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Introduction

Jeff Bezos is going to the moon. In May of 2019, just a few blocks from the White House, he unveiled the lunar lander developed by his secretive Blue Origin space exploration company to the jaunty falsetto harmonies of Electric Light Orchestra's "Mr. Blue Sky." "New York Times" journalist Kenneth Chang likened the gala, dubbed the "Going to Space to Benefit Earth" event, to "the announcement of an iPhone." "We are going to build a road to space," the Amazon CEO vowed, extending a hand to the Trump administration's own ambitions to send astronauts to the moon. "And then amazing things will happen." What kinds of things? Nothing short of planetary exodus: Bezos has an oft-stated vision of trillions of human beings floating in space on millions of massive cylindrical colonies. It's a dream that, like so many of those among Silicon Valley's elite, comes right out of old science fiction, in this case 1976's "High Frontier" by physicist Gerard K. O'Neil, a book that, upon its publication, inspired Congress to abandon all funding for space colonization.

But, for Bezos, space colonies are serious business. Not because they can solve the intractable problems of Earth: global poverty and environmental degradation are mere "short-term" problems. With Earth's supply of resources dwindling, the future of technological progress itself relies on drawing from the vast quantities of minerals locked away in distant celestial bodies. Humanity will have go along for the ride.

Of course, Bezos isn't the only billionaire betting big on outer space. Elon Musk's flashier SpaceX has its sights set on Mars. Holding court on Twitter, as is his wont, he revealed plans to transport 100,000 travelers a year to the red planet — for a fee. And those who can't afford a ticket through the solar system can take out a loan and work it off at one of SpaceX's off-planet facilities. For Musk, as for Bezos, space travel is not a profit-making endeavor; it is a project to restore faith in the future itself. "You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great, and that's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about," he proclaimed at the International Astronautical Congress in 2017. "It's about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past."

Not all of our tech billionaires want to travel the space-ways, but they all share something in common (that is, aside from a propensity to dine with the late sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein). They believe that technology lays a path to a brighter future, that the progress of humanity is one and the same as the progress of machines and gizmos. Bill Gates wants to use computers to overhaul education, and genetically modified organisms to solve hunger in Africa; he also sponsors a competition to invent new toilets to address the lack of sanitation infrastructure in the global South. (The Gates Foundation recently granted a Goalkeepers Global Goals Award to India's right-wing prime minister, Narendra Modi, for his dedication to the toilet cause.) Mark Zuckerberg, to his credit, acknowledges some of the shortcomings of his own company. "I used to think that if we just gave people a voice and helped them connect, that would make the world better by itself. In many ways it has. But our society is still divided," he writes in, naturally, a Facebook post. "Now I believe we have a responsibility to do even more. It's not enough to simply connect the world, we must also work to bring the world closer together." Never one for excessively creative thinking, Zuck argues that solving the problems exacerbated by Facebook requires, well, more Facebook.

Peter Thiel, Facebook board member and Musk's former PayPal partner, and now a venture capitalist with a taste for extreme-right libertarian politics, does not hesitate to reach for the supernatural register to explain his faith in technology: "Humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology." Such is his zeal for the promise of technologies like artificial intelligence and life extension that anyone who lacks it is suspicious. He aligns the nostalgic tastes of "hipsters" with the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's "loss of faith in the technological frontier."

In a more muted register, the Lolita Express–traveling Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who is something of a Dr. Pangloss of the Davos set, wants you to know you've never had it so good. In his 2018 "Enlightenment Now," Pinker seeks to combat "progressophobia," an affliction caused by liberal arts intellectuals who assign Theodor Adorno and Jean-Paul Sartre to their young charges. But, even as an avowed secularist, Pinker, like Thiel, can't help but reach for the cosmic. "Though I am skittish about any notion of historical inevitability, cosmic forces, or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force." This force may be the very milieu that props up his book sales, as he takes pains to celebrate "technophilanthropists," information technology, smartphones, online education, microfinance, and, at the risk of sounding redundant, Bill Gates himself, whose effusive praise graces the cover of the book. As Pinker brushes aside statistics on rising inequality, he warns his readers about the enemies of progress — environmentalists, Marxists, populists, and leftists: "The impression that the modern economy has left most people behind encourages Luddite … policies," he cautions.

While the technological optimism of billionaires comes from the political right and center, it can also be found on the radical left, where so-called accelerationists anticipate a fully automated luxury communism on the back of the wildest fantasies of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and the self-proclaimed "pro-science left" embrace the logistical organization of the most exploitative businesses on the planet. The accelerationists are, as they often point out, subscribing to a prevalent view from within the Marxist tradition. Historically, Marxists have not been critical of technology, even when that technology is deployed in the workplace in ways that seem detrimental for workers. For many Marxists, technology is at worst neutral: it is not the technology itself, but who controls it, labor or capital. And for some of them, technology, even when wielded by capitalists, is a boon to socialism, creating the conditions of radical transformation right under the bosses' noses. This means that a socialist movement should treat technological development, even if it has negative consequences in the short term, as something positive.

