I’m sitting here with the hum of the office AC rattling in the background, thinking about how easy it is to want to throw my laptop out a window. It turns out, I’m not alone. Thomas Dekeyser, a geography professor at the University of Southampton, just dropped a book called *Techno-Negative* that dives into our long, complicated history of wanting to destroy the machines we’ve come to depend on. According to Misryoum, the book isn’t a manual—it’s more of a map for people who are just tired of being fed into the AI meat grinder.
Dekeyser breaks the whole thing down into three parts: Sovereignty, Revolt, and Withdrawal. He calls for something he labels ‘techno-abolitionism,’ which is basically just refusing to accept that new tech is inevitable. He writes, ‘There is insufficient hatred for this technological world.’ Honestly, I’ve considered using that line as my wallpaper. It hits differently when you look at how the ancient Greeks treated *technē*—their word for engineering—almost like a demonic influence that needed to be kept at a distance. They didn’t have robots, but they definitely had a vibe that tech was just a bit… wrong.
It’s not just the ancients, either. The medieval Church thought tech was basically the devil’s work—one pope was even accused of using a demonic talking statue to climb the ranks. Talk about early conspiracy theories. But once industrial capitalism hit, everything changed. Technology stopped being a demon and started being the boss. If you messed with a street lantern in 17th-century Vienna, they’d literally take your hand. That’s how much the state began to value machines over the people actually working them.
Resistance is hard, though. And let’s be real—it usually fails. Look at the Luddites. Their name is basically a joke now, even though they were just trying to survive. The book traces these ‘Icarus narratives,’ where rebels have a moment of glory before the status quo swallows them back up. Does that mean we should stop trying? Not necessarily. Dekeyser reminds us that hating the tech that monitors our location or ruins our focus isn’t a new personality trait; it’s a tradition. Maybe smashing a smartphone is just the modern version of burning a factory, even if it doesn’t change the world overnight.
Sometimes, the theory gets a little thick. Dekeyser can talk like an academic, dropping phrases about ‘strategic-affective possibilities,’ which can be a bit much if you’re just looking for a good read. But if you’re feeling burned out by the endless hype of generative AI, his book makes the act of saying ‘no’ feel a little less lonely. We aren’t the first ones to want to unplug, and we definitely won’t be the last.