Leftists must become more critical of cell phones and social media. Is Luddite Socialism the answer to decentering digital technology from our organizing?
The Left, like the rest of society, is addicted to their cell-phones and social media. The consumption of digital technology by the Left may be dressed up with various excuses, but our society as a whole is addicted and the Left is no exception.
Leftists are backing destructive industries and feeding information and profit directly to our political opponents. We are without a doubt funding and sharpening the tools that are being used to surveil and destroy us. And while some of this may seem like necessary evils that enable organizing, there is plenty of evidence that it is weakening our ability to engage in the kind of work that is needed to overcome fascism and capitalism. And before you utter the maxim “there’s no ethical consumption” under capitalism, I would argue that it’s an ethically empty position to write off critiques of how we consume every day simply because capitalism exists. It’s strategically empty as well.
We need Luddite socialism to overcome our modern challenges and build stronger social movements. Even if we can’t remove ourselves fully from these technologies, we must become more critical of them and decenter them from our organizing.
The Luddites
The Luddites were a group of English craftsmen who smashed textile mills and other private property of capitalists at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Their destruction of private property was a protest against the enclosures of common land and the growing power of industrial capitalism. They understood these technologies as a threat to their way of life. We should understand the way that tech is reshaping our lives to be similar.
While I am not advocating breaking the phones of random people on the street, I do believe the Left must embrace a more tech-critical position. The Left must move beyond digital technology as our primary locus of organizing and way of relating to one another. I am not interested in looking at the Luddites as a reference point in terms of their “success,” but more so understanding how they understood industrial technology as oppressive to their ways of life.
Digital tech as oppressive
To get an idea of the resonances we might share with the original Luddites, we can look to the global south. Johan Grimonprez’s documentary, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, partially narrates how imperialism and extractive industries in the Congo are tied up with the creation of cell phones and electric vehicles. This film highlighted for me the importance of the Left adopting a more anti-tech approach politically, as it described how fraught with exploitation the creation of digital tech is, especially in terms of brutality faced by workers in the Global South in mineral extraction industries. Tens of thousands of children work in cobalt mines that supply raw materials to cell phone production, and much of the trauma-inducing moderation of social media platforms falls on the backs of underpaid African workers.
The addition of artificial intelligence to both makes this all worse, especially in terms of exacerbating the damage to earth and the environmental racism that usually accompanies it, even here in the imperial core. Elon Musk’s new data center in the South, polluting the air of Black Memphis, is but one example. These data centers also pose a broader threat to life in the United States, with predicted blackouts in the not so distant future. So the question is why do we continue to rely upon these devices, technologies, and platforms when they are killing us and creating the capacity for our political opponents to cause harm in the future?
Attacks on progressive movements
These platforms are not created by us, they are the product of an openly far right tech industry. Just go read about Curtis Yarvin, the software developer and right wing theorist who inspired Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir, and J.D. Vance’s techno-authoritarianism. It is strange that many on the Left are devotees or fans of Instagram or X.com as critical organizing spaces when acknowledging the destructive ideologies of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The tech-right thrives on our participation on these platforms. These forces are our opposition, and by using their technology, we’re not only feeding them profit, we’re feeding them our personal information.
These platforms are used by the police and fascists to surveil progressive social movements. Our devices are also surveillance machines. The ease to which the State forces have been able to surveil our movements on the Left is concerning.
The dystopian conviction of the Prairieland defendants in the recent North Texas show trial is a clear example. The clear conclusions from that trial are that phones are not simply a tool for liberation, they are a tool for prosecutors and police to lock-up so-called members of Antifa cells. Even widely used apps such as Signal were used as proof of conspiracy. Actions as simple as removing someone from a group chat has led to charges. As Sara Van Horn writes for n+1 in “The State vs. the Emma Goldman Bookclub,”
the government’s lawyers provided six terabytes of evidence for the defense to review, the equivalent of one and a half million photos, three thousand hours of video, or hundreds of millions of pages of documents…One defendant’s satirical text messages to his wife and misspelled calendar invites, accessed through his iCloud data ceded to the government by Apple, provided a visceral reminder of the familiar refrain: “Don’t send anything over text that you don’t want read back to you in court.”
Recently, it was revealed that ICE has access to Graphite, a technology that can remotely access cell phones. This technology was created by Paragon Solutions, an Israeli company. According to NPR, “Graphite uses what is known as ‘zero click’ technology so that it can gain access to encrypted messages on a targeted device even if the user never clicks on a link.” The reality is that avoiding surveillance takes much more now than just installing Signal. If ICE has access to this technology, more agencies, including municipal police departments, are well on their way to getting it. We must dare to dream of a world (if not a world, just a Left subculture) where we aren’t so willing to let fascist tech corporations and the State surveil us so easily.
