From medieval monks who banned tools to weavers burning looms in the 17th century, people have long resisted technologies that they thought would take their jobs or otherwise hurt them. More recently, there has been a wave of resignations at frontier artificial intelligence companies, and opposition to data centers. What do past resistances have in common with current movements?
In his new book, Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, Thomas Dekeyser, a lecturer in human geography at the University of Southampton in the U.K., explores the points where people rejected new technologies. The pushback against AI is not a rejection of “progress,” but the creation of a future that doesn’t diminish what it means to be human, he told Rest of World.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is behind the growing opposition to AI data centers, some AI tools, and AI companies?
We need to avoid thinking about our contemporary moment as uniquely anti-technology. The history of technology reveals that from the very earliest moments, technological advancements came under attack. The church, philosophers, everyday workers, governments, artists — all have long, and at times fiercely, sought to reject, or at the very least, radically delay the arrival of particular technologies.
One of the greatest problems we face is the way that critique of technology is easily presented as simply a fear of technology, as anti-progress. It is a way of demonizing someone as irrational, and therefore, whose concerns should not be taken seriously. What this insult of “techno-phobia” crucially overlooks is not only the many emotions that fuel contemporary refusals of technology, it also fails to recognize the often deeply rational reasons why one might decide to leave behind, or actively resist, the most harmful dimensions of contemporary technological life. Within the refusal of tech, we can find alternative imaginations of the future. Not anti-progress, only refusing a particular, narrow idea of what “progress” should look like.
How did the largely unfavorable image of Big Tech come about?
There was a time when Big Tech was able to at least claim to be socially progressive, as perhaps best expressed by Google’s early slogan “Don’t be evil.” Big Tech was, for a long time, a place where, as a worker, one could feel like they were helping to improve people’s lives, or building new connections across the world. This progressive image has long been revealed as a facade. The internet infrastructures that were built post-WWII were tied to building better war machines and increasing geopolitical power. These were not side-projects of big tech firms, but part and parcel of their rapid expansion.
What is new, however, is the active push away from that facade, the strong claim to ethical principles. In 2018, Google removed its original slogan, and changed it to “Do the right thing.” Ethics has, in many instances, vanished into the background. Big tech firms no longer feel the need to present themselves as “do-gooders.” The deepening alignment of Big Tech with the Trump administration is an open embrace of what it had previously hoped to disguise: its at times authoritarian, nationalistic tendencies. The failure of tech workers to end military or policing contracts is intimately tied up with this right-wing shift of the companies that employ them.
We’ve seen the vandalism of Waymo robotaxis, the destruction of 5G towers, and now the cancellation of ChatGPT accounts. What’s driving this?
There is a growing sense that the latest technological advancements serve the few, not the many. For many, contemporary tech — whether it’s robotaxis or surveillance cameras — is decreasingly in service of our collective wellbeing and growth, and instead, appears as beneficial largely to a very minor portion of the population, including to those who have monetary or political interests in seeing these technologies flourish. In fact, they can seem like they actively run counter to general interests. AI, for instance, promises to revolutionize our everyday working and social lives, but for many, it feels like it is delivering the opposite: the loss of jobs and meaningful social interactions, more efficient ways of surveilling people, and a deepening climate crisis.
This sense of disillusion is matched by a collective feeling of disempowerment. However hard we organize and campaign for better, less harmful tech, there seems to be little movement towards different futures. When tech surrounds us in a way that feels both omnipresent and inevitable, material destruction offers a temporary release from that disempowerment.
The populations outside of the West are still often simply treated as either cheap labor or as valuable data.”
What’s behind the growing pushback against AI from data workers in Africa and local communities in Latin America?
Contemporary resistance in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere is inseparable both from the ongoing colonial logics of contemporary tech industries and from the original anti-colonial resistance that was a part of attempts at colonization. The populations outside of the West are still often simply treated as either cheap labor or as valuable data. At the same time, these populations’ natural environments are extracted for the building-out of essential AI infrastructures. Contemporary resistance to AI and to data centers needs to be understood as a refusal of these afterlives of colonialism.
Another crucial driver of AI refusal is AI’s reshaping of what it means to be human. Not only is AI altering how we work, how we think, or how we create, it is reconfiguring what it means to live a meaningful life. The kind of life deemed meaningful, within the AI narrative, is one that is efficient, fast, and intelligent. This is simply unconvincing to many. For them, AI promises not emancipation or new powers — such as that of superintelligence — but a further diminishing of their ability to be in tune with what actually matters to them: community, care, growth. Fueling this bad feeling further is what the philosopher of technology, Günther Anders, called “Promethean shame,” whereby we feel the shame of being insufficient and vulnerable in the face of a perfect, efficient machine. The AI promoters are already telling us that without fully embracing AI, we’re second-class citizens. The contemporary refusal of AI is a struggle against this promise of a particular kind of human life secondary to that of machine intelligence.
