Anarchism and the Politics of Technology

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Contemporary anarchist practices display a strong ambivalence toward technology, with active resistance residing alongside extensive use and development. This article theorizes a broad‐based anarchist politics of technology, which can account for these diverse expressions within a coherent framework. I first examine the two major competing approaches to technology in anarchist literature—Promethean anticapitalism and the primitivist critique of civilization. Noting the limitations of both approaches, I then turn to the work of Langdon Winner and other critical theorists of technology who stress the inherence of social relations in technological design and deployment. Such a perspective