak for? So what's interesting is this idea of Taylorism, right? So this is the origin of scientific management, which was in its initial conception by Frederick Taylor, an instrument of class struggle, not a technological innovation, right? His big problem, as you mentioned, was that workers weren't working hard enough. He called it soldiering. They would control their own pace of work. They would take

smoke breaks. They'd have downtime. And the reason they had all these things is because at the time, it was not that common for management to really have a comprehensive understanding of the productive process. So they would employ workers and say, you need to bake these things, you need to do it. But they didn't actually know how it was done. They had to rely on the knowledge of the workers to get it done. So the workers said, okay, fine, we'll do it. But we can control the pace of work, we can have all this other control over the sort of day to day, hour to hour, minute tominute kind of way of life. And it was Taylor's goal was to stop that, right?

And the way that he found to stop that was, yeah, you isolate tasks and you make sure that none of the workers have that comprehensive understanding. He thought that was part of the problem. They know too much and management knows too little. So he wanted to kind of reverse that kind of state of affairs so that management would possess exclusive comprehensive knowledge and workers would be kind of stuck on a particular task and not really understand how everything fit together because that was a way to disempower them. And once you disempowered them, you could force them to work harder or work for fewer wages, et cetera. Technology was absolutely a part of this because you can start arranging workers in ways that keep them bound to a particular station, doing a particular repetitive

task. Taylor himself didn't really come up with a lot of advances in that. That would come along with the second generation of scientific management, which was actually much more scientific than Taylor. He was actually kind of making stuff up a little bit. And Henry Ford was kind of the hero of that advance. So this is important or interesting for a few reasons, because as you know, right, like this is clearly like this kind of weapon of class struggle. So when you have like successful socialist revolutions or potentially successful socialist revolutions, they're thinking about this, you know, they're thinking, wow, there's this is the politics of work, where do we stand on this? And there's actually a fascinating debate in the Soviet Union, because there were people who were like, we can't do Taylorism, because that's clearly like, bourgeois science, like, it's going to

disempower workers, and we're not for that, right? You know, you have this kind of moment in the few years after the revolution, where there's quite a lot of really interesting debate and experimentation in the Soviet Union. But ultimately, those voices lost out. And it was the Taylorists who made the case, look, we have to develop, we have to develop quickly, we don't have a lot of time to think about alternatives, we know we can increase productivity through these means. So we just got to copy what the capitalist world's doing. And yeah, we can kind of justify it with this kind of stagious Marxism kind of thing. And so that's what they did. And, you know, if you think that one of the problems of the Soviet Union

was there emerged a division between the people running the state and the masses of people doing the work, which, you know, I think is a compelling criticism, then you can see it actually happening right at this point where they're like, look, we have to divide management and labor. And people rebelled, you know, just as they did in the US when Taylorist methods were implemented, workers rebelled. In the Soviet Union, they rebelled as well. You had people who fought a brutal war and had terrible experiences. And their whole idea was like, we are sacrificing to build socialism. And then they find themselves in these situations where they're being crushed. They were not happy about it, right? So it's a fascinating moment. And I think there's another kind of contemporary takeaway. I think you see

there's a lot of hype kind of in the 70s through the 90s that like work was being restructured in various ways. We were going to get away from this kind of strong hierarchies in the workplace. We're going to try to enliven work because workers were feeling like super alienated. And this is mostly rhetorical rather than practical. There were a few experiments, right? But it leads to this idea that work is not like that anymore, that work is more creative, self-motivated, etc. But I think a lot of work, when it comes down to it, is still quite tailorized. Like these dynamics of separating you, taking away your autonomy by

giving you less control, by preventing you from understanding how work is done in a comprehensive way, by socially isolating you, by speeding up your work so that you are more productive, that profits your employer and not you. All these dynamics are absolutely contained here. And I think one really important one is surveillance. The whole premise of Taylorism is that you observe the work process so you know exactly how it's done. And then you can restructure it away from the workers. I don't have to kind of explain. Everyone knows our digital environments are utterly saturated with surveillance. And this is really, you know, we talk a lot about, oh, it's a threat to privacy. It's a threat to activists working under police state conditions.

