neo-Luddism

a review of Breaking Things at Work

Luddites survive in the contemporary imagination as English men in Victorian clothes burning down giant looms in a doomed attempt to prevent the rush of technological progress.

So when the group got a call-out in the season finale of Upload, a dystopian TV show set in 2033, it got me thinking – what would a modern-day Luddite look like? Is there something potentially useful to resurrect from their legacy in an age where we are just as confused about technological progress? Or are they merely “history’s fools”?

Breaking Things at Work by Gavin Mueller is a kind of revisionist history of the Luddites. Mueller argues that the Luddites were not anti-technology or anti-progress as much as they were against the abuse of workers by factory owners, who used the machines to flout labor agreements that had already been negotiated. Yes, they destroyed machines — but they were often skilled laborers themselves, using technology to sabotage the technology that the owners used to take away jobs and flout agreements made within guilds. Mueller also goes further back to find a tradition for Luddism beyond their namesake, particularly slaves who:

“broke their tools so often that owners “bought extra-heavy implements in the hope they would survive rough handling,” thereby reducing the plantation economy’s productivity.”

Today, in a world in which algorithms govern our livelihoods and our attention, what can we learn from the Luddites?  

After all, how do you protest an algorithm? Last year’s “F*** the algorithm” protests worked in the UK, but old-school, direct protests work less well to disrupt data structures that reside in the cloud. On the other end of the spectrum, many of the most popular proposals for resisting algorithmic power are to avoid them entirely, such as doing nothing (Jenny Odell) or meditating (Yuval Noah Harari). 

Mueller draws a direct line between the factories and our workplaces today, arguing instead that we can take inspiration from the Luddites to work within systems to subvert them. Using Mueller’s book as a jumping off point, I analyze examples of how workers use sabotage to disrupt the pace of technological change, excavating resistance in the ways in which we evade and misdirect technology everyday, and asking whether collective solidarity can spring from individual choices. 

Today, we can find acts of technological subversion from supermarket workers sabotaging the tills and leaving their tracking devices uncharged to gig rideshare workers coordinating to manipulate surge pricing. Even tech workers can be Luddites, Mueller argues, and that’s become even more true in the past year. An article in Wired cites examples of how remote workers subvert the spyware that tracks login times and even spies on them through their webcam, such as anti-surveillance software, like “Presence Scheduler, which can set your Slack status as permanently active” or elaborate contraptions involving a desk fan and a mouse to simulate productivity. Mueller argues that abusing the copy machine or the grill in the kitchen to make an elaborate meal also count as Luddite actions. 

These techniques have been called many things — “obfuscation,” “adversarial machine learning,” and “algorithmic resistance” are just a few. What unites them is the idea of sabotage.

Mueller posits that we can be united by the desire to break things. He cites a viral article that extols the pleasure of breaking things at work: 

“The urge to sabotage the work environment is probably as old as wage-labor itself, perhaps older.” As a grateful reader subsequently wrote to the magazine, “I will leave it to the theoreticians to argue about the dialectical nuances of sabotage. Basically, there is one overwhelming reason to do it: it makes you FEEL GOOD.” 

So why not theorize revolutionary strategies from what people are already doing and what feels good? Because sabotage, at scale, can work: 

As the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual explains, “Acts of simple sabotage, multiplied by thousands of citizens, can be an effective weapon…[wasting] materials, manpower, and time. Occurring on a wide scale, simple sabotage will be a constant and tangible drag on…the enemy.”

Sabotage proves that things don’t have to work one way. At the very least, it slows things down.