Nowtopian

Democracy Wall, January 2025.

I’ve spent a lot of years writing about work, technology, revolution, organizing, politics, etc. From the early days of Processed World (1981-1994) to my book Nowtopia (2008) and in dozens of essays on this blog and on Foundsf.org, I’ve addressed how the shape and control of work is the linchpin of how we live, of how we make life together. As I dug into history I realized that it was more than a century ago when a key battle was lost: who decides what kinds of technologies we use, why, and to what purpose? Who decides what work we do, how we do it, how the benefits of our efforts are distributed, and what should we do going forward? It is obvious that nothing remotely resembling a democratic process exists for any of these questions. And yet most people, if asked (which we never are!), would probably agree that a democratic process would be appropriate when it comes to determining the texture and purpose of our lives.

Or as Jathan Sadowski puts it in his new and very valuable book The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism

… risk governance transforms the public into janitors cleaning up the messes of corporations, militaries, police forces, and others who would rather shoot first and never ask questions later. The default is to allow capital to innovate without needing to ask for permission—or at least to move forward with as few imposed guardrails as possible. (p. 166)

As I learned of the long and admirable history of labor agitation and organizing, with its many epic battles and violent confrontations, I concluded that unions as we know them are as much as part of the problem as any other institution in our society. Not because the unions are guided by bad people (though too often they are!), or even that the urge to unionize itself is misguided. I’m in favor of people getting organized!

But the logic of AFL-CIO trade unionism, born in the 1935 Wagner Act and massively curtailed by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and ensuing McCarthyite Red Scare, is to narrow union goals to contractual agreements on wages and benefits, and to ensure a base line of safety standards for workers. (Not that the miserable condition of workplace safety and health across U.S. factories, refineries, offices, campuses, and highways is anything to be proud of!) But unions agreed to let owners of capital decide how to organize factories, which technologies to implement, etc., during bitter 19th century battles between capital and labor—when capital had all the power of the state and its police and military, in addition to private armies, at its disposal in that class war. In the recent past unions have capitulated to decades of neoliberal cutbacks, deindustrialization, automation, globalization, and ultimately presided over their own political demise, unwilling to break out of the legal shackles that prevent workers from exercising the power they (should) have over economic life. For all its limitations, the unionization wave of the 1930s was at least based on widespread workplace occupations, secondary strikes and picket lines, boycotts, etc. All those effective techniques were specifically made illegal by Taft-Hartley in 1947.

New Year’s Eve, Ocean Beach, Dec. 31 2024

If such militancy still existed and could prevail against the inevitable repression that the state and corporations would bring to bear, it’s still not clear that the working class, or its representative institutions, have much desire to wrest control over decisions about technology, production, or the very structure of the economy from the Lords of Capital. Perhaps with the coming disruptions that the Trump regime will impose on business, government, international borders, etc., not to mention the expected all-out assault on nonprofit organizations and anyone with even the vaguest of center-left politics, social opposition and revolt will be thrown back to basics. That is, finding power where it exists and can be wielded, at work, on the roads, at chokepoints throughout the just-in-time global economy. Once people begin to assert themselves in that direct way again, assuming they do, it’s long overdue to take up the deeper predicament we face over a profoundly unjust and uncontrollable technosphere, one that is using all the tools of behavior modification to keep people down and blaming each other for a fucked up capitalist world.

In the three books I’m going to discuss in this post, a process is unveiled starting with early industrialization at the beginning of the 1800s that has made the introduction of new technologies remarkably undemocratic. Technologies chosen by vested interests to protect and expand their power and wealth are trotted out as inventions and innovations but at no point are everyday people given a chance to evaluate the purpose, value, or potential consequences (good or bad)—not even elected representatives in government are given the opportunity. Any effort to address the consequences of a given technology or invention, no matter how life-altering it turns out to be, are well after the fact and treated by some as illegitimate regulations or impediments to their ability to profit freely. Obviously the current “large language model” system of artificial intelligence (AI) is a good example of a potentially powerful implementation of new software that might have far-reaching consequences in multiple areas.

In Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk the French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz provides a very useful look back at key technological introductions and the social conflicts that arose in the early 1800s. He helpfully frames his discussion with the term disinhibition by which he means two sides of the social integration of new technologies: contemplating danger and then normalizing it. He uses several key examples to show how regulations and safety standards and governmental authorizations were all used to legitimize technological faits accomplis, or technologies that were already being used, regardless of their demonstrably negative or risky qualities.

From a historiographical point of view, his work is doubly interesting because he is seeking to give voice back to the losers of history, to “reconstruct frameworks of intelligibility that their defeat rendered invisible. In so doing, it becomes clear that the opponents of these projects were not siding against innovation, but rather for their environment, their safety, their jobs, and for the preservation of forms of life they considered valuable.” (p. 8) Jathan Sadowski describes the way technologies are actually implemented in the 21st century: “Rather than a politics of refusal, we are given an ethics of acceptance. The driving concern is: How do you get people to trust a technology, integrate it into their lives, or just look the other way and not raise a fuss?” (p. 45)

The Luddites in the 1810s in England are the best example of a dynamic and widespread revolt against new looms and spinning machines that they knew would make their lives worse. No other group or movement has had a bigger impact historically on the question of technology and its social acceptance than the Luddites. Sadowski quotes the great historian of technology and labor processes David Noble saying, “the Luddites were perhaps the last people in the West to perceive technology in the present tense and to act upon that perception.” (p. 43)

Someone has begun doing 3D art on Democracy Walll… the sign follows at a readable size.

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