Gavin Mueller

A large part of this short book is made irritating and sometimes unreadable by its Marxist jargon and point of view. However, I do accept the idea of too many people for good reason are unhappy with their jobs and place in society and so I get some value from Mr. Mueller's approach. Personally, I have become fatalistic and think western society is living in a trap from which we cannot escape, and it is too late for breaking things. For me there is great irony in this attempt to organize the show more left when it seems the right and its MAGA folks have seized the initiative, have beaten Muellar to the punch, and are much closer to breaking things and in a much bigger destructive way. This is in ways that our author would not like as this is not just for the left wing.

Quotes: (page 27) “For Morris, the industrial system did not produce abundance...'They are called 'labor saving' machines---a commonly used phrase which implies what we expect of them; but we do not get what we expect. What they really do is to reduce the skilled labourer to the rank of the unskilled, to increase the number of the ' reserve army of labour'---that is, to increase the precariousness of life among the workers and to intensify the labour of those who serve the machines (as slaves of their masters).'”

(page 119) “The ghost work of the human cloud may give the impression that low-wage gig workers are alleviating the burdens of the lucky few who manage to snag a comfortable career. But computer-facilitated taskification comes for all of us. The fumbling medical students provide a dramatic example of what the saturation of everyday life with digital technology has wrought: the deskilling of everyday life. Ian Bogost, a media scholar and video game designer, observes that the proliferation of automated technologies, from self-flushing toilets to autocorrecting text messages, accelerate feelings of precarity and unpredictability. This is because rather than serve human needs, they force people to adapt to unpredictable and uncontrollable machine logic: 'The more technology multiplies, the more it amplifies instability.'”

(page 135) “My hope is that recognizing Luddism at work in the office, on the shop floor, at school, and in the street aids the ambitions of contemporary radicals by giving anti-technology sentiment a historical depth, theoretical sophistication, and political relevance. We may discover each other through our myriad of antagonistic practices in their incredible diversity, connecting to other struggles against the concentrated power of capital and the state, pitched, in the words of Althusser, of 'different origins, different sense, different levels and points of application.' To do so requires no preconstructed plan, no litmus tests of what is necessary in order to be properly political, authentically radical, or legitimately left.” show less