Reading/Listening/Watching List
Zines:
Botzine - Angie Berkley - Mini zine from one artist.
Flash Fic Friday – Technocritical flash fiction.
ICE Surveillance Zine – From 404 Media and focusing on the surveillance tech used by ICE, much of which relies on AI to one degree or another.
Looming – Neo-Luddite, AI resistant zine based out of Lawrence, Kansas.
Power Tools – Neo-Luddle, AI resistant zine.
The DAIR Zine Library – Various technocritical zines from the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute.
Podcasts:
Books:
Algorithms of Resistance – Tiziano Bonini &
Emiliano Treré
An exploration of the frontlines of resistance to algorithmic imposition.
Blood in the Machine – Brian Merchant
An overview of the original Luddites which also draws links to our current struggles.
Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence – Dan McQuillan
An overt and absolute rejection of AI mobilisations which highlights the inherent fascistic tendencies of them.
Overseers of the Poor – John Gilliom
A pre-AI study of the everyday resistances necessary to survive invasive surveillance systems designed to be punitive. Connects with earlier forms of techno-bureaucracy and shows how the push back against such impositions is a lived one, not a grand declaration waiting to be discovered.
Two Cheers for Anarchism - James C. Scott
Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful – Mirca Madianou
Writing at the intersection of technology and humanitarianism Madianou shows the harms already enacted on the most vulnerable by technosolutionist fervour. Enough to cover in itself but the ease with which those disfunctional tools can be expanded beyond those in crisis suggests new fronts for resistance everywhere.
Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work – Craig Gent
Focusing again on the frontline workers experience of algorithmic impositions, especially platform workers, Cyberboss offers a useful set of case studies to explore to define where the conflicts between us and tech impositions appear.
Again focusing primarily on the platform worker experience Augmented Exploitation is a useful collection of articles which offers hope for what can work and caution as to what doesn’t.
Critique of Black Reason – Achille Mbembe
Another one that doesn’t primarily focus on AI but in drawing out the long history of racial dehumanisation Mbembe offers a great parallel for what a lot of AI mobilisation seems geared to do – diminish the human down to a datafied subject. As with Madianou’s Technocolonialism you can see the origins and motives for re-casting populations as non-agential subjects to a technological engine of extraction, be it one founded on AI or more established forms of cultural, political and social alienation and exception.
The Atomic Human – Neil Lawrence
Less about resistance, more about understanding the mechanisms of risk as AI is deployed to influence without accountability.
Techno-Negative - Thomas Dekeyser
A really good exploration of historical instances of techno-negative thought, completely with deep investigations of their motivations and how the perception of the human and the machine both evolved along the way. Especially useful as a counter to the rampant narratives of inevitability we face now as history challenges the already gradually diminishing concept of a progressive, tech-focused West as arbiter of progress.