There’s a particular itch people get when tech starts feeling like it owns the room. A new book leans into that itch, almost gleefully.
“Techno-Negative,” a provocative and enjoyable new book by Thomas Dekeyser, a professor of human geography at the University of Southampton, collects a history and taxonomy of the refusal of technologies—sometimes even the ones humans end up relying on day to day. Dekeyser calls the attitude “longing for the dismantling of what sustains you,” and honestly, that line lands hard right now.
The book frames techno-negativity against the mood of the moment: generative artificial intelligence promising to supplant nearly every form of non-physical labor, social media wreaking havoc on the mental health of young people, and massive data centers looming as environmental blights. It’s not a how-to manual for turning the switch off or lighting anything on purpose. Still, the stories are meant to inspire ways of thinking against today’s dominant technologies, even if you don’t end up agreeing with every conclusion.
Dekeyser organizes the book into three themed sections. First comes “Sovereignty,” state policies that regulate technology. Then “Revolt,” individual efforts to sabotage new technologies. Finally “Withdrawal,” attempts to escape from society’s technologized condition. There’s a call at the end that sounds almost like a dare: “techno-abolitionism,” described as a process of deconstructing the aura of inevitability around new technologies. That goal is a little abstruse, at least on first read. It aims not to stop technological change, but to remake its character—how much that changes in practice, I’m not totally sure.
The historical sweep is where the book gets kind of fun, and also uncomfortable. In antiquity, technology was literally demonized, so there was no stigma around positioning oneself against it. Dekeyser argues that the ancient Greeks, for all their knowledge, created curiously little in the way of lasting machines—and he links that to technē, their word for skilled crafts and engineering, carrying a dark shadow. He writes that technē had “brought something dark, possibly sinister, into the world, something that must, for as long as possible, be kept at bay.” There’s also the fear—so the story goes—of machines displacing humanity, which the Greeks apparently considered the height of beauty. And yeah, there were enough human slaves to keep things moving without robots. I can almost hear the gears, if you know what I mean.
Then the medieval Catholic Church enters, with technology tied to devilish temptation of pride. A twelfth-century historian accused Pope Sylvester II of using magic learned in Islamic Spain to call forth a demon and have it build an omniscient talking statue head that helped him become Pope. (Sylvester had evil statuary; we have ChatGPT.) Dekeyser summarizes the Church posture with: “Sinfulness is the hidden condition of technology.” Amen! With early modernity and industrial capitalism, ideological skepticism toward technology shifts—tech becomes a tool of the state. Once technology proves it can reproduce capital more efficiently than a human worker, it gets protections than the worker doesn’t. There’s even a reference to a seventeenth-century law in Vienna: you could get a hand cut off for messing with street lanterns.
What ties it all together, whether you want it to or not, is the labor question: the struggle over what makes the human different from the machine. The labor movement takes on two fights—resisting workers being displaced by machines, but also resisting workers being treated as machines, subhuman fodder fuelling technological progress. And techno-negativity, Dekeyser suggests, is the desire to opt out of technology and its (perhaps illusory) narrative of improvement.
There’s also an Ashanti king in the mix: Osei Bonsu, in the early nineteenth century, who declined a gift of mechanical devices such as a lathe, a watch, and a music box from the British. Colonial technology came anyway, and modernity ended up demonizing those who didn’t embrace it as backward and uncivilized. The book’s protagonists may find contemporary adherents among people who choose older, slower, less efficient forms of technology—because bricking smartphones, for instance, is now its own kind of rebellion.
Dekeyser writes crisply, but the theory can swallow nonacademic readers sometimes. The lantern smashers, he writes, “open up the strategic-affective possibilities of a politics of the unknown.” Maybe that’s brilliant. Maybe it’s just hard to breathe in. But there’s more solace in the lineage traced by “Techno-Negative” than in many mainstream literary critiques of technology. Our hatred of social media or of artificial intelligence isn’t a new phenomenon; Dekeyser reminds us it’s a feeling with millennia behind it.
Resistance, in that framing, seems less futile when it’s part of a shared tradition—even if the book is focused more on lineage than on judging the effectiveness of past anti-technology movements. Many of the stories play out like tragic Icarus narratives: rebellion that succeeds in one brief, ecstatic burst, then fails resoundingly. We know, of course, the Luddites weren’t successful; over time “Luddite” became shorthand for technological dummies, which the book treats as undeserved. CLODO’s fires didn’t stop digital recordkeeping either—though they could barely have imagined Pokémon Go user-generated location data training automated delivery robots. Still, maybe the ancient Greeks had a point about keeping technē at bay—something about the damage it can do to how we think we’re meant to live. And despite the manifesto tone, the ending feels a little open, like the writer moved on mid-thought: ♦
