Sophie vs. the Machine: Neo-Luddism as Response to Technical-Colonial Corruption of the General Intellect

ABSTRACT

Historically, the commons is conceptually rooted in concerns over shared expertise derived from material resources. Contemporary understandings increasingly examine varied commons rooted in the general intellect—an affective and ideational production across people. Too often, this focus reduces technology to either a tool for, or impediment to, building and accessing robust commons, and overlooks the colonial inheritance of contemporary theory. As a corrective, we follow efforts to rehabilitate the Luddites as not antitechnology, but as technology ethicists, and theorize technology as a coproducer of the general intellect. Situating Sophie Zhang’s and others’ activism as exemplary of a productive neo-Luddism, we argue that technology constitutively remediates the general intellect and as such is central to the ethics of the commons. From this, we advance the argument that rhetorical sabotage is key to promoting a general intellect against the corporate interests and technical-colonialism too often coded into commons.

KEYWORDS:

• Neo-Luddism
• rhetorical sabotage
• technical-colonialism
• technical commons
• whistleblowing

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Johanna Hartelius, Joshua Barnett, and the reviewers for their feedback, which was instrumental in the development of this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We recognize that labeling any activity as “fake” is a misnomer. Certainly, such content is not generated “authentically” according to the expectations of the platform. Yet content generated outside these expectations has impact both on colonizing forces and in resistance to them. Despite this, we use “fake” because the main alternative (inauthentic activity) replicates the same terminological problem and because “fake” is the primary term used in the social media industry.

² Our use of quotation marks is intended to draw attention to how the singular form “the commons” implies a universalizable and uniform concept, as well as the existence of a singular common. We focus on “commons” in the plural to highlight the multiple commons present in every context.