The politics of technology is one of the most important issues in our industrialized and electronically interconnected world. It has been a burning question since the advent of modern-day capitalism when it became clear that it was the humans that were being appendaged to and ‘subjugated’ by the machines due to the class contradictions between the owners of the machines (capitalists) and the workers who used them in factories. As explained here, the factory owners capitalized on the efficiency and scale of production made possible by machinery by decimating local production in the colonies— as the British did to Indian textiles — and ramping up working hours and expanding the labour force by exploiting the severely underpaid labour of women and children. Charles Dickens’s Hard Times paints a dreary picture of a smog-filled urban world where people are mere ‘Hands’ and society operates on the logic of utilitarianism. As a literary product of its time, it gives us a look into how people related themselves to a regimen of mass production and machine-enabled labour discipline.
There are many such products of literature from the Industrial Revolution which give us insights into how machines were perceived as an overbearing force in society, and the fact that the common people and workers felt excluded from the decision-making on their effects on society. The Luddite movement of the early 19th century (1811) has often been misconstrued as disgruntled workers lashing out against mechanized production because they had been rendered obsolete.
Alternative perspectives say that the movement was actually a class struggle on behalf of the workers to mitigate their exploitation and push back on the loss of their rights at the hands of State and its wealthy patrons, the capitalists. It was born out of a desire to make the capitalists pay the workers a higher share of the profits made possible by new technologies, which were after all operated by workers themselves. Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine puts forward these perspectives to conclude that the Luddite struggle and its aftermath was about the question of who controls the fruits of technology and who gets to have a say in the ways that technology is allowed to develop in and affect society. This review of Merchant’s book notes that even though the movement was doomed to fail due to the overwhelming resources and power of the State, it was not a futile resistance and that the movement left a mark on popular culture, seen prominently in Frankenstein (1818).
As one of the earliest works of science fiction, Frankenstein questions not just the disruptions caused by technological advancements but the essential unfairness of who decides and controls its use vs. who suffers the consequences of such use. The titular Frankenstein is not the monster, as many people automatically believe, but its creator. He stands in for the figure of the young and brilliant inventor, the risk-taker who deserves to reap the billions as his reward. He distances himself from the consequences of his actions and lets loose the ‘product’ that he created, divesting himself of responsibility. The ‘monster’, on the other hand, represents the human misery inherent in the deployment of industrialized production in the service of the profit and glorification of the ‘owners’. The ultimately tragic fate of Frankenstein serves as a cautionary example of how an uncritical championing of ‘progress’ can eventually wreak havoc.
Author and tech commentator Cory Doctorow has written that science fiction is a Luddite literature. The Luddite’s goal was not to smash the looms and the machines by themselves. Those were their tactics and not their goals. Doctorow writes, “In truth, their goal was something closely related to science fiction: to challenge not the technology itself, but rather the social relations that governed its use.”
Situating social criticisms of technology in today’s context
Many people in communities around the world are organizing with the increased consciousness of the class character of technology. Even though many seem to have bought into the façade of ‘Digital India’ and the exclusionary infrastructure being put in place through things like ‘ed tech’, Aadhaar, financial surveillance (UPI), rapid proliferation of facial recognition (Digi Yatra, for example), there are many voices of critical dissent that are waking up to the fact that the universalist connotations being plastered on tech may not be the true picture. Genres like science fiction and ‘dystopian’ cyberpunk, which prominently feature ‘rule by robots’ or a techno-feudalist class of overlords in their plots, convey cultural anxiety over the absence of democratic control of where technology is leading society.
Apart from the frequent outrages regarding social media content moderation policies, there is also the question of increased weaponization of technology against civilians. The genocide against Gaza against Palestinians by Israel has also become a testing ground for American robotics company Ghost Robotics. The smooth yet disturbing, inhuman movements of these unfeeling machines, as they sniff out civilians and resistance fighters in the streets and tunnels, should send shivers down anyone’s spine and provide an unfiltered view of the world to come. Similar to this, New York’s police (NYPD) unveiled Boston Robotics’ ‘crime-fighting robot dog’ as a grim foreshadowing of the treatment that the working class and the marginalized can expect. As I read somewhere online, it is not a matter of the city funding the robot dogs instead of the needs of the people. The robots are there for precisely when the needs of the people outweigh their compulsion to ask for things ‘nicely’, within the framework of ‘permitted’ means of protest.
Since Edward Snowden in 2011, everyone knows that premier U.S. intelligence and security agencies have backdoors into all the products of American Big Tech. The emergence of the rival TikTok has caused much consternation, with India blocking it in June 2020 and now the Americans threatening to do the same if its Chinese parent ByteDance does not hand it over to an American company. While social media was once hyped for proving an alternative space for people to mobilize and connect, the talk of ‘enshittification’ of platforms is now common, and the issues of hate speech, trolling, unreliable information, and ceaseless monetization of every inch of the online world go hand-in-hand with the rapidly deteriorating economic conditions of people the world over.
Western governments are laying the groundwork for internet censorship in the U.S. and the U.K., something which India already does through its IT Rules, 2021, its IT Act, and the numerous internet suspensions and blocking orders it keeps enforcing to cull politically undesirable speech. The ‘soft censorship’ imposed by these platforms’ obscure algorithms and content-moderation decisions (like allegations of shadow-banning levelled by users of all stripes), and inadequate revenue-sharing has led to the creative arts being made even more precarious than before, while right-wing propaganda dressed up as ‘journalism’ is able to muscle its way to the top off the backs of millions in funding from vested interests.
If not liberated from the hold of the ruling class, tech becomes yet another tool of oppression rather than a means of liberation. Like this Google engineer refusing to enable genocide through the company’s Project Nimbus, many more of us need to be conscious of the class character of tech. Google and other tech mega-corporations have resisted democratic oversight and scrutiny for years, and have convinced many that tech takes its ‘natural course’ through society. Nothing could be more wrong. How tech develops and shapes society is under the conscious control of those who benefit from it as a class. It is time for us to disregard our complacency and have a closer, more critical look at how the machines are ruling us.
Arjun Banerjee is a writer and political commentator. He is a postgraduate in English literature from the University of Delhi. He writes about current events and culture