Negative impact on social movements
Abandoning or revising our relationships with smartphones, social media, and digital technology will make us better organizers. So much of the Left’s strategy is based on social media mobilization. As Zeynep Tufekci writes in her book Twitter and Tear Gas,
…the ability to use digital tools to rapidly amass large numbers of protesters with a common goal empowers movements. Once this large group is formed, however, it struggles because it has sidestepped some of the traditional tasks of organizing. Besides taking care of tasks, the drudgery of traditional organizing helps create collective decision-making capabilities, sometimes through formal and informal leadership structures, and builds collective capacities among movement participants through shared experience and tribulation. The expressive, often humorous style of networked protests attracts many participants and thrives both online and offline, but movements falter in the long term unless they create the capacity to navigate the inevitable challenges.
This isn’t to say that technologies like smartphones and social media haven’t enabled social movements and organizing in some ways, but there are clear trade-offs. Assembling large groups no longer takes the same kind of outreach, but with this crucial organizing skills are lost in building capacity. In addition, influencer-based mobilizations often create informal hierarchies as Tufekci writes:
These movements rely heavily on online platforms and digital tools for organizing and publicity, and proclaim that they are leaderless although their practice is almost always muddier… Although online media are indeed more open and participatory, over time a few people consistently emerge as informal but persistent spokespersons—with large followings on social media. These people often have great influence, though they lack the formal legitimacy that an open and recognized process of selecting leaders would generate.
The rise of the political influencer class on the Left is a problem unique to our current moment. The Leftist influencer so common now is a weak stand-in for real analysis and action. Instead of being theoretically competent, the Left follows influencers who produce short form content that cannot substitute for meaningful individual or collective political study. Historical complexities are glossed over as screenshots, buzzy soundbites, and short passages with little context fill the space.
While brevity is a skill, the reality is that communication required for social movements with a capacity to transform society cannot be limited to the bite-sized information economy on places like X.com or TikTok. All of this makes sense as the Leftist influencer is focused upon building their individual brand on a platform rather than a collective movement. While building a personal brand is not inherently wrong, as there are many good writers on social networks, the logics of building a brand and building a movement are different. Increasingly over the past fifteen years, Left-leaning influencers now substitute for organizations with political education and strategy in decisive moments. And visibility substitutes for organizing infrastructure and the development of practical skills.
Digital tech harms organizing and social abilities
The focus on visibility is a logic that needs to be expelled from the Left’s imagination. Followers and visibility are not a stand in for real capacity, skills, and relationships. Organizers’ reliance on cell-phones has weakened a number of skills that were commonplace even twenty years ago. For instance, researching without Google or navigating a city with a map. In terms of organizing, the increased social isolation that results from these devices and social media platforms has led to social skills atrophying such as dependability across the population. The lack of social skills can lead to struggles with organizing canvassing efforts, one on ones, and any kind of organizing based upon talking to people. I think that we have to reimagine our social relationships to one another unmediated by these devices. These devices and social media make people depressed, alienated, and illiterate.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha are amongst the most friendless generations. Across gender, class and race, people are more lonely and isolated. The thesis of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone has only expanded as the television itself is now portable. Social media makes our bonds with one another more porous and intangible. Opting out of the tech dominated social field can lead to new social bonds and trust. As an example, not having a cell-phone means if you meet up with your fellow organizers you have to be on time. There’s a type of social trust that emerges when you can’t just text your comrades last minute.
As fascism continues to deepen, our social bonds will matter more than parasocial relationships on the internet. A good relationship with a neighbor, a co-worker, or a roommate is worth more than a popular social media account. Your Twitter followers who live across the city or in another state are unlikely to show up to save you from fascists, but your friends down the block just might. Access to the Internet is something that the government has the ability to moderate or even shut off. There must be alternatives.
Engaging with tech
Obviously, we will have to engage with tech to some degree. By nature of this online article, I am. However, transitioning from a smartphone to a flip phone, deleting your social media, hosting in-person meetings with your organization, renewing print-only publications in lieu of social media accounts, getting a watch, or leaving your phone at home could all be first steps. Small changes like this in our daily and organizing lives can help us develop social bonds to withstand repression.
For comrades and community members facing deeper alienation and loneliness, I would propose that the Left and others with a social conscience should organize groups similar to Alcoholic Anonymous but for phone/social media addiction. The reality is that much of our relationship with these devices is built out of an unhealthy coping mechanism that substitutes for real friendships, social connection, and mental health support.
The Black Panther Party started free clinics to assist with drug detoxing in their communities. Perhaps the Left needs to create digital detox clinics to assist our communities that are beset with tech addiction. Black radical holidays like Black August encourage participants to fast from various things. Imagine if we started to develop broader cultures of a digital fast amongst the Left. Workshops to develop skills lost because of phones, support communities for people with digital addiction, and other types of collective structures are the way forwards to fight back against the evil presence of tech in our lives.
It may seem odd to argue for a Luddite socialism, as I call it, but I think in the end, it will strengthen the capacities of organizers in relating to one another and the broader world as they fight for a liberated world. While I do not think getting rid of cell phones or social media will solve all of our problems as organizers, I do think it is a critical step in moving towards organizing communities that are built less around the logic of the screen, and more around the logic of human beings. At the end of the day, these devices are meant to sell us things, surveil our activities, and generate shareholder value. If we are interested in a world with more freedom, the first step is breaking the hold of the infinite scroll.