And that's very, that's all true. But what's also true is that the information gathered, all the data gathered from this massive kind of surveillance project and project of datification is also being used to rationalize digital environments, the same environments that we find ourselves working on, particularly in this pandemic moment where, you know, overnight, you know, millions of people are now primarily, you know, working on their computers. So these dynamics are still present today. And I think it's really, really important to understand that and also to understand that surveillance isn't like whenever I teach media studies, you know, digital media studies, of course, we talk about surveillance and, you know, you reveal like what information

is collected on you. And the first thing the students say is, wow, that's so creepy, right? They get creeped out. Someone's looking at me. Someone's thinking about me. Actually, no one's really thinking about you. The threat there is the aggregation of that that's used to restructure the environments that we're within, right? Every time they do a site redesign on Facebook or Instagram or something else, it's not to make it nicer for you. It's to extract more from you and to make your time on there more valuable and to give you less of an idea of how things actually work. These are very opaque environments. One thing people always complain about is, I know there's an algorithm there. I have no idea how it works. And it causes a lot

of problems for me. So these are very tailorized environments in a way. So I think it's really significant to kind of recalibrate how we're thinking about not just the history of technology and work, but also thinking about this contemporary issue of surveillance. I'm eager to kind of push that into thinking about the politics of labor as well. Absolutely. You know, I think that's such an important point, and it reveals so much about how the technologies that are promoted as being kind of this liberatory force that is giving us all this freedom actually have these attributes that allow them to be used against us for control and surveillance, as you say, right? And so you argue in the book that technology, quote, often plays a detrimental role in working life and in struggles for a better one, unquote. And so because that

allows, you know, an accumulation of wealth and power that can then be used against workers and the rest of society, right? In the same way that you describe how that works with, you know, the algorithmic work that we're seeing with gig platforms or in the Amazon warehouses, or even, you know, how so many of our communication networks these days are designed. And so you describe how a lot of the technologies that we use today are the product of military research that were then commercialized for consumer and labor purposes, right? So do you think that understanding those origins of the technologies and where they're designed and kind of the original incentives

behind their design is important to understanding, you know, how they are actually used when they get implemented in these other spaces across society. To some extent, I think the most important thing is to really understand like the workings of where we are right at the current moment. I think there can be a kind of tendency that is as misleading as it is elucidating when you do these kind of like long view, right? So you can like look at like, okay, so like cybernetics, right? Is this kind of Cold War era? It's not really science. It's kind of a mishmash of things, but they had a lot of money to work with and they came up with some things that work. So this idea of cybernetics is like at the heart of the digital, right?

Of computation, of algorithms, etc. And cybernetics is essentially our informational output will be fed back into the system. And the overall goal of the system is a kind of homeostasis, right? A kind of stability. So you can look at, for instance, there's this French ultra- leftist group called Takun. And a lot of their stuff is interesting. You know, I don't say I'm not saying don't read it. They wrote this track, like the cybernetic hypothesis that, you know, sort of starts with that and then says, see, that you kind of get in the realm of like, it's like the original sin, or it's like a conspiracy, right? That the military did it, US military invested in it, gave it the money. Therefore, anything that comes out of it is like directly related to US military concerns. I just don't think that's accurate, I mean, one thing I do talk about is the idea of automation, that we have to have technology doing more of the labor process and people having less power over that. I do talk about it being driven by military needs, particularly during World War II and the immediate aftermath, where it was actually a high point in labor struggles for a variety of reasons. And the reason I bring that up in the book is because what I want to push against is the idea that automation and scientific management and all these things are really about creating more efficient, productive systems, right? Okay, maybe it's, you know, annoying some workers or something,

but it's rationalizing it, it's becoming more productive, and that's good. Well, if you actually look at the history of industrial automation, it was driven by military productive, and that's good. Well, if you actually look at the history of industrial automation, it was driven by military funding, and they were not really that interested in efficiency, right? Because it's the US military, they essentially have an endless budget. They're not concerned about making profit in this like direct sense at all. What they're concerned about is predictability, right? And firm hierarchies, everyone knows where they're supposed to be and how things are going to go. And they're also fighting a massive war and they need like X number of bombers at this point in time.