I disagree, both with the billionaires and with the pro-tech Marxists who are much closer to my own political and theoretical perspectives. In my view, technology often plays a detrimental role in working life, and in struggles for a better one. Technological development leads to vast accumulations of wealth, and with that, power, for the people who exploit workers. In turn, technology reduces the autonomy of workers — their ability to organize themselves to fight against their exploiters. It robs people of the feeling that they can control their own lives, that they can set the terms of their world. If you have an interest in the fates of these people, and count yourself as someone who wants a more egalitarian future than the current system can provide, you should be critical of technology, and acknowledge those moments where people, especially those at work, have resisted it.

This is to say that this is a book about Luddism. It is not a book about the Luddites, although I discuss them in the first chapter. Rather, I am interested in the politics behind the movement formed by the weavers of early nineteenth-century England, politics that took a militant stance toward the technological reorganization of work undertaken by early capitalists. The Luddites believed that new machines were undermining their livelihoods and destroying their communities, and that targeting those machines was a valid strategy in their fight against it. I believe that the terms of debate over work and the future of the economy in our current moment could benefit from such a perspective, along with a better understanding of how Luddism continued to traverse worker movements, up until the present day. It is, as we shall see, the irrepressible, if still unconscious, spirit of the twenty-first-century workplace.

One of my goals in writing this book is to turn Marxists into Luddites. I go about this in two ways. First, I excavate a strand of thought from within Marxist theory, going back to Marx himself, to demonstrate that Luddism is intellectually compatible with Marxism. But this project is not simply a philosophical endeavor. Rather, Marxist theory has to be put to the test of history, the test of the actual practices of workers themselves — those actions that inspired Marx's theorizations and the work of many of the best Marxists after him. And so I also recover important struggles where workers focused not only on their class antagonist (personified by bosses or managers), but on the machines deployed in this struggle as well. My argument boils down to this: to be a good Marxist is to also be a Luddite.

While I want to make Marxists into Luddites, I also have another goal: I want to turn people critical of technology into Marxists. If, as Marx argued, a society's ruling ideas are those of its ruling class, then technological optimism should indeed be at the top of the heap. And yet, our billionaires and their Ivy League hangers-on protest too much. Their blithe boosterism for optimism itself belies the fact that among those of less-than-astronomical means, technological optimism is on the wane. We are increasingly turning against the technologies that saturate our work and leisure, and I think there are powerful political possibilities here, but only if this perspective is connected to a larger critique of the social and economic system in which we live: capitalism. Marxist theory offers many important tools in understanding how capitalism works, and how it can be changed — tools I want to share with people who may not think of themselves as Marxists. In fact, I hope this book is accessible to people without much of a background in Marxist theory. Maybe it will be your introduction to an intellectual tradition as rich, varied, and scintillating as any I've encountered.

Much of our contemporary technological criticism comes from a place of romantic humanism, whether acknowledged or not, the notion that technology has separated us from some kind of essential part of ourselves, that it alienates us from what makes us really human. For example, social scientist and influential technology critic Sherry Turkle asks us to "reclaim conversation" from our smartphones, which alienate us from the "raw, human part" of our existence by allowing us to live in a convenient and curated reality. In a similar register, Tim Wu concludes his fascinating history of media advertising, "The Attention Merchants," with what he calls "a human reclamation project" to protect our attention from the techniques and technologies of the ad-driven internet. Wu extolls practices like "unplugging" as the beginnings of a larger endeavor "to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living." In the complaints of Turkle and Wu, we might hear echoes of Martin Heidegger, who criticized technology for alienating us, through its disenchanting and instrumentalizing nature, from the mystical experience of Being.

Even if I believed in a universal human essence (full disclosure: I do not), to recover it would not be enough. The problem of technology is not simply that it alienates us from Being, or from authentic experiences. After all, this is a problem for which the tech companies themselves are happy to sell the solution: Google and Apple have launched their own "well-being" services to help users cut back on screen time. Instead, the more fundamental problem of technology is its role in the reproduction of hierarchies and injustices foisted upon most of us by business owners, bosses, and governments. In other words, the problem of technology is its role in capitalism. In this book, I aim to show how technology developed by capitalism furthers its goals: it compels us to work more, limits our autonomy, and outmaneuvers and divides us when we organize to fight back. In response, a flourishing class struggle will necessarily target the machines of the day, and I document the moments where it has.

In this way, I am not simply lobbing advice at movements by telling them to go out and break machines. What I try to do is show that *workers themselves* have repeatedly become Luddites in struggle. This was true of the self-proclaimed followers of King Ludd of the early nineteenth century, and it is true of workers down through the decades since. It is even true of some of the most technologically adept workers of the computer age. If Marxists should do anything, it is to study and learn from the history of past struggles, to recover the voices from past movements so that they might inform current ones. Our theory should take its form from these struggles, not advise and chastise them from on high.

When I started writing this book, my position was not a popular one. Accelerationism was having its time in the sun, with its belief, in both its right-and left-wing guises, that exponential technological development could surmount the political and social impasses of our current moment. Its gambit was that we could take a cybernetic leap out of late neoliberalism's doldrums. But the tenor has changed. After 2016, fewer people than ever have faith in the future, and still fewer believe in the salutary effects of the latest developments in digital networks, automation, or artificial intelligence. "Twitter revolutions" in the Middle East have been ground into dust. The cheap scooters of the so-called sharing economy choke our streets, and we collectively celebrate their destruction on the Instagram account Bird Graveyard. There is a palpable rise in Luddite sentiments, as well as anti-capitalist ones. As the following chapters show, these attitudes complement each other, and hold the key to the future of radical politics.