Hey, in about an hour at 8pm ET we're going to get together to talk about chapter 3 of Techno-Negative and the n+1 piece "Getting Off With the Luddites" by Sarah Thankam Mathews.

In this chapter I was keying in on the transformation of the state into a stricter antagonist of workers in favor of capitalists, and especially the development of law not just to criminalize Luddism, but to render it a capital offense that would precipitate death penalties.

Maybe this connection I'm drawing is strained, but I'm thinking a lot about the n+1 piece and the cultural wave today favors Luddism. Movements like DeFlock have faced some persecution, but it must be said how wildly popular it is; people really don't like cameras everywhere in their communities, watching children, watching people enjoying some time alone, etc...

But we shouldn't linger in the popularity of the Luddite movement, because Dekeyser doesn't. He writes about how the things people did to refuse technology - destroying looms, sabotaging machinery, breaking into buildings, etc... - all of that got criminalized as the state took up a role closely aligned with the fate of capitalists against a class of people who were increasingly illegalized (by the state, so we shouldn't lose sight of how contrived crime is...).

I guess this is a roundabout way of getting to observe that we should be prepared for the criminalization of things we do to refuse and destroy AI. Poisoning datasets, stopping data centers from being built, even facilitating people escaping the watchful eyes of literal and metaphorical algorithmic surveillance. I worry that the future of refusal is going to look more pitched and more confrontationally adversarial, as it was for the Knights of Ludd.

In truth, the state has characterized anti-data center organizers as "extremists" already; Flock's CEO has portrayed organizers against mass surveillance as "terrorists"; tech evangelists have characterized antipathy toward AI as "blasphemy".

None of this is to discourage organizing and activism against this project - far from it - but to identify the state's growing interest in this subject, and maybe to discuss the more-than-purely-economic transformation that took place during the time we just read about in Dekeyser's book. And to encourage people to think strategically about how to be safe while struggling for a better future.

When you're ready to join at 8p ET, you can click on this link or you can go here:

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

See you then.