This becomes a problem if you have a wildcat strike every other day at the factory. So investing in automation, and the Air Force was the main proponent of this, is not a way to make these airplanes cheaper, right, or to produce them more quickly or something. It's a way to make sure what these wildcat strikes stop disrupting the orderly production of weapons, right? So this is like, this is, I think, the main point of that, of kind of telling that story, right? But also, I think we want to keep in mind, right, that like workers are not just fighting against like their managers or their bosses, right? There's also nations are very interested in their economies, to put it in like the most like basic way, right? So they're directly interested in this. And they

are generally, you know, states are contradictory social formations, but the history is that state power has been used against workers in these situations, right? And so that's the other thing I want to keep in mind is that if we're thinking radically, right, we have to think about the state as well. And its role in this whole thing is to push these kinds of technologies of control. A lot of the liftoff in computation is also related to war making. And I write about in the book, the use of computers in the Vietnam War is where computers start becoming politicized in this way.

They weren't surveilling the population. They weren't really doing a whole lot in the workplace. It was starting, but we hadn't seen full-scale reorganization yet. But what it was doing was the war effort was going to be a datafied war, it was gonna be a war based on like scientific information. And in part, that's because it was a war that was being run by someone who comes out of industry, right, rather than like someone who's schooled in the military, the art of war. So the state and the military are part of this story, right? And I think that's also important to consider, like, it's easy to kind of, you know, read a lot of labor history and not really think too much about the military in all of this.

With a longer purview, you actually see that important moments of implementation of new forms of technology are actually done sometimes quite literally at gunpoint, right? So that needs to be a part of the story. And we also need to think about if we're thinking about, you know, what are the impediments to kind of social liberation and a greater autonomy at work? You know, the state sometimes can be a friend, you know, if you can rely on labor laws and things like that, but it's often not so helpful. And I think that's kind of, I wanted to put that on the radar. No, absolutely. So I wonder what you make like of how things are going in the present day,

right? Because on one hand, we have, I would say this dominant ideology that technology is giving us all these freedoms and new conveniences, et cetera, et cetera. But on the other hand, when we look at how technology is actually implemented when it comes to work, obviously the gig workers are the best example of this, the Amazon warehouses,

but just in general, there's this kind of use of the new technologies that have, you know, kind of arisen because of the internet and the digital revolution and whatever to increase surveillance at work, increase control at work and reduce the kind of autonomy of the worker even further. Like, you know, when you're talking about Taylorism and even all the way back to what the Luddites were experiencing, like it feels like there are certain parallels that can still be drawn to what's happening now, like these similar processes are still being carried out just in, you know, slightly different

kind of ways. So I wonder, you know, obviously, what you make of how these technologies are being implemented, and how this kind of general narrative of technology kind of is divorced from how this is being experienced by a lot of workers. I think one thing that's encouraging is that, you know, I started this project a few years ago. And over that time, I think that popular sentiment about technology in general, about Silicon Valley, in particular, social media has really turned. Fewer and fewer people are inclined to see like Mark Zuckerberg as, you know, some kind of like boy genius hero. Instead, at best, he's a Dr. Frankenstein whose monster has gone out of control. And at worst, he's like an evil, anti-democratic, you know, supervillain,

right? And these opinions are more and more widespread, you know, in particular after Brexit and the election of Trump, where social media and the internet is kind of credited with those victories, you know, right or wrong. It's a kind of general sentiment that I think you're seeing. You're also seeing, I think, a much wider understanding of the problems of work, and in particular, the problems of these new forms of work in the gig economy or the platform economy that are essentially like one of the more visible kind of technological changes in the world of work in the past decade. So I think that popular sentiment is becoming more Luddite in some ways. That doesn't necessarily mean to like great outcomes.

