Movements to reclaim power over technology are springing up, from Neo-Luddism to Permacomputing to Rewilding the Internet. Alongside these approaches, we must discuss how tech has atrophied the exact civic muscle we’ll need to reclaim power over it.
Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the Summer of Ludd, organized by NYC Off Tech and dedicated to getting people “off big tech, into public space, and re-enchanting each other.” Like the original Luddites rebelling against the machinery that stole their livelihoods, the Neo-Luddites are correct to rebel against today’s tech, which threatens our livelihoods, our privacy, our living world, our creative joy, and our ability to think.
Despite the heaviness of the stakes, the event itself was light: plays, puppets, clown workshops—I put on a gnome hat. My favorite moment of the event, which I dipped in and out of all week, was when a yellow gnome asked me to put my iPhone away and “carry this instead,” then passed me a hand-painted cardboard apple attached to a popsicle stick. How silly; how reasonable.
By itself, the event was not a labor movement; it was a cultural one. I think often about the divide between Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden as depicted in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. Abbie keeps insisting on the importance of cultural revolution through street demonstrations, theater, humor, and sexual liberation, while Tom dismisses it as a distraction from “actual revolution.” My favorite moment in the film comes when Abbie tells him, “We’re not going to jail because of what we did, we’re going to jail because of who we are. Think about that the next time you shrug off cultural revolution.”
I agree with Abbie: how people play, feel free, and come to see what’s possible matters just as much as formal politics. I also agree with Naomi Klein when she says surrealism expands our political imagination, and with David Graeber when he asks, What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? My coalition is big enough for whimsy, and it can’t be effective without it.
This is why I have such a hard time trusting any “only war is the class war” pusher. Pretending that all will be well if we give one group what they want reeks of a desire for power rather than a desire for liberation, and you know that those people are not going to either 1) share any power they gain with people they worked with to get that power, who have a different idea of what the post-revolution society should look like (e.g. the USSR banning other Socialist factions), or 2) actually ensure the society they build does not recreate the same social issues (specifically, the ones that didn’t affect them personally).
WRT the tech backlash, I’ve been pushing myself to have a fully offline-capable tech ecosystem. I’ve been sharing that (though it’s seen only marginal adoption) with my family, who are long-distance, and I’ve been really really happy with how much I find myself actually using it versus using ‘online’ media. I don’t know if that fits into the models of interaction that the movements mentioned in the article are advocating, though, or if they’re going more “use tech less”, rather than “use tech that serves Capital less”.
I’m not telling anyone else to do this; it’s definitely my version of reclaiming time and money and attention from Big Tech, but I guarantee that if you find a way to decouple from a major corporate-run platform you rely on, you will realize just how unenjoyable those platforms are.
