The term „Luddite“ is a pejorative that marks one as an opponent of emergent technology, and, by extension, the future that these new technologies bring to bear. This designation derives from the experience of the historical Luddites, who, according to popular myth, put up a doomed resistance to the Industrial Revolution in favor of remaining in a pre-industrial, pre-mechanical craft past through the technique of machine breaking. Recent historical treatments have sought to put the Luddite struggles in a more sympathetic light, rationalizing the destruction of machines as a component of labor struggle. But can analysis go further than a retroactive justification of Luddite praxis? Can we understand Luddite struggles, both historical and contemporary, not as attempts either to maintain an existing state of affairs or to retreat to an idyllic technological past, but as offering a positive vision of the future? This talk will sketch out these Luddite futures in the interest of developing a concept of Luddism that can act as a political challenge to dominant hypercapitalist technofutures as well as romanticized primitivist ones.

Gavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a tutor in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Instituut. He is the author of Breaking Things at Work (Verso 2021) and Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy (Routledge 2019).

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