Title: Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism
Author: Jathan Sadowski
Publisher: University of California Press
Year: 2025
In 2025 I have resolved to escape the clutches of my smartphone, which has turned out to be no small task – it encroaches on every aspect of my day-to-day life, from communication and banking to two factor authentication and navigation. This creeping dependence is just one aspect of the pervasive techno capitalism tackled by political economist Jathan Sadowski in The Mechanic and the Luddite. Throughout its eight chapters, Sadowski casts a withering gaze on the digital technology industry and its oligarchs, encouraging the reader to engage in rigorous material analysis by embodying two figures: the Mechanic and the Luddite.
Sadowski’s Mechanic offers an antidote to widespread de-skilling and alienation from technical knowledge, for users to seek understanding of their everyday tools. Through this de-mystification, we can imagine their alternative applications and recognise when they are used for control or disempowerment. Should the latter arise, enter the Luddite. Consigned to history as stubbornly anti progress, the early 1800s movement was in fact a highly organised direct-action campaign, which precisely targeted the machinery of exploitative textile factory owners. Through the Luddite, the reader may adopt a decisive refusal to allow new technologies to be blindly adopted without the consent of those whose lives and labour will be impacted.
These titular characters are not heard from again until the book’s conclusion. In the interim chapters – standalone essays on innovation, data, labour, landlords and risk – Sadowski deftly demonstrates how digital technologies have developed inseparably from and in service of capitalism. Now inextricable from our lives, they have come to be tools of subsumption, shaping the social environment to fit the demands of capital. Data has become an asset, accumulated in mass and valued by its potential application. As such, our platforms and devices are designed to capture reams of user information, with little option to opt out, for their corporate owners to use with impunity – often reinforcing societal inequalities when used to algorithmically determine welfare recipients, insurance claims or other societal mechanisms, for example.
There is indeed a ‘radical potential’ in the text’s argument, but I fear an individualised and abstract politics of refusal may not provide a rupture of adequate scale or force
While each chapter stays true to the Marxian ‘ruthless critique’ promised by the book’s subtitle, the essays on labour and landlords stand out. In ‘Labour’, Sadowski lays a pathway for contemporary Luddism, demonstrating not only how technology continues to devalue workers but how over-hyped AI products mask the invisible labour of moderators, ghost drivers and the humans behind chatbots – a global outsourcing industry that reinforces geopolitical and colonial inequalities – to maintain the mythos of technology. ‘Landlords’ proposes that the logics of rentier capitalism have become enmeshed within the tech industry – subscription based softwares, paid-for platforms and streaming services make up what Sadowski calls ‘the internet of landlords’, where access to now essential tools is privatised, gatekept and controlled by corporations. Avoiding the trappings of idealism often found in even the most critical work, Sadowski never deifies technology, careful not to perpetuate narratives of its inescapability and power.
The last decade has seen a growing trend of techno-scepticism, as it becomes clear that the incessant drive towards innovation, efficiency and solutionism comes at the expense of global justice. In The Mechanic and the Luddite, Sadowski succeeds in pulling together disparate cases into a robust structural analysis, arguing for materialist critique. His argument is so strong, in fact, that the final chapter ‘Futures’ – which opens with an admission that he offers no solutions to the clear crisis he has laid out – risks leaving the reader unsure of what is to be done. While the Luddites were unwavering in turning critique to praxis, Sadowski writes of the need to ‘actively intervene against the impositions of capital’ but skirts around the form that intervention may take, making only vague allusions to ‘smashing’.
There is indeed a ‘radical potential’ in the text’s argument, but I fear an individualised and abstract politics of refusal may not provide a rupture of adequate scale or force. The final section of ‘Landlords’ turns to the land that houses the backbone of the digital world – data centres, network-peering points and other energy-consumptive infrastructure – a reminder of the physical manifestations of techno-capitalism that I’m sure would ignite the imagination of a militant Luddite.
The book does not pretend to be a manifesto, but it demonstrates a dire need for one. Clearly, the runaway train of technology under capitalism, and capitalism reinforced through technology, is on track to foreclose the possibility of a just future, ‘colonising our norms, ideals and desires’. Sadowski has outlined the state of affairs in a way that cannot be disregarded, and his book must be, as he writes and as I hope, a ‘starting pistol’.
