A01=Gavin Mueller
aaron batstani
acceleration
accelerationism
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Amazon
anti-capitalism
Author_Gavin Mueller
automatic-update
automating workers
automation
capitalism
capitalism and technology
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=JHBA
Category=JPFC
Category=UFB
communism
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Pre-order
digital technology and labor
Elon Musk
Empire
eq_bestseller
eq_computing
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Facebook
fully automated luxury communism
Google
hacking
history from below
intellectual history from below
inventing the future
inventors
John Bellamy Foster
Karl Marx
Karl Marx and technology
labor history
labor movement
labour
labour movement
Language_English
luddites
marxism
marxism and technology
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
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Paul Mason
people's history
piracy
Price_€10 to €20
primitivists
progress
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Robert W. McChesney
Shoshana Zuboff
social media and work
socialism
socialism and technology
softlaunch
surplus populations
surveillance capitalism
technology
the age of surveillance capitalism
the left and technology
Twitter
UBI
universal basic income
utopia for realists
work
workers and technology
workers' movement
workplace conditions
Product details
- ISBN 9781786636775
- Weight: 176g
- Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 09 Feb 2021
- Publisher: Verso Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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In the Nineteenth-century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years the Luddites roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and manoeuvres that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. The movement has been derided by scholars as a backwards-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history; for Gavin Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of the antagonistic relationship between all workers, including us today, and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies. The luddites weren't primitive and they are still a force, however unconsciously, in the workplaces of the twenty-first century world.
Breaking Things at Work is an innovative rethinking of labour and machines, leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially threatened knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance-evading truckers driving across the continental United States. Mueller argues that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their spread wherever possible. The task is intimidating, but the seeds of this resistance are already present in the neo-Luddite efforts of hackers, pirates, and dark web users who are challenging surveillance and control, often through older systems of communication technology.
Breaking Things at Work is an innovative rethinking of labour and machines, leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially threatened knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance-evading truckers driving across the continental United States. Mueller argues that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their spread wherever possible. The task is intimidating, but the seeds of this resistance are already present in the neo-Luddite efforts of hackers, pirates, and dark web users who are challenging surveillance and control, often through older systems of communication technology.
Gavin Mueller is the author of Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy: Intellectual Property and Labor under Neoliberal Restructuring. He is a Contributing Editor at Jacobin, and a member of the Viewpoint Magazine editorial collective.