And we still see some issues there, right? So if you think about Prop 22 in California, where it was enshrined by a ballot initiative, meaning this was taken to the voters, right? They voted on this directly, whether or not gig economy workers were employees. And if they're employees, if you're an Uber driver and you're an employee of Uber, which you are currently not, although it's changing quite rapidly, but you are currently not, that means Uber has many fewer obligations to you and you have fewer rights to things like unemployment and other kinds of benefits. Right. So the voters like overwhelmingly said that now they're not employees.

Right. Keep them in this kind of precarious status. And I think we haven't really gotten to the bottom of why that is. But I think it does illustrate. And yes, you know, these companies had like an unprecedented kind of propaganda campaign, spent a lot of money. But this is looks like at least with the US labor market could be a disaster, not just for people in the gig economy. But if this idea of workers being reclassified as independent contractors, that could spread to many other industries, and that that would be a catastrophe, right. And so we see that there's still, I think, it's very uneven. And that, you know, part of what these gig economy companies do is they ask you to treat yourself as, you know, as a consumer and in part, as purely as, you know, someone who just

wants to get their food delivered or get a ride to the bar. And they encourage you to do that in all sorts of ways, right? Like, you don't have to talk to those people. You just interface with your phone, right? Like you're just talking to, you know, anonymous technology, right? You can sit quietly in that Uber, you never have to say anything to your delivery rider or anything like that to cut you off. So you don't feel like those struggles affect you. And I think that's something we have to think about. That said, you know, that was a few months ago. In the past week, we've seen in the UK, they've said actually the opposite, right? They've ruled that Uber drivers will be classified as employees. We had a similar ruling actually right here in Amsterdam, where I live, for delivery riders. And that will probably have repercussions

throughout the EU. So I think one terrain that we can look at, you know, I just criticized the state, but it's a terrain of struggle, right? It's not something to be taken as, you know, it's always the enemy. And in a moment of time where, you know, labor is not in a very strong position, resting upon these regulations when we can, I think is useful. And we need to fight those battles because we didn't win in California, but we have won some and that can really change people's lives for the better. You know, I think that's one promising arena. But I think the thing that we really have to do is we have to start understanding what else workers are doing. You see, I see some really nice stuff from there's a group of researchers and writers in the UK, notes from below, who are really taking it upon themselves to actually try to research the experience of work in this contemporary economy to really understand not just what workers want, but of resistance they're developing, what kind of solidarities they're developing. One of the reasons I think the Luddites are relevant is not just because they're cool and interesting and they smash new technology and we should too, although,

you know, sure. But they were also conducting their activity at a particular moment where they didn't have the infrastructures of unions or welfare states to draw upon, right? They had to fight in the best way they could. They couldn't have organized a sit-down strike in the manner that people would decades later, because they hadn't composed themselves as a class that way. That's not how the economy was structured at the time. And I think if we think about our moment of neoliberalism as essentially destroying things like the welfare state, ripping up labor laws and labor regulations, making it much more difficult for unions to do anything, and overall crushing

them, so we have extremely low unionization rates, then yeah, we are going to have to start looking at other means to struggle, means that might look like the Luddites, not necessarily that they're taking a big hammer to a big machine, but in that they are developing strategies and tactics that might not always be totally legal, right? In fact, there's some really interesting research coming out about effective labor actions that are legal. There's always a kind of border, right, an edge that violates certain kinds of laws, right? So if you actually believe in any kind of worker activity, you have to be a little bit flexible on this. So we need to be alive to these kinds of things, because we're in a moment, even with a kind of tech lash, right, people being much more skeptical of technology than I think they were even five or six years ago, we still haven't really developed the kind of strategies and tactics that we need to organize ourselves effectively, and also to breed the kind of militancy that we need. I mean, my goal, I would love for Uber drivers to be classified as employees, but that's not my end goal, right? If we are serious about creating an egalitarian future, or perhaps any future at all for the vast

majority of humanity, then it cannot be a capitalist one. And capitalism is not going to go away on its own. People have thought that it would many, many times, and they've always been disappointed. And I'm not content to sit around and wait. So we need to think about how we can develop that kind of militancy as well. And I think that you develop that kind of militancy by thinking about observing, cultivating these kinds of militant practices on the shop floor, forging solidarities. The Luddites were very good at solidarity. They'd smash a factory up, and then the authorities would come in to hundreds of people in these towns,

and no one would talk. They had no witnesses. So they created really remarkable solidarities that allowed them to be more assertive. And I think that those are the kinds of things that we need right now, whether it's to abolish capitalism or even just to simply have the basic protections that workers had a generation or two ago, it's going to require a hard fight. So I think this is one reason that I wrote this book is because I think that the tasks right now, I mean, are very granular, right? In some ways, they're small scale. We have to really start like at the shop floor, at the workplace, starting from like basic militant practices of what are people doing and how are they organizing themselves? And then kind of thinking about how we kind of enlarge that and scale that up.

There's been many attempts in the past five years to kind of, you know, sort of speed run to social democracy through the electoral system. And it's, you know, sort of speed run to social democracy through the electoral system. And it's been very encouraging, right? I mean, it was like unimaginable to me, you know, like a decade ago that everyone my age and younger would be a socialist and socialist political candidates and all of this in the United States of America. I mean, wow, that's amazing. And yet, we're also seeing the limits of that kind of activity, right? And I'm not opposed to it by any means. Again're also seeing the limits of that kind of activity, right? And I'm not opposed to it by any means. Again, this is the state is a terrain of struggle,

sympathetic politicians are valuable, and yet it's not going to be enough, right? We're seeing how it's already kind of topping out at a certain level that's not close to enough. And so I think we need to sink deeper and develop a much more kind of radical and militant kind of strata that can lead to more ambitious challenges at the level of the state. And so that's another kind of, that's what I feel like our contemporary moment is. And how we get there, I think we have to start where we are. And by that, I mean, we have to start looking around us, where we're working, what does it look like? What are these technological apparatuses? How do they work? And what do they do? Who are the people around us who are allies, right? Because we can't do it individually, right? I'm critical of people who say, just quit Facebook,

or just use a dumb phone instead of a smartphone. That's fine. If that's your choice, you know that fine, that's great. But that's not going to create like large scale social change. And those are the kinds of things I'm interested in. And so for me, it's a book that's not always about giving answers, right? It's a book about saying we have to like open up questions that we thought were settled, because they weren't settled, or they were settled in a way that didn't work out. And so we have to reopen a lot of these questions and reopen some of these debates. And so to me, that's maybe the way the book is pitched, right? It's not what to do necessarily, but the kinds of questions to ask. You know, you're talking about how the book doesn't necessarily have answers, right? But you

do also kind of give us an idea of what a kind of vision of the future or a politics of the future that's influenced by Luddism could look like, right? I'll quote here. You write, the radical left can and should put forth a decelerationist politics, a politics of slowing down change, undermining technological progress and limiting capital's rapacity, while developing organization and cultivating militancy. And obviously, that is quite different from some of the other visions of the future, some of the other left wing visions of the future that we've had in recent years, right? As you talked about earlier, the fully automated luxury communism

that kind of says, let's seize these capitalist technologies, use them to produce abundance, and that is our road to communism, right? But I think what you are laying out here, these kind of Luddist politics for a future is a very different vision of what a future society could look like and what kind of ideas are influencing the way it would look. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. What would this Luddist future look like? And most importantly, how does it allow workers to live a better, more fulfilling life? Yeah, I think one thing that really kind of started me in this project was thinking about kind of what was then called accelerationism, or now is fully

automated luxury communism, or the People's Republic of Walmart, and really thinking that that didn't seem like socialism, right? It just seemed like capitalism, but like nicer, right? You know, socialism is a different mode of production, right? Would be a very different way of living than capitalism. And I really think we have to take that seriously. So one thing I advocate is we need to think about not accelerating, but decelerating. Part of the problem that we're having, one of the challenges of political organizing is the terrain is constantly shifting under our feet, politically, socially, and technologically. And so, you know, we're constantly caught, you know, fighting last year's battle or the battle from five years ago. So we need to advocate for things like

slowness, right? There is a slow movement. It's pretty bougie. It's very lifestylist. But I think as a kind of structure of feeling, right, it speaks to something that I think a lot of people feel is true, which is things are kind of going off the rails in a way that's really unpleasant. One thing I do like about the slow movement is it's about quality of life rather than quantity of goods. It's about having time to do the things that are meaningful. And so I think that this, to me, works well or is aligned with politics of degrowth, which came out of maybe not anti-capitalist, but capital, critical, ecological, and economic movements in the global South to say,

do we have to follow this path of development? Are we all on the same train? And it's just a matter that, you know, these poorer countries will just have to catch up, you know, by following the same line of development, right? So there was like, can we rethink that? And what would that mean if we didn't follow that path of development? Maybe you wouldn't have as much stuff, but maybe that's okay okay because I think ultimately people don't find that stuff very satisfying. What they find satisfying is when they have time to spend with other people, when they have time like the Luddites did. The Luddites actually, because they were strong in the beginning as weavers, they had time for a lot

of extracurricular activities. They wrote poetry. They were amateur botanists, right? I moved from the US to Europe. And even that change, people in Europe work fewer hours significantly, not tremendously, but significantly fewer hours so that it's noticeable to me as an American that people have more time to spend with their families. They have hobbies, right? Like all my neighbors play instruments and stuff. And in the States, like no one plays an instrument, you know, once they're out of college, no one has time. So if you think about it in those terms, that's a qualitative change. That's where we're starting to get into the realm of changing social relations and thinking about a real alternative to capitalism, not just how can everyone have more and more stuff like millionaires do,

which I don't think would actually break us out of capitalism. So I'm very intrigued by the degrowth movement. There's a lot of great work coming out that I'm really trying to catch up with, really. But I think that it has something very compelling to say, and is also something that speaks not just to our situation and really wealthy, technologically, quote unquote, advanced economies, but is also a global politics of development, which I think if you want to think as a good socialist and have a good understanding of capitalism, you have to think that way. I completely agree, Gavin.

And I think that's such an important perspective to have, right? To recognize how workers are pushing back against these technologies and also how technologies can work differently if they are designed to serve different ends, right? You know, I feel like your book kind of helps to extend this discussion that I think has been growing in recent years, you know, Aaron Beninoff's recent book, looking at, you know, different futures that I think are somewhat in line with yours, the work of Theo Riofrancos, who I've spoken to on this show, who kind of looks at the supply chains of these technologies and how movements in the global south are imagining different kinds

of futures that are not so extractive and focused around these technologies. So I think that this is a really important contribution to this larger conversation that is going on. And I really appreciate you taking the time to chat and to share your perspectives. So thanks so much. Well, thank you very much, Paris. It's been a pleasure to talk with you. And I really appreciate you reaching out and showing an interest in my work and putting me alongside such other important figures as you have. So thank you. Gavin Mueller is the author of Breaking Things at Work, The Luddites Are Right, About Why You Hate Your Job. You can find the information about how to buy it from Verso Books in the show notes. You can follow Gavin on Twitter at at Gavin your job. You can find the information about how to buy it from Verso Books in the show notes.

You can follow Gavin on Twitter at at Gavin Mueller PhD. You can also follow me at at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that I put into making this show every week,

you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.