An exhilarating challenge to the way we think about work,
technology, progress, and what we want from the future
In the nineteenth
century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new
technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years
the Luddites roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and
manoeuvres that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. The
movement has been derided by scholars as a backwards-looking and
ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history; for Gavin
Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of the antagonistic
relationship between all workers, including us today, and the
so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies. The luddites
weren’t primitive and they are still a force, however
unconsciously, in the workplaces of the twenty-first century world.
Breaking Things
at Work is an innovative rethinking of labour and machines,
leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially
threatened knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance-evading
truckers driving across the continental United States. Mueller argues
that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements
will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their
spread wherever possible. The task is intimidating, but the seeds of
this resistance are already present in the neo-Luddite efforts of
hackers, pirates, and dark web users who are challenging surveillance
and control, often through older systems of communication technology.