Techno-negative : a long history of refusing the machine / Thomas Dekeyser.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dekeyser, Thomas, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Technology--Social aspects.

Technology.

Technology--Moral and ethical aspects.

Technology--History.

Technological innovations.

Physical Description:

233 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2026]

Summary:

"A radical history of technology told through acts of resistance, not progress. The history of technology is often told as a history of progress, moving optimistically and inevitably from one emancipatory invention to the next. Techno-Negative turns this story on its head, taking us on a journey to the critical junctures where people have pointedly rejected and tried to undo, rather than adopt, new technologies. Beginning with Archimedes's decision to destroy his own war machines, this book explores the will to negate technology as a deep -- but persistently condemned -- current in history. As he presents a new theory of technological power, Thomas Dekeyser argues that technologies, never neutral, operate as 'ontological policing,' drawing the boundaries of humanness as they are unequally leveraged by select groups. Looking beyond the Luddites to medieval monks banningtools, seventeenth-century loom burners, revolutionary lantern smashers, and computer arsonists, Dekeyser shows how people have long recognized and resisted the machine as a violent, sometimes deadly force implicated in defining who counts as human and whose lives (and ways of life) are worth saving. Against the ubiquitous demands to reform or accelerate technological 'advancement' that have failed to disrupt our present, Dekeyser proposes a spirited alternative: abolition. He challenges us to rethink the terms of our technological present and future. In a time when Big Tech grows increasingly enmeshed with authoritarian control, Techno-Negative is a conceptual declaration, and source of inspiration, for those searching for a new paradigm of technological politics."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: Burning Down Artifice: Technology, Negativity, and Ontological Policing

Delay: Homo Humanus and the Ontological Horror of Technē

Prohibition: Medieval Demonology of Machines

Breaking: State Luddites, Predators, and a Capitalist Theory of Law

Indifference: Techno-Colonialism, Onticide, and the Limits of Posthumanism

Extinguishing: Vandals and Epistemics on Black Boulevard

Exodus: Phobia and (Techno-)Rationalism in an Epoch of Planetary Technicity

Arson: An Entropic History of Computation

Conclusions. Against a Humanist Politics: Techno-Abolitionist Beginnings

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-219) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Techno-negative.

ISBN:

9781517917739

1517917735

9781517917722

1517917727

OCLC:

1576251811

Publisher Number:

90104345969