iStock/davidp Luddites are having a moment. While today, Luddite is used as an insult toward those who reject technology or are simply inept, it turns out that the term has an exciting backstory. The original Luddites were a proto-labor movement at a time when unions were illegal. Large, mechanized looms produced lower quality cloth for far less time and money, in part because fewer workers were needed, and those who were needed could be unskilled and were often children. Mechanized looms were a technological marvel and economic boon for those who owned the cutting-edge machinery, precisely because these tools reduced the need for labor to produce cloth, which in turn reduced the power of the few textile laborers that remained. Important parallels exist between today’s gig workers and cloth makers in the early factory period [1]. The Luddites are one part of the broader story of the transition from feudalism to modern capitalism and the re-negotiation of access to land, food, and housing through a familiar pattern of disenfranchisement and collective action [2].
Luddite in that colloquial sense of rejecting technology resonates with people today. Luddite clubs, digital fasts, and digital sobriety groups are part of a growing grassroots effort to resist the intentionally designed addictive and distracting attributes of smartphones, apps, and constant digital distraction [3].
What is striking about these grassroots efforts to reject technology is that they are largely separate from the growing body of academic literature revealing the profound social impacts of ubiquitous phone, Internet, and social media access. The recognition that specific technological objects have been designed to steal our time and attention is occurring both in academia and among the general public. This development is hopeful and a way of liberating the self from (often corporate) control of our attention, time, and money. Yet, technology also has beneficial, enjoyable, and useful attributes.
When Technology Calls the Shots
The most extreme form of powerlessness over technology involves compulsive behaviors (e.g., online gambling, gaming, or pornography addiction), but the feeling that our technological choices are beyond our control is far more widespread. Technological powerlessness appears in two ways: a lack of real choice in which technologies we adopt and a lack of agency in how those tools are used.
This lack of agency is manifested in statements like “I can’t live without my phone” or “I can’t work without a laptop”—statements that conflate using any technology with using technologies that are harmful or using technology in harmful ways. It is easy to believe that technological choices are a monolith and that the choice is to live without the benefits of technology or to accept loss of privacy and loss of agency.
There is some truth to the notion that it is difficult to opt out of technology. Loss of privacy and agency are often literally encoded in terms and conditions statements that are required to access certain tools at all. Doctorow identified switching cost as the factor that allows social media platforms to provide worse user and then client experiences [4]. Since its coinage, enshittification has been more broadly applied to websites, applications, and even computer functionality as these tools are intentionally made to work less well for users while enriching oligarchs and billionaires.
The concepts of powerlessness and overwhelm are equally not limited to technology. Sludge describes processes that are unnecessarily burdensome, annoying, or difficult—in other words, processes that are designed to make users give up [5]. This idea is not inherently a technological one, but technology is often the means by which processes are designed to work smoothly or not at all.
The counter to this powerlessness is action. The tricky part here is that sludge works by making action within existing systems feel impossible. But we have the power to opt out, at least some of the time.
So, what does it look like to opt in, not to everything, but to the technology that we want and need?
Opting in to the tech we want and need means being intentional with technology choices and time.
Opting in to the tech we want and need means being intentional with technology choices and time. And that means rejecting the narratives of big tech and following paths that lead away from corporate control toward shared, nonproprietary, or communi-ty-rooted alternatives.
Along with my predecessors for this magazine, I have written about collective technology decisions and how collective action drives adoption [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]. This Special Issue on Locating Accountability and Centering the Margins for Ethical Technology Futures pushes further, asking who gets left behind in home care innovation, how collective care might work, and how marginalized voices can reshape STEM and AI. These are the places where small groups can still effect meaningful change.
Collective action is critical, whether through groups of individuals acting in concert to push for institutions to make different choices in adopting technology, or to regulate the ways in which technology companies deploy their tools. We can also make individual choices about the technology we choose to use and what we choose to reject. Just realizing that we have power over the tech we use is liberating. Even more liberating? Encouraging the institutions we work with to reject big tech and to make more critical and informed technology choices.
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Thinking about rejecting big tech? Here are some ideas
Alternate platforms to those offered by large corporations exist for most everyday tasks. Some of these options are good enough to replace mainstream corporate platforms, without entirely disrupting life.
I have had my own spotty success in rejecting big tech. I use Tidal, which pays more to artists than other streaming services, and Brave as a browser for their privacy protections. I experimented with OfficeLibre for this article and have kicked around the idea of getting a Proton Mail account for a while. For more advice and options for making intentional technology decisions, see [11] and [12].
To read more about the Luddites and the parallels to today’s high-tech industries, I suggest Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine [1]. Astra Taylor explores the transition between feudal society and industrialization, and how those changes impact us now in Age of Insecurity [2].
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Nicholas Zacchia for his comments and questions, which helped me to clarify this article.
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