Please join us at the CAMRI seminar Thursday next week

Breaking Things at Work

Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam)

Date: Thursday, 7 October 2021
Time: 17.00-19.00
Location: Online event - Zoom Meeting (please register so that we can send you the Zoom link)

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/breaking-things-at-work-tickets-170527897532

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.

This talk is based on material from the book Breaking Things at Work, published by Verso in 2021. 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.

Biography

Gavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy: Intellectual Property and Labor under Neoliberal Restructuring (published by Routledge in 2019). He is a Contributing Editor at Jacobin, and a member of the Viewpoint Magazine editorial collective.


Further CAMRI Seminars this term:


Thursday, 28 October 2021

Benedetta Brevini (University of Sydney) - Is AI Good for the Planet?

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/is-ai-good-for-the-planet-tickets-170528308762


Thursday, 25 November 2021

Taina Bucher (University of Oslo) - Facebook

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/facebook-tickets-172310093127


Thursday, 09 December 2021

Matthew Flisfeder (University of Winnipeg) - Algorithmic Desire and the Ideology of Twenty-First Century Capitalism

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/algorithmic-desire-and-the-ideology-of-twenty-first-century-capitalism-tickets-170528374960




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