Technology For (and against) The People

[Reuters / Clodagh Kilcoyne]

When Jeff Bezos recently announced he’d be going to space, my first thought was to call up writer Gavin Mueller.

Mueller’s new book, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job, troubles the concept that “technology lays a path to a brighter future, that the progress of humanity is one and the same as the progress of machines and gizmos.” However, while Mueller is skeptical of the idea that we should be aiming for a highly automated utopia, he’s not dismissing technology entirely – rather, he wants to illuminate criticism on the left that might help us imagine a different sort of progress and future.

We recently chatted about what it might mean to shed our techno-optimism while imagining a bright and radical future.

So, what’s wrong with techno-utopianism? I want a future of cheap and abundant stuff!

It has had a kind of vogue. We’ve heard the pop artist Grimes, Elon Musk’s partner, talking about how artificial intelligence was going to create a fully automated communism. But I want to show that there's actually something quite conservative about this kind of optimism with technology.

You find most techno-optimism not just among people who are interested in technology, but really the people who seem to be profiting from it. So you find it in Jeff Bezos, you find it in Elon Musk, you find it among people who are into and (up until a few weeks ago) making a lot of money off of cryptocurrency. But I don't think you find it in a whole lot of other places. So I wanted to intervene in that and say this kind of techno-optimism, it's maybe not the most prevalent feeling among working people.

A lot of thinkers, including Marx, saw the path to a good future through the development of technology that could provide abundance for all. What are the alternatives?

Historically on the left and in the worker's movement, there has been a faith in progress that is tied to advances in machines and industrial production. The debate over the politics of technology has been something that people on the left have discussed for centuries.

And so, part of what I want to do in the book is to reconstruct that, and rescue from the obscurity of history some thinkers that I thought were opposed to this. Some of those figures have quite a lot to teach us, people like William Morris or Raya Dunayevskaya, who have made really careful, cautious arguments that are often, in my opinion, rooted in a better understanding of the struggles of working people and the experiences of work.

Some people today would consider these perspectives quite romantic, even quaint.

In the case of William Morris, he certainly had a lot of romanticism about him. But the value that I get out of his arguments is about technology and politics. One of his best essays is his review of Edward Bellamy's science-fiction novel Looking Backward, which was a kind of Fully Automated Luxury Communism manifesto of its day. Morris wrote a very perceptive critique of it.

Bellamy's got machines doing a lot of the drudgery. There's no money and there's abundance. But Morris says, you know, this future utopia, it just looks like middle-class society. It doesn't look like a break with the existing world – he just lopped off some of the bad things and kept what he prefers. Morris didn't think that a real political and social revolution would proceed in that way. You would really have to rethink and revalue and restructure social relations in a much more radical way.

Another thing that I get from Morris is that he did really think that work was something that people valued and that rather than simply relieving people of work, the goal in a future society should be to consider what kinds of work are necessary and how this can be structured to give people some kind of satisfaction.

Ideally, we would probably do a lot more care work, right? Childcare, eldercare, etc.?

If you talk to people who do care work, first, you hear that many of those jobs are not very good, but a lot of people who do them get satisfaction out of helping people. That’s an extremely admirable quality – perhaps even a radical quality.

Absolutely, nurses and teachers should be paid more. But we can also think about how we might share really burdensome tasks. What if you cared for other children in your neighborhood? People do this all the time informally. In fact, the gig economy is formalizing a lot of informal forms of work, including care work.

An old claim for a radical communist utopia would not be one where people didn't have burdens, but where the division of labor itself would be overturned. I feel like I would know my neighbors better if I had more responsibilities towards them and they had some to me.

I know it's not very cool to talk about responsibility. It seems like a kind of conservative value, but if we're thinking about how we develop really strong bonds among people, if we're going to fight the political battles that need to be fought in the near future, we do have to think about how to forge those connections and how to make them serious. Tenant organizing has really taken off. And I think it’s an especially good way for people of our age [30s] and life experience to do that. We’ve got to put the social back in socialism.

One critique of this view would be to say yes, it would be nice for everyone to share in childcare, but we’re also trying to figure out how to cure cancer – and scientific discovery takes a lot of resources, time and expertise. Do we want the people with this expertise spending half of their time doing childcare?

I don’t have all the timetables worked out for every profession, but to me, an alternative to capitalism means that – rather than letting market mechanisms determine decisions about how people work and what they do and what is made and consumed – you would sit down and really think. We have so much capacity. What does it take to do the things that we need done?

This happens quite a lot. This happens when, for instance, you need to crank out a vaccine rather quickly. If we had a more equitable society, would we still need forms of expertise? Yeah, absolutely. But right now, think about how much expertise we waste not curing cancer but instead, coming up with air fryers – which is just a crappy version of an old technology to have something that electronics companies can sell. What percentage of pharmaceutical research is being done on erectile dysfunction and male-pattern baldness versus cancer research and other forms of lifesaving research?

I'm not opposed to science and technology per se. What I want to highlight is that a lot of science and technology is developed according to capitalist values, and I want people to recognize that. When people are provoked to take practical action against some of these technologies, they are not nostalgics who are against progress, or irrational. There's actually a rationality there that we should try to understand.

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