Dekeyser: AI backlash is centuries-old tech refusal, not anti-progress
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- Thomas Dekeyser, a human geography lecturer at the University of Southampton, published Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, tracing technology resistance from medieval monks who banned tools to 17th-century weavers burning looms.
- Dekeyser frames the critique of AI as a rational refusal of a narrow vision of progress rather than 'techno-phobia,' arguing the label dismisses legitimate concerns about harmful technological trajectories.
- Big Tech's progressive image, once anchored in Google's 'Don't be evil' slogan, has been exposed as a facade tied to post-WWII military and geopolitical infrastructure, with Google swapping to 'Do the right thing' in 2018 and ethics 'vanishing into the background.'
- Dekeyser points to the deepening alignment of Big Tech with the Trump administration as an 'open embrace' of authoritarian and nationalistic tendencies the companies had previously tried to disguise.
- Recent acts of material resistance — vandalism of Waymo robotaxis, destruction of 5G towers, and mass cancellation of ChatGPT accounts — are driven by disillusionment that tech serves the few, not collective wellbeing, and by disempowerment that material destruction temporarily relieves.
- Dekeyser situates resistance in Latin America and Africa within the 'afterlives of colonialism,' where populations are treated as cheap labor or raw data and their environments extracted for AI infrastructure.
- Citing philosopher Günther Anders, Dekeyser invokes 'Promethean shame' — the feeling of being insufficient in the face of a perfect machine — as fuel for refusal of a human life made secondary to machine intelligence.
Why it matters: By historicizing today's AI backlash alongside 5G tower arsons, data center opposition, and ChatGPT cancellations, Dekeyser reframes a story that outlets often treat as fringe vandalism as a continuous, rational tradition of refusing technologies that concentrate power. That matters for policymakers and tech companies deciding whether to treat critics as irrational or as legitimate stakeholders in defining what 'progress' means.
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