The year is 2018, and the internet is about to come under attack.

The setting for the event is rather mundane: It is noon, and a group of people are hanging out beneath a bridge on the outskirts of Berlin. Despite the inconspicuous appearances, however, these are no ordinary workers or loiterers, and this is no ordinary bridge. As the anonymous crew knows all too well, this bridge holds more than motorized traffic. The bridge is a central node in the capital city’s connective tissue, one of the pulmonary veins pumping digital oxygen in and out of crucial governmental, corporate, and residential districts. Opening an unsigned hatch, the group stares at their target: an immense nestling of fiber-optic cables linked to power cables. Time for execution—drain the cables with bottles of flammable liquid, throw a match, escape. By the time the police arrive, the culprits have long vanished, leaving behind little more than molten fiberglass, blackened transmitters, and torn pieces of insulation. The result is an entire region swamped into an internet blackout. In the years that follow, anti-internet arsonists escalate their fiery intents, creating a string of attacks on fiber-optic networks in Munich, Toulouse, Paris, and plenty of other digital crossroads.

But why hurt what you adore? The connectivity infrastructures under assault are the very mechanisms allowing the attackers to communicate not only with one an-other, sustaining a joyful social existence, but with the wider world, giving their actions an intelligible life after the flames turned into embers and, finally, into gray ashes swept up by a cleaning contractor. Why destroy what sustains you? The attacks appear irrational, hypo-critical even . . . and yet, I must admit, they also make me chuckle striking a sinister chord with my own melancholy in the face of infra-structures that all too often don’t know which side to pick: a project of liberation or an experiment in the macabre management and exploitation of people and planet?

Having spent the last five years sharing stories of technological refusal with a wide range of audiences, I have come to the comforting realization that I am not entirely alone in my pessimism. Most would never act upon such urges, but plenty have imagined what it would be like, how it would feel in the bones, to destroy a technological object that, momentarily or lastingly, appears hostile to one’s ability to endure, let alone to flourish. Such dark dreams abound today, for technological modernization has proven much too poisonous, and much too boring, for centuries-old technological optimism to still impress many; not least, modern technology’s solidification into the oligarchic power of “Big Tech,” its mass harnessing of attention, its hyper-commodification of social relations, its islands of e-waste, its unforeseen powers of surveillance and policing, and its proletarianization of work forces in cities and factories around the globe have taught us this much. Faced with the contemporary intensity of technological violence, plenty of us have felt the pull of techno-pessimism: We par-take in digital-detox programs, anti-Google efforts, and campaigns against the automation of labor through artificial intelligence, or, simply, we wonder whether a life lived without internet connection or phone emails might relieve us from stress. Once we start looking carefully, we find that this suspicion of technology is not an anomalous affect—belonging solely to the anti-internet arsonist with a zeal for Heidegger and insurrectionary anarchism—but a feeling growing in intensity, ambition, and collectivity, haunting the dazzling march of technological innovation.

This book traces the often animated, sometimes bewildering, history of this feeling. What we find is that, far from a recent phenomenon emerging in a vacuum, an undercurrent of refusal under-pins and pierces the long histories that make up the modern world’s technological horizons. In fact, it permeates the history of technology, at every step and turn. Techno-Negative challenges the familiar tales of technological advancement as ones of invention, acceleration, and emancipation, employed by the West to separate itself from its “Others.” Against the stories of technological progression as the smooth succession of inventions by genius interlocutors, in this bookit is presented as a political battlefield fraught with tension, contes-tation, and contradiction. It uncovers fragments of the too-little-known, and oft-perplexing, existence of a tenacious, fierce urge to negate life’s technologization, and the equally persistent impulse in technological orthodoxy to condemn and repress this urge.

