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.