We Should All Be Luddites: Jathan Sadowski on Why We Deserve Better Tech

In this time when tech monsters are showing their faces, we wanted to try and make some sense of how to respond. To that end, Bay Area Current enlisted Jathan Sadowski, a scholar who studies political economy and the social theory of information technology. His new book, The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism, explains why the tech industry wants us to believe that we’re not smart enough to understand what they’re making or why, and helps clarify our role in it as workers and tenants under what he dubs technological capitalism. 

Padmini Raghunath:  You start the book by describing two myths: a) that technology is too complicated for us to understand, and b) that we're just supposed to accept it. How do we move past these myths, and why do you think we should?

Jathan Sadowski: We can't overestimate how much of the power and wealth of the elite capital class of Silicon Valley — the investors, the executives, the entrepreneurs — comes from perpetuating this idea that only they know how to innovate, and creating institutional barriers that enforce it. But there's nothing inherent to these technologies that makes them unassailable, or these gifts from the gods that drop from the sky. 

A key thing I was trying to do in my book was to debunk that. We are able to actually understand how a machine learning model works or how venture capitalists make decisions, and it doesn't even take that much effort. It just takes some curiosity, and I think most people have a real mechanical curiosity about how the world works and how it affects them. 

PR: While I was reading your book, I was thinking about the way we're encouraged to think about the types of actions that we take around technology as individual consumers. How do we change the frame to think collectively, and what questions can workers or tenants ask themselves about their relationship to technology?

JS: You're exactly right that our relationship to technology tends to be one of a passive user or consumer.

So yes, you can install an ad blocker or put tape over your webcam. But it's not an accident that all of these solutions tend to put the onus on the individual.

What we need instead is a collective and structural framing. We should have a voice in how the technology is designed and for what purposes. And you can only ever actually confront the real structural problems through a collective mode. 

The book is called The Mechanic and the Luddite, and to me, the mechanic is that role model that's thinking about how these technologies actually work.

The other side of the coin is the Luddite, who takes that understanding of how the technology works and gives it a collective edge. The original Luddite movement was a labor movement, not a movement of people who were afraid of technology as the term is used today.

The original Luddite movement was a labor movement, not a movement of people who were afraid of technology as the term is used today.

Many of the technologies that the original Luddites stood up against, that they smashed under the cover of night, were not new. What changed was not technology, but the fact that factory owners and bosses redeployed technologies in ways that sped up the pace of work, degraded the quality of work, lowered worker pay, made the work more dangerous, and undermined the place of the skilled craftsperson in their communities. There's a lot to be learned there. 

If we think about the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes, a core catalyst of those strikes was the studios’ desire to use AI to de-skill people, to fire loads of writers and actors, to literally steal their voices, words, and images, and reproduce them under the studio’s control. That was a 21st century Luddite movement of people going on strike and noticing, Hey, these technologies are not for us, they're not benefiting us. 

In 2018, you have protests and walkouts at companies like Google around misogynistic and gendered abuse at the company, and engineers not wanting to work on Project Maven, a very large contract that Google had with the Pentagon to create AI targeting for weapons systems.

The reaction to that by the elite class in Silicon Valley was, How dare these workers tell us what we can and can't do? How dare they stand up and say they don't want to work on these things. They think that they're WORKERS?

I remember one investor from the Founders Fund tweeted that these engineers, they're not workers. They should not have a labor union. They should not complain. They're well paid. They have all these perks and benefits! 

And so it became very clear that all the perks of working at a tech company were not only designed to get people to stay later and work longer. It was also a bribe: don't complain about what we have you do, because we're paying you off. You should just be happy to work here.

PR: I don't know if it's just a vibe shift, but do you think that there is more pushback now, more critical engagement with tech?

JS: I do think that there is a real shift in terms of vibes, but also towards not just assuming that Silicon Valley has our best interests at heart and are responsible stewards of the future.

And nothing's contributed more to that than the tech sector's own actions! The loudest and most influential people in Silicon Valley have themselves proclaimed that they are not for us, they are against us.

People like Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen have always been right-wing in the sense that they threw fundraisers for Democrats while pushing them towards the neoliberal right, but now they are proudly radical right-wing. They've done more than I ever could to show that technology is political. And I think this has caused people to start looking critically at the obvious social consequences of the technology. 

PR: Something that seems relevant to this conversation is that tech positioned itself as a “revolution by capitalists.” In particular around 2009-2010, the overwhelming conversation was around whether or not the internet was going to “democratize” media. Maybe their pivot to the right is good for everyone because it exposes their motives very clearly.

JS: It also really exposes the power of framing and marketing as well, right? That whole period of Web 2.0, these “dads of the internet” (paraphrasing Astra Taylor & Joanne McNeil for The Baffler) who said this stuff would make all the dreams of the hippies from the 70s into reality.

The gig economy was originally called the sharing economy. People forget that like Lyft not only had those obnoxious pink mustaches that drivers were supposed to put on their cars, but drivers were supposed to give the passenger a fist bump. It had all of this cringey culture built into it. The purpose of that was to create this air of sharing and caring and democracy.

That was always just cynical marketing by the same people who are now in control. Marc Andreessen was one of the first board members for Facebook. Jason Calacanis, another venture capitalist and one of Elon Musk’s top fans, made his bones by being a very early investor in Uber. All the people who are now very central to this right-wing formation in Silicon Valley were also investors and founders in that early era where it was supposed to be about democratization and sharing.

But at some point the winds started blowing in a different way. It just became more profitable to align yourself with more radical right-wing forms of anarcho-capitalism or techno-authoritarianism.

PR: Your book also describes how Silicon Valley needs the hype to perpetuate itself. Can you talk about that?

JS: In the book, I call this system “innovation realism,” riffing on Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism — the sense that there's no way out of capitalism as a system, you can’t imagine an alternative to it.

In this whole innovation system, which is built with venture capital at the core, the idea of innovation realism says that this is the only way, and there is no alternative.

But it's not enough to just simply say a myth, and then hope that if you manifest it in the world it becomes true. You actually have to create a bunch of material structures in the world that make it true. 

That's what Silicon Valley is. It’s a set of financial structures and social networks that make it so that you can only create new technologies this way.

Venture capital is essentially highly speculative gambling. It's a form of investment that requires rapid returns in a fixed time scale, usually five to seven years. You're looking to only invest in technologies that can meet hypergrowth or “blitzscaling” as Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn calls it, which is this rapid, exponential growth in a way that completely dominates a market and becomes a monopoly. 

That's not all the technologies that could possibly exist in the world by any measure, but it is most of the technologies that Silicon Valley is interested in bringing into existence.

All of this is built on what in Marxist terms is called “fictitious capital.” I think of it as a form of check kiting – you're cashing a check today and hoping that the money is in the account tomorrow. This is really what the hype machine is.

The purpose of the hype machine is to get people excited about something that doesn't exist yet. You want them to build it up in their mind as this revolutionary and value-producing technology. You want people talking about how blockchain is the future, crypto is going to be everything, AI is going to transform the world. Or buy into it in maybe more material ways: buying NFTs and meme coins, or becoming completely in thrall to some chat bot.

The purpose of this is to create the opportunity to realize your fictitious capital. The venture capitalists build, maintain, and expand the hype machine, and their wealth is connected to this hype.

PR: If there's one idea that someone could take away just having read this interview, what would it be? 

JS: I always come back to this idea that we deserve a better class of technology and a better class of technologist. Technologies are so important and they can do so much good in the world. But technology as a kind of singular thing does not necessarily improve our lives or create a better society.

It only does so when it actually serves the needs of the people. There are things about the current system that can bring joy and convenience and betterment to our lives. But those are almost accidental byproducts of a system that is designed to maximize exploitation and consolidate power and wealth into a very small number of hands. 

The convenience you get from an app like DoorDash or Postmates comes on the back of an incredible amount of human immiseration. The joy you get from like seeing a friend's post on Instagram, or finding a cool new band on Spotify, is also this really expensive byproduct of a system that is not designed to do those things as the priority.

We deserve technologies that are actually designed to improve people's lives and make society better for everyone as their primary purpose. The only way that's going to happen is if we make it happen. Currently the people who hold the reins, who allocate the resources, are a very small minority; there's a lot more of us than there are of them. It's about time that we as a collective actually make the technological system work for us.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.