Until recently, there has been a subtle but firm stigma around speaking against the Machine. (Specifically, the Internet.) Since the successful counter-revolution of neoliberal capital, launched in the 1980s against the organicist counter-cultural experiments of the 1960s and 70s, any voices raised against the digital revolution have been dismissed as romantically nostalgic at best, and conservatively neo-Luddite at worst. (Never mind that Ned Lud’s followers, protesting against weaving machines at the beginning of the 19th century, were not necessarily our first “technophobes” but rather an activist group especially attuned to the economic consequences of out- sourcing labor to automated contraptions.) ...
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