A radical history of technology told through acts of resistance, not progress
The history of technology is often told as a history of progress, moving optimistically and inevitably from one emancipatory invention to the next. Techno-Negative turns this story on its head, taking us on a journey to the critical junctures where people have pointedly rejected and tried to undo, rather than adopt, new technologies. Beginning with Archimedes's decision to destroy his own war machines, this book explores the will to negate technology as a deep-but persistently condemned-current in history.
As he presents a new theory of technological power, Thomas Dekeyser argues that technologies, never neutral, operate as "ontological policing," drawing the boundaries of humanness as they are unequally leveraged by select groups. Looking beyond the Luddites to medieval monks banning tools, seventeenth-century loom burners, revolutionary lantern smashers, and computer arsonists, Dekeyser shows how people have long recognized and resisted the machine as a violent, sometimes deadly force implicated in defining who counts as human and whose lives (and ways of life) are worth saving.
Against the ubiquitous demands to reform or accelerate technological "advancement" that have failed to disrupt our present, Dekeyser proposes a spirited alternative: abolition. He challenges us to rethink the terms of our technological present and future. In a time when Big Tech grows increasingly enmeshed with authoritarian control, Techno-Negative is a conceptual declaration, and source of inspiration, for those searching for a new paradigm of technological politics.
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About the Author :
Thomas Dekeyser is lecturer in human geography at the University of Southampton.
Review :
"This is a brilliant and brave book that brings to the fore the brute refusal that haunts the history of technology. I call it brave because it is, in fact, much easier for scholars to call for the reform of technology rather than its refusal. But in this techno-negative history from below, Thomas Dekeyser makes it abundantly clear that reform is futile." --Sarah Sharma, author of Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech
