Breaking Things At Work

Description

An exhilarating challenge to the way we think about work, technology,

progress, and what we want from the future In the 19th century, English

textile workers responded to the introduction of new tecnologies on the

factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years ''the Luddites'' roamed the

English countryside, practicing drills and maneuvers that they would later

deploy on unassuming machines. The movement has been derided by scholars as

a backwards-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of

history; for Gavin Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of of the

antagonistic relationship between workers – all workers, including us today

– and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies. The

luddites weren''t primitive or even anachronistic – they are still a force,

however unconsciously, in the workplaces of the 21st century world.

Breaking Things at Work is an innovative rethinking of labor and machines,

leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially threatened

knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance evading truckers driving

across the continental United States. Mueller argues that the future

stability and empowerment of working class movements will depend on

subverting these technologies and preventing their spread wherever

possible. The task is high, but the seeds of this resistance are already

present in the Neo-Luddite efforts of hackers, pirates, and dark web users

who are challenging surveillance and control, often through older systems

of communication technology.