Jathan Sadowski’s The Mechanic and the Luddite critiques technology’s entanglement with capitalism, advocating for “ruthless criticism” of this dual system in order to dismantle it. Sadowski’s forthright materialist approach and argument for actionable, anti-capitalist tech critique make the book an original and vital read for our times, writes Sam DiBella.
With the ongoing dismantling of the US administrative state by a handful of ill-informed programmers, I would like to declare the current moment a failure of tech criticism. For decades, academics in the social sciences and humanities have built a critical edifice that challenged the cultural hegemony propping up the US tech industry, an industry grounded in science fiction parables, speculative fiction, “rationalist” dreaming, and an endless stream of technological solutionism. We can now count “AI safety” as a new field of knowledge production about technology captured by industry interests. I do not attribute blame to tech critics for this state, but now is a good moment to stop and reflect: what are we doing? In being so caught up in cataloguing new horrors of the digital age, we have been unable to stop its worst excesses. We need a new way of thinking about that project, of how we catalogue the problems of technology and hope that corporate appeals or policymaking will address them.
While there is plenty of tech criticism around, much of it is not comfortable explicitly labelling itself as anti-capitalist tout court.
In his new book, The Mechanic and the Luddite, Jathan Sadowski provides a model of “ruthless criticism” that might meet that requirement. As he explains, many academics have created criticism isolated from the source of its complaints: “Too much of the tech criticism that exists today is happy to ignore, if not remain ignorant of, the links between technology and capitalism. We can see this anodyne style in the sudden burst of work on “AI ethics,” which is content with offering superficial tweaks to, say, the training data for an algorithm without ever challenging how that algorithm will be used or why it should exist at all” (24). In contrast, he calls for more materialist analysis of technology and the internet – that is, Marxism.
While there is plenty of tech criticism around, much of it is not comfortable explicitly labelling itself as anti-capitalist tout court. Often, connecting those dots is an exercise left for the reader. In other cases, researchers have found a particular excess that they think needs to be excised to restore broader social health. Sadowski explains the limitations of these theoretical exercises:
“Modifying the word capitalism with adjectives like rentier or platform or surveillance is useful for focusing on certain features of capitalism. […] But these modifiers can also obscure our analysis if they cause us to mistake one part for the whole problem or to overlook how the future is connected to the past. Suddenly your critique of rentiers or platforms or surveillance slips into a nostalgic plea for the halcyon days of good capitalism before the thing isolated by the specific modifier ruined everything else.” (142)
For example, I discussed a similar failing in my criticism of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and its assumption that profit production from “data exhaust” is a kind of reversible anomaly. Other scholars of digital political economy like Nick Srnicek have theorised Google and Facebook as part of a new “platform capitalism” era, defined by a new kind of economic actor. While well-intentioned, the same maneuvers that allowed them to draw our attention to novelty prevent them from returning their critical gaze to the primary noun they claim to theorise – capitalism. As a result, those projects cannot maintain their own orbit outside the gravity of capitalist capture.
Throughout The Mechanic and The Luddite, Sadowski is often trying to demonstrate a method for thinking, rather than advancing an argument against a specific relation between technology and capitalism. As a result, in its structure, The Mechanic and the Luddite is more of an encyclopaedia than a targeted takedown. Its inventory of articles is expansive: the discourses of innovation that justify venture capitalism; how the data produced by technology is circulating as a new form of capital; the devaluation of labour under computational automation; the rentier infrastructure landlords that control the pipes and lights of the Internet; and the reconceptualisation of irrational risks as inevitable investments, which justify speculative tech ventures.
Sadowski builds on a prior article of his to explain how the circulation of data in the current economy allows it to function on its own as a kind of capital, rather than a commodity or resource
For tech critics and academics who have been following these subjects for years, the descriptions that Sadowski advances will not be novel in themselves. Instead, he succinctly encapsulates a decade of social tech research in clear, if academic, prose. And in all his case studies, he makes a classic materialist move: look for the base, do not be distracted by the superstructure. He does not get into the many arcane debates about what each of those actually mean in practice. Instead, reflecting his assumptions about the academic background of his audience, Sadowski gives a basic introduction to how Marxists understand capitalist exploitation to ground his later discussions. He then uses those well-worn tools skilfully.
For example, Sadowski builds on a prior article of his to explain how the circulation of data in the current economy allows it to function on its own as a kind of capital, rather than a commodity or resource: “The constant debate over which metaphor for data is most accurate—oil, water, gold—is evidence of too much mental confusion about the status of a thing that is key to grasping the mechanics of contemporary capitalism” (79). He describes how the behaviour companies and capitalists exhibit toward data mirrors their approach to other forms of capital – unthinking acquisition for the purposes of accumulation. Accumulation is a prisoners’ dilemma imperative under capitalism: each drop of accumulated capital facilitates further accumulation, and if capitalists don’t accumulate as well as others, they fall behind and out of their class. Data accumulation, then, is just a new form for that kind of death drive.
Critical data studies in the 2010s reminded us that data production is necessarily reductive. There is no “raw” data; it is always “cooked.” That reminder, however, has made tech critics repeatedly remind us of that fact as if it were a novel conclusion. The work it takes to force a person into an Excel sheet is violence, but the violence is the point. That violent abstraction allows for the creation of data as capital, Sadowski argues: “Data can never represent every fibre of a person’s being, nor account for every contour of their complex life. But that is not the purpose nor the value of data. Rather than a failure of the system, this reductionism is a crucial and useful feature of abstraction. The whole point is to turn integrated human subjects into fragmented data objects” (88). Worse, under the logic of capitalism, data production is only going to continue to intensify. We should live in a world where your fate is not determined by how neatly you can fit into a box, but we also cannot expect empathy from a machine.
We stand disempowered before new forms of technological exploitation, but The Mechanic and the Luddite constantly reminds us that this is a learned helplessness
In his project of “ruthless criticism,” Sadowski does not provide a prescription for what will resolve the conditions he critiques (other than the end of capitalism). The closest he gets is to advocate for the spread of two critical roles, those named in his title:
“The mechanic knows how a machine is put together, how its parts function, and what work it does. The Luddite knows why the machine was built, whose purposes it serves, and when it should be seized–in both senses of stopped or taken, destroyed or expropriated” (34).
These roles are not hammered into the reader’s head but serve as ghostly archetypes throughout. We stand disempowered before new forms of technological exploitation, but The Mechanic and the Luddite constantly reminds us that this is a learned helplessness. It can be changed. Hopefully, the model this book proposes will be built upon by others, to recast tech criticism into a form that is actually effective for its ends.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image: Grzegorz Czapski on Shutterstock.
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