ralentina reviewed Breaking Things at Work by Gavin Mueller
"In the nineteenth century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on …
Raging against the machine
4 stars
I read this book to intellectualise my hate of so-called artificial intelligence, and it worked. Hurray. In essence, it's a long literature review on how workers have resisted automation, from the Luddites to #techAgainstApartheid (which to my mind is a slightly different beast, since it is not focused on rejecting tech in any meaningful way). The argument is that technological developments tend to harm the interests of the working classes, notably because they restrict workers' autonomy over their work process. They are not exactly inherently oppressive, but tend to be so because often that's why they are developed, or at least applied on the work floor. In making this argument, the author enters into a respectful polemic with the accelerationists, and I appreciated this because it would be to easy to just disagree with the tech hype. Another interesting approach was the insistence that the book is not meant as …
I read this book to intellectualise my hate of so-called artificial intelligence, and it worked. Hurray. In essence, it's a long literature review on how workers have resisted automation, from the Luddites to #techAgainstApartheid (which to my mind is a slightly different beast, since it is not focused on rejecting tech in any meaningful way). The argument is that technological developments tend to harm the interests of the working classes, notably because they restrict workers' autonomy over their work process. They are not exactly inherently oppressive, but tend to be so because often that's why they are developed, or at least applied on the work floor. In making this argument, the author enters into a respectful polemic with the accelerationists, and I appreciated this because it would be to easy to just disagree with the tech hype. Another interesting approach was the insistence that the book is not meant as a call for workers to break things at work, but precisely the opposite, as sort of celebratory analysis of how workers already are breaking things at work, and have been doing so for centuries. Long live the Luddites!