Breaking Things at Work

First an foremost: You're better off reading many of the books that he uses as resources before you are this one because he super-oversimplifies everything in ways that remove context and information. (This includes Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks and Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil.)

Second, he intentionally erases a huge chunk of history in order to (attempt to) achieve his stated goal in the introduction, which is to convince people to be Marxists. He completely writes out any time anarchists even participate in something, and it's particularly egregious when talking about the IWW (an organisation that has been very much shaped by interactions with anarchists). He intentionally overlooks people (socialists and anarchists) who could make his point simply because they can't be vaguely referenced as 'communist' and co-opted into Marxist thought. It's really blatantly frustrating.

That said, there are some points where I was made curious. But that would've happened with any other book, to be honest.

I found the historic part of this book (first two chapters) interesting, but not particularly helpful politically; I guess it's nice to rehabilitate the Luddites (and the anarchic style of organizing is interesting), but I'm not sure there's so much to learn from. The last two chapters I found more engaging. Particularly striking was the author's finding that people (workers, consumers) already engage in anti-automation, Luddite practices (like stealing from a self-checkout, or messing with food delivery robots in a fast food restaurant) and that it's good Marxist practice to build on that. Or this finding: "A large majority (85%) said they would support restricting workforce automation to jobs that are dangerous or unhealthy for humans to do." [^Pew] So as an overview of what automation currently does and how the Left can relate to it, the book was good; as a source of ancient wisdom from the Luddites, not so much.

[^Pew] www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/08/how-americans-see-automation-and-the-workplace-in-7-charts/

This book deserves a better review than I can give right now, but here goes nothing.

Suffice to say that while I was reading the book, I thought of a lot of people who I wanted to send copies to, because it touches on problems of human autonomy in a digitally mediated and increasingly digitally constrained age. In other words, it is relevant to pretty much all of us (including a lot of us who don’t think that automation and AI will come for them). It builds a compelling argument that (if nothing else) we should be thinking hard about why and how people actively break technology. I was less convinced by the book’s ultimate conclusion that we should be going substantially backwards in technology, for a variety of reasons—but those reasons deserve, and might even get, a whole essay. And that ultimately feels like quibbling—the core thrust of the book is important, timely, and forceful. As a result it’s a book worth reading and grappling with.

A note on style and accessibility: Given the topic, and that the author is an academic Marxist, this could have been dense and unreadable. Instead it is brisk, pretty tightly edited, and jargon-free. If you’re concerned about that, don’t be - pick it up.