A journey into the world of “techno-negativity” will illuminate the conceptual stakes of contemporary techno-politics: How to think a negative relation to technology at a moment when technological devices, infrastructures, data, and algorithms are so omnipresent they engulf us? To critically think twenty-first-century artifice, the book claims, we need to explore the conceptual and political paths opened by refusal rather than limiting ourselves to the task of critiquing the dreams, stories, and innovations that have accumulated into our technological moment, even if such historico-theoretical analyses offer us crucial lessons about the intricacies of technological power. These do allow us to shed those genealogies that Siegfried Zielinski refers to as “comforting fables about a bright future, where everything that ever existed is subjugated to the notion of technology as a power to ‘banish fear’ and a ‘universal driving force.’” In the aftermath of numerous critical histories of technology, few would still embrace a progressivist historiography that casts technology as natural development, as the benevolent and sacrosanct augmentation of human ability. To name but two of the twentieth century’s harshest critics of technology that will be introduced more carefully later in this book, Martin Heidegger presents technological modernization as the reduction of human and nonhuman life to “standing-reserve,” and in Jacques Ellul, it is the becoming-autonomous of technology at the expense of human liberty. Troubled by the sustained tendency toward linearity and homogenization of these genealogies, theorist-historians “from below” draw us into the multifaceted and uneven geographies, temporalities, cultures, and effects that have long in-formed the power relations inherent in technological invention and diffusion. Not least, Claude Alvares has taken us into the rich worlds of non-European invention while recasting Western technological ascendency as a matter of greed, arrogance, and aggression, while Sadie Plant has retheorized the emergence of the computer by centering gendered labor and machinic inventions by women. For all their critical merit, what remains missing and unthink-able within these dominant genealogies is the disobedient subject. In Heidegger and Ellul one will be hard-pressed to find any mention of the lived embodiments of their own crucial counterpoint to the technological optimism of their era and will even go out of their way, as Heidegger does, to ridicule the “stultified compulsion . . . to rebel helplessly against [technology] and curse it as the work of the devil.” In the histories from below, one finds accounts of diverse up-takes of technology, but little in the name of refusal, of dismantling and rejection.

What explains this erasure of refusal from the histories of technology? We might argue that the critical thinker can only work with what she finds in the archive, and, as it happens, Achille Mbembe is right when he tells us that the archive is always a product of judgment, of the selective exercise of a specific authority invested in a particular historical narration and the taming of others, and so is Christina Sharpe when highlighting the accumulated erasures of (in her case, anti-Black) violence from the archival record. But as Sharpe’s own (his)story of slavery’s afterlives demonstrates brilliantly, tales of violence and refusal abound in the archive, if only one learns how to conduct archival imagining, looking close enough between the official lines and in the informal cracks of the archive. The deeper problem is that much of modern thought on technology is still tied to what Frédéric Neyrat, in reference to the famous Hungarian American cybernetician, calls the “Von Neumann Syndrome,” whereby moderns are invested in thinking technology only in terms of its inevitable take-up and extension, however beautiful or gruesome that trajectory may be. Technological refusal remains something to be suspicious of, to be shunned, as if the embodied experiment with criticality is akin to its soiling, rather than its productive expansion into more-than-discursive registers. We need to shed the fear of techno-negativity, which for too long has been scorned as a misguided or naive, even infantile, project that runs counter to any meaningful formation of technological politics.

What is at stake is more than historical curiosity. By sustaining the structural absence of technological refusal, we lose the opportunity to illuminate the problem of contemporary technological poli-tics anew. This task is an urgent one. From the denial of gig workers’ rights and the large-scale extension of surveillance and policing abilities, to Big Tech’s desire to shape electoral politics and the environmental collapse fueled by immense data centers, the terrors as-sociated with contemporary technologization are becoming increasingly hard to ignore. But the irony of our times is that we, like the arsonists, are all dependent upon this technological present whose promise, whose tales of emancipation, fewer and fewer believe in. This is the affective paradox underpinning what in this book I call the “techno-negative”: longing for the dismantling of what sustains you. This is not the “cruel optimism” described by Lauren Berlant, where one holds an attachment to what is, ultimately, averse to your flourishing, but its inversion: a disbelief in what holds the conditions of one’s ability to live on. The data, the applications, the algorithms, the cloud storage, the mobile devices, and the wearables we might disdain are the same ones that—in empowering much of our per-sonal, social, and working lives—constitute us. The imaginative challenge for contemporary technological politics is: How to refuse what is part of you? To take on contemporary technology is to engage in a struggle over what should, and what shouldn’t, constitute what is properly “human.”

To address this philosophical battle, we need to understand it as but one episode within the extensive struggle for a dominant theory of the human that marks the conflicted histories of technology. Across crucial episodes within the history of technology, the negotiation over the status of “the human” in the face of technicity has survived under different names and been refigured on shifting grounds. For this reason, we need to bring out the demons the archive carries in its texts, its gaps, its absences, and its outsides, by tracking the changing ecologies of technological refusal. In every case, we will encounter a rich cast of figures, from machine-breakers in ancient Greece to computer arsonists in 1980s France via executions of inventors in the modern world, with each invested in the dissolution of a given technological construct, revealing that the history of technology is as much a story of invention as the genealogy of a struggle to undo it. Each in their own ways, they will bring us into the book’s central argument: The extension and expansion of the technical realm is inextricably tied up with a political struggle for a conception of the human, for an understanding of the “human self,” what con-stitutes us, and what doesn’t. Tracing the historical manifestations of technological refusal brings us, this book reveals, into how a period, a people, an individual, understands itself as a “self,” as a “subject” with recourse, however tentatively, to the category of “humanity.” Before untangling the conceptual complexities of human-technology relations, we must first draw the contours of this book’s object.

Object: Techno-Negativity

Two central terms guide this book. The first—the “techno” in techno-negativity—speaks to the precise terrain of intervention for the protagonists of this book. Its form is consistent through-out: the invention, production, and social uses of artificial objects (components, devices, systems). In this book, the terrain of such objects is defined neither by a general logic (e.g., what “governs” in Foucauldian technique, or what “enframes” in Heidegger), nor by a precise end (e.g., what rationalizes in Ellul, or what takes nature as means in Arendt). Instead, I take it first and foremost as a material category—those material expressions emergent from the inventive procedures translating earthly provisions into resources of practical, aesthetic, and economic concern—whose artificiality emerges from their being generated by, and, in having their own force of becoming, from their coming to generate, human life. In this book, which material objects exactly constitute the technological, as well as the particular coordinates of “artificiality” vis-à-vis the human, will shift in tune with the historically specific conceptions offered by those refusing technology’s invitation.

“Negativity” brings us into the mode of relation to technology this book is concerned with. Unlike an affirmative relation (“yes”), nega-tivity calls for neither acceptance nor the acceleration of technological objects. Escaping the lure of a reformist connection (“yes, but”), nega-tivity also denies the promise of their adaptation, redirection, and im-provement. The negative prefers the discursive category of the “no,” blocking and declining rather than embracing and creating. Like some of its scholarly companion figures—including the “queer negative,” “afro-pessimist,” and “crip negative” —the techno-negative is profoundly suspicious of calls for concession and resolution. Instead, we encounter a relentless drive toward “refusal”: the radical undoing of one or more technological objects. For all its discursive force, long admired by philosophers ranging from Gandhi to Marcuse, techno-negativity must not in this book be understood as a metaphor, but as a diverse range of concrete phenomena in which artificial objects come under assault materially, socially, and discursively.

Negativity’s (non)relation to technology cannot be understood, strictly speaking, as a matter of dialectics. Refusal is not a secondary response (an anti-thesis) to a technological status quo (a thesis), as if the latter could ever exist without already inhabiting its own undoing. As the book will reveal, technology is as much a story of invention as it is of collapse. Each technological object is co-constituted by its own dismantling by way of human resistance, built-in obsolescence, or an inhuman force of entropy. For our purposes, one cannot speak of technological objects before considering the modes of refusal, the spirit of techno-negativity, that co-constitute them. This book thus contests the contemporary insistence on the primacy of technological success stories—when the technology performs as intended—and aims at rediscovering the central role the thinking and practices of the techno-negative play in shaping the trajectories of technological objects and their implications.

From “below the radar” interventions to formal challenges, from tools of the law to explosive weapons, from indifference to arson, from the protectionism of the conservative to the political “no” of the militant, the techno-negative stories we will tell undermine the one-dimensional domain of a reactionary romanticism, infantile primitivism, or, more generously, workerist concern of the Luddite to which technological refusal is commonly reduced, as if outside of difference, history, and geography. The book showcases how techno-negativities are propelled by shifting, often ambiguous, and at times even contradictory ways of operating, sets of motivations, and affective logics. But they are never arbitrary, unscathed by the material, political, and philosophical forces from which they emerge.

The book showcases that each mechanism of power—from the Greek politeia and medieval pastoral power to cybernetic principles of control—coincides with its own specific instantiations of the techno-negative. Of central importance, the book argues, are two socio-economic upheavals, producing distinct modes of refusal. First, the growing to dominance of Western capitalism in the early nineteenth century shook up existent expressions of technological refusal, supplementing techno-negativity’s functioning as the expansion of social and religious sovereignty with its materialization as the struggle against dominant interests. Second, capitalism’s restructuring in the early twentieth century by way of technology’s deepening expan-sion into everyday life crucially triggered a third mode of refusal, onecentered on principles of disconnection and opacity. Governed by a logic of supplementation, not substitution, these shifts serve to orga-nize this book into three parts; refusal as “sovereignty,” as “revolt,” and as “withdrawal.”

Running across them is the stubborn recurrence of a surprising, more ontological scale of power. The book argues that technological refusal can rarely be reduced to the spheres of practical considerations (e.g., will the artifact improve the quality of life?), economic considerations (e.g., will it increase or reduce productivity?), or ethical considerations (e.g., will it facilitate or rupture social relations?) commonly assigned to it. The battle for and against a technological object rarely proceeds without some claim that asserts itself, implicitly or less so, in the domain of political ontology. Approached from the vantage point of its refusal, the history of technology presents it-self as a crucial terrain in which claims to humanity are fought, where the technological facilitates the extension, solidification, rupture, or negation of a particular conception of being properly human, with the concomitant drawing and redrawing of the dividing lines be-tween the human and its “Others.” Only by gaining a thorough grasp of how technology is intricately tied up with what the book terms this “ontological policing” can we begin to fully understand it as a political technique, one that governs by way of ascribing some beings with the luxury of “humanity” while excluding others. The central target of Techno-Negative is this onto-political life of technology. If we leave this life unexamined, and thus in place, our techno-politics run the risk of reproducing old, and introducing new, models of domination, of falling victim to the alluring but dangerous promise of a techno-logical imagination based on a humanist idea of value, the self, and community that cannot help but produce its own outsides.

Target: Ontological Policing

To approach technology as a matter of “ontology”—as the examina-tion of the order of being—is to foreground the question: What is the nature of humanity’s relationship to technology? Do technologies drive us away from, or toward, being properly human? Do they constitute and expand, or undermine, human subjectivity? These queries are both the founding questions—variously investigated through the (un)weaving of the pairs human/nonhuman, mind/world, organic/inorganic, subject/object, human/animal, artifice/nature—and the terrain of much debate, for much philosophical reflection on the technological in Western thought. Six conceptions of human-technology relationality dominate debates on the politics of technology, ones that are far more usefully delineated by way of a certain conceptual con-sistency rather than through any neat chronological periodization.

Most prominent in ancient Greek philosophies of technē, the first insists on a mimetic relationship between technology and the human, whereby the former can only ever imitate the latter, as per the ontological distinction between natural objects (physis as self-reproductive) and artifacts (technē as nonreproductive).16 The second conception is the Promethean foregrounding of a compensatory relation. The human, in this reading popularized by the negative anthropology of German philosophers of technology Arnold Gehlen and Günther Anders, is born unfinished and instinctually deprived, and thus, un-like other animals, can only ensure its survival by compensating for its originary lack through the development of artifice.17 A third theorization picks up the impulse of this conception but dampens its anthropological claims, asserting a relation of extension that centers, as Ernst Kapp and Marshall McLuhan have, technology as a projecting-out of human organology.18 A fourth conception reverses the logic of extension to assert an atrophic relation of human-technology pairings, insisting on either the withering-away of human bodily function and cognition (as in Paul Alsberg’s and Ray Lankester’s notions of physiological regression and degeneration),19 or their taking on of a merely parasitic function in the face of an autonomous technological realm, as suggested by Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and (to a lesser degree) Langdon Winner. A fifth theory offers a causal relation of the human-technology pair, one that, according to Heidegger, originates in the Aristotelian notion of ktema praktikon (practical equipment), and continues to dominate many popular accounts of technology today. Arendt and Heidegger are two of its most prominent philosophers and vehement critics, showing how an insistence on artificial objects as instrumentality (“man-made means to an end established by man”) ignores both the catastrophic result of subordinating the world to questions of serviceability—the “homo faber” who, in Arendt, cannot but engender what she calls “earth alienation”—and the ontological potential for technology as a positive force “unveiling” the world to the human, rather than flattening it to our access to it. A sixth conception, articulated by a number of dominant posthumanist theorists, prioritizes a constitutive relation to force us to think the human not only as co-emergent with technical evolution (as per Simondon’s theory of transduction and in the phenomenological stance of Don Ihde), but as always already coproduced by it (Hayles; Stiegler).

What is at stake in each of these six conceptions is the onto-logical status of the human vis-à-vis technology. In the following chapters, the book will return to these heterogeneous conceptions by showing how they align with, and are distinct from, the words and practices of techno-negativity. For now, what is crucial is that, across them, technology is conceived of as, variously, the bringing-into-being, or the threatening of, a normative theory of the properly “human.” Let’s take two examples. In the compensatory conception of human-technology relationality, artificial objects allow the human to become its whole self, simultaneously lesser than and distinct from other forms of animal life. The atrophic theory of relational-ity presents those same objects—particularly in their machinic, self-regulatory form—as a threat to the wholeness of organic human life. What emerges across the six conceptions is a series of distinct theories of the properly human with its own foundations, contents, and boundaries (however porous, as per the posthumanist conception), alongside a “nonhuman” Other on the basis of each theory’s own predicaments (the animal, the inanimate, the inorganic, the artificial, the object, and so on). What is commonly missing from these theorizations is a self-reflective thrust: a consideration of this ontological labor as more than neutral metaphysical contemplation. What is forgotten is that ontology is not simply the framing of the world but its production; not signification or categorization but creation. Or, as Roberto Esposito writes in his argument for the study of political ontology, “every philosophical definition of being entails presuppositions and effects of a political nature.”

Heidegger suggests there is an indissoluble connection between ontology and politics when, in his Letter on Humanism, he brings us into the extensive legacies of the “human” as a political category in service of dominating a “nonhuman” other. For Heidegger, humanism has many different lives, each time taking on a form appropriate to its precise circumstances. The first humanism, which has roots in ancient Greece but only comes into full fruition in ancient Rome, could only ever be thought by opposing homo humanus (who embodies the Greek virtue of education) to homo barbarus. Later, Renaissance humanism would continue this separation, with the in-humanity of homo barbarus embodied by Gothic Scholasticism, while Christian Humanism would prop up the humanity of the human in contradistinction to another inhumanity: a Deitas to which man is a Child. For all their differences in purpose, teaching, and realization, these humanisms agree, according to Heidegger, that the humanitas of homo humanus is determined on the basis of “an already established interpretation of nature, history, world, and the ground of the world, that is, of beings as a whole.” But for Heidegger, the problem is less that the human, and their humanity, manifest them-selves as a grounding at the expense of another, than that, in remain-ing metaphysical rather than ontological, they take the essence of “man” to be obvious as, simply, animal rationale. What this ignores, Heidegger suggests, is an appreciation of what ontologically distinguishes “man” from other living beings (plants, God, animals): its access to the truth of Being, the truly distinctive character of man’s Dasein. Not only does Heidegger, in this gesture, ontologize human-ism (providing human superiority with a basis in ontology, and thus extending it); he also fails to sufficiently investigate, by relegating to the past, the procedures of ontological exclusion his Letter opens up, conveniently ignoring his own commitment to the dehumanization of Jewish people along the way.

Others reveal that the age-old problem of ontological differentiation, far from extinguished, saturates the contemporary conditions of political subjectivity, action, community, and emancipation. Homo sacer (Agamben), the Black (Wilderson), the queer (Edelman), woman (Irigaray), the colonized (Mbembe), the savage (Arendt);28 these are but a few names given to the contemporary embodiment of ontological exclusions. The result is a series of figures who main-tain an uncertain recourse to humanity, either occupying the hybrid space between the human and its Others (e.g., Agamben’s “wolf-man,” Mbembe’s “living dead”), or an outside space removed from subjecthood in all its forms (e.g., Warren’s Black as nonbeing). The social, discursive, and institutional carving out and management of dividing lines between the properly human and its abyssal Others it relies upon is what I call “ontological policing.” If policing (in its everyday uses) is the governing of social, material, and territorial borders by way of inclusion-exclusion procedures, then ontological policing is its ontological twin, incorporating some beings within the discourse of proper humanity while either sidelining or directly ex-pelling others.

Ontological policing has two central features. The first is its logic of inclusive exclusion. Lee Edelman writes: “There can be no ‘all’ without the ‘not all’ inaccessible to thought; no life, no mode of being, without the mode of nonbeing posed against it.” The figure of the nonhuman is externalized, only to be reintegrated as an Other (an object, thing, animal, commodity) against which the human at-tempts (at various rates of success) to prop up the unity, the dis-cursive comprehensibility, of its own world. As a constitutive outside (rather than an absolute outside), the nonhuman helps produce an order of being to structure a given world, haunting it as the limit to intelligibility, the specter of its impossibility.34 The second feature is its orientation toward differentiation. Schemes of ontological policing are always tied up with regimes of valuation; the ontological order of being is the social ordering of being. Such schemes give meaning to—that is to say, legitimize—the enactment of differential rights, capacities, and access to differently ordered beings within the same space or time.35

As a relentless battle for an updated conception of what counts as properly “human,” the history of technology is a privileged (but by no means only) site of ontological policing. By way of technology and its refusal, ontological policing establishes lines between the human and its Others. This book aims to gain purchase on this pre-cise ontological labor of technological advancement. Too often, when addressing the question of technology’s ontological work, technological innovation is thought of as the progressive blurring of human-nonhuman demarcations, a process of intensifying hybridization of human and technological life that makes any attempt as separating the one from the other a futile endeavor. We are all increasingly, the argument goes, cyborgs ontologically inseparable from our tech-nological augmentations. Complicating the singular progressivism of such ontological claims about technological histories, the book shows that each technological innovation uniquely carries within it a specific potential crisis in existing models of the properly human, including, but largely exceeding, tales of ontological hybridization. Paying attention to histories of techno-negativity, we find that theintroduction of new technologies is often tied up not with ontological hybridization but with the production of novel ontological exclusions or peripherizations, and the procedures of dehumanization, rehu-manization, or subhumanization these give rise to. Such practices of ontological policing are inevitably, and profoundly, political, for they cannot be thought outside of their material expressions, their trans-lation into an uneven social organization of life.

Despite this, contemporary techno-politics fails to sufficiently think and confront ontological policing. My argument is that three dominant strands of techno-political thought in particular run the risk of reproducing and magnifying, rather than undermining, the violent humanism expressed by ontological policing. These strands take the form of three figures: the techno-reformist, the posthumanist, and the techno-rationalist.

Let me introduce each briefly. The reformist is the figure who identifies in our technological present a series of important biases and shortcomings. They follow a modest logic of correction and regulation, showcasing a strong belief in the ability to redirect—step by step—technological objects and systems in the direction of a more democratic, less damaging future. To the reformist, only by keeping technology at a safe distance from the human is it possible to mas-ter and guide the trajectory of technological expansion away from its current flaws. The posthumanist, by contrast, is skeptical of any re-course to a pure humanity in need of saving from technological inva-sion. To the posthumanist, the human subject is not external to, but always already co-constituted by, technological objects. In fact, in breaking up the restriction inherent to any bounded notion of human selfhood, technological augmentation is able to expand humanity’s abilities to affect and being affected. The techno-politics of the post-humanist translates this into a maxim: We ought to celebrate tech-nological entanglement and the emancipatory decentering of liberal selfhood it promises. Finally, the techno-rationalist follows the post-humanist’s strict denaturalization of the human. The rationalist’s techno-politics is centered around the belief in the liberation from human vulnerability and finitude by way of humanity reengineer-ing itself rationally through technological manipulation. Unlike the posthumanist, they extend the reformist’s humanist obsession with mastery, and dislocate it from its grounding in “the human” while shifting it to the level of cybernetic ensembles.

For all their differences and promises, as we will see, what these figures share is a commitment to either radically embracing (the reformist), or updating (the posthumanist and the rationalist), humanism. They forget that humanism, by way of ontological policing and its production of an Other, has a fatal tendency toward instigating new forms of domination and subjugation.

The technological imperatives the three figures leave us with today are: “Reform!” and “Accelerate!” The book aims to be a concep-tual declaration, and source of inspiration, for those not enamored by, or those suspicious of, the promise of such commands. Techno-negativity offers us a spirited alternative in whose unyielding com-mitment to refusal—if we are willing to probe carefully—we may find the seeds of a techno-politics settling for nothing less than the promise of abolition.

Itinerary: An-Archives of Refusal

What is accumulated across the chapters that follow must be mis-taken neither for a monumental countergenealogy to histories of technology nor for an exhaustive treatment of technological refusal, as if the real that is history is simply a totality that can be recon-structed. If Techno-Negative is historical in its mode of inquiry, it is more in tune with a Michel Foucault than an Abbott Payson Usher. The latter, a renowned historian of technology, makes it his task to show how an empirical event (a practice, an object) comes into being and spreads—shifting people’s habits, livelihoods, governments. We may call this mode a “constitutive history.” Foucault, by contrast, is suspicious of teleological narration and the search for origins, preferring the impulse toward fragmentation. His “archaeological history,” or more precisely “archaeological genealogy,” prioritizes historiography as the heterogenization of that which is imagined to be consistent with itself.

My own method accelerates Foucault’s into an explicitly “destitutive genealogy” whose an-archival approach is marked by a commitment to rupturing both constitutive histories and the very desire to construct new ones. This requires turning to the archive, look-ing for the gaps, absences, or fleeting mentions hinting at the pres-ence, however obliquely, of techno-negative praxis. By foregrounding these, and while partially dependent upon and paying tribute to the

cautious work conducted by period-historians of technology, the objective of the book is not to fill the gaps of history, to resurrect the forgotten or left out into a counterhistory. Neither the work of a historian nor of a philosopher, Techno-Negative is genealogical in method and scope. The book is the labor of a conceptual empiricist aiming to trace the connecting points between an idea (the human) and a practice (technological refusal) across changing spatio-temporal ter-rains. This requires closely engaging the emergence of conceptions of human-technology relationality encountered in specific philosophers of technology (from Plato to Heidegger, Aquinas to Hayles), but only ever where their manifestos resonate—in the form of materialization, negotiation, or rejection—with the embodied-material practitioners of techno-negativity.

Many of those practitioners who are given narrative primacy in the book would have never entered the archival records if it had not been for their encounter with power. Without their direct refusal of a given technological object, they would have been lost to the passage of their own lifetime. This is the first principle applied in selecting the book’s protagonists: They must have existed, and during their existence have confronted a technological form through a practice of refusal to the extent that it became of interest to archivists (the historians, publishers, museums, journalists, state bureaucrats, and other story-collectors of a given age and place). The second principle of selection is that their actions, or their own narrations of those actions, must do justice to the variety of forms of ontological questioning, of the renewed questioning of the human, that make up the contested lives of technological histories.

The book’s chapters follow the divergent traces left by the selected cast of techno-negative protagonists. Chapter 1 starts from Archimedes’s destruction of his own war machines, binding the very promise of technē to its refusal and delay. Focusing on three conceptual distinctions developed in Aristotelian and Platonic discourse—technē/ēpistēmē, technē/physis, technē/tuche—we encounter a wariness toward artifice as an affront to an agential theory of the human as uniquely animated by the soul and intellectual faculties. Two “ani-mate instruments” in particular—“the machine” and “the slave”—pose a crucial threat to the sanctity of the properly human, the homo humanus. Responding to technē as a problem for early human-ism, by way of technology’s presentation as the horror of ontological corruption, Greek techno-negativity’s ontological policing functioned as a securing of a social ordering, the governors-governed relations beneficial to the dominant classes of the Greek city-state. Chapter 2 shows how the techno-negativity of medieval Christian demonology emerges from a conflation of the artes mechanicae and the demonic. The chapter travels via the pleas of the Cistercian Order, Peter the Chanter, Saint Augustine, Charlemagne, and Pope Innocent III into the early medieval conception of technology as the manifestation of one of seven deadly sins: Pride. Through polemic tracts and legal exclusions, artifice is kept at bay as an assault on God’s civilization—the right to devour God and his creative transcendence over this world, as if not everything was already produced, perfectly, by Deitas. What was to be maintained in this ontological policing was a political theology centered around pastoral power, extending God’s authority over the Catholic and non-Catholic world in the name of Christian humanism.

Chapter 3 serves as a turning point in the book. The techno-negative ceases to be a model of sovereignty and is, increasingly, supplemented by its translation into an assault on the strategies of authority. To bring this development to the foreground, the chap-ter zooms in on two distinct state responses to the machinization of labor tools in Western and Central Europe. Before the nineteenth century, mercantilist imperatives inspired states to burn looms, even executing some inventors. By the time the Luddites organized themselves, states became inclined to turn not against the machines but against the revolting workers. This shift can only be understood in light of the state’s embrace of anti-protectionist economics pro-moted by a capitalist theory of property, labor, and production. In turn, the Luddites helped turn techno-negativity from a method that staves off, to one that unleashes, insurrection. Beyond a nar-row struggle against economic precarity, however, techno-negativity quickly spiraled into an assault on the ontological degeneration of machinery later recognized by Arendt, Ellul, and Gehlen. Chapter 4 turns to the organized resistance to Western technologization dur-ing European colonialism. It shows how techno-colonialism is inti-mately tied up with the exclusion of indigenous lives as subhuman—a form of ontological policing I theorize as “technological onticide.” Working through dubious travelogues, the development of the field of “social evolutionism,” and the racist science of polygenism, the chapter reveals how the presumed absence of technology became a (theo-centric, ratio-centric, bio-centric) measure of the Other’s subhumanity, at the same time as this Other was expected to be humanized through their technologization. The chapter suggests that, by arguing for the “co-constitutive” logic of human-technology rela-tionality, posthumanist theories of technological subjectivity insuffi-ciently engage the human as the historico-political effect of negating the assumed nontechnological colonial Other. The result is a failure to confront the legacies of ontological murder. The chapter finishes by articulating the need to probe ways of thinking technological poli-tics in ways that circumvent the violence of ontological policing. We open chapter 5 with one nineteenth century figure (a drunk Karl Marx) and end with another (French revolutionaries). The chap-ter examines the singular practice holding them together (lantern smashing) as a process of “publification” of techno-negative histo-ries, both in terms of target (state property) and actors (a diverse range of practitioners). It speculates that the seeming aimlessness of the practice drives both its standing as a source of frustration for commentators and authorities, and its affective—and I will sug-gest, libidinal—popular appeal for practitioners. A second specula-tion proposes that, in attacking illumination, the smashers, possibly unwillingly, entered into a clash between conflicting legacies of the Enlightenment. Theirs was an embrace of the Enlightenment ethos of reason, democracy, and liberty, but, equally, an attack on the way the state generalized what were, to the lumières, a series of “epis-temological” propositions into “epistemic” vectors of control. The effect is a series of what I call “policing epistemics” that enable a political theory of the human subject as “enlightened man”: knowing, knowable, and to be known. Such a theory showed much contempt for, and criminalized, the dark(ened) subject who, remaining invisible, carves out their own path: an epistemics of opacity.

With the “electrification” of global capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth century, techno-negative tendencies encountered a new set of obstacles. The result, chapter 6 argues, is the prolifera-tion of techno-negative practices opting not for materially assault-ing technological objects but for the distant politics of the commune. The chapter opens by telling the story of one such community and its unthinkable annihilation: being bombed by a helicopter owned by the Philadelphia Police Department. By reading founding texts employed by three intentional communities (John Africa’s MOVE, Gandhi’s Tolstoy Farm, and Sri Aurobindo’s Auroville) alongside theories of techno-rationalism in Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, the chapter shows that one insult—calling someone a “techno-phobe”—plays a crucial role in legitimizing the sometimes lethal refutation of techno-negative exodus as an “Other” against which to define a theory of technological humanity. The chapter shows that techno-rationalism operates as a censoring both of alternative modes of rationality and of its own irrationalities. It asks whether, despite its confidence, techno-rationalism is not itself an expression of fearfulness—a phobia of more-than-human excess. Chapter 7 stays in the twentieth century to examine not withdrawal but a renewed dynamic of direct antagonism: the arson of 1980s computer companies. The chapter treats these as a politics of re-venge, whereby one mode of violence—of computation—is matched by another. The computer arsonists take computational violence as temporal in nature: the cybernetic investment in reducing futurity to the extension of the present, its reduction of the space of radical virtuality as a condition of human subjectivity. Engaging Norbert Wiener’s “prediction machines” alongside Henri Bergson’s principle of virtuality, the chapter argues, allows us to think of computer arson as the scandalous production of its own forms of futurelessness.

The conclusion retraces the conceptual lineages of this book and brings them to bear on current articulations of techno-politics. What holds contemporary techno-reformism, techno-rationalism, and posthumanism together is their sustained, if often implicit, com-mitment to the ontological policing that defines humanism. Tracing their varied paths, the chapter argues that central to this lingering humanism is the quest for ontological security against the undoing of the human as a site of unity and identity. After pushing against the violent afterlives of humanism, I offer a brief polemic in favor of an abolitionist politics of technology that resolutely rejects any axiological commitments to the human. An abolitionist politics calls out to the inhuman, counterhuman, nonhuman, and unhuman, not for solutions but for companionship in techno-negativity.

Excerpted from Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser, published by University of Minnesota Press. Copyright © 2026 Thomas Dekeyser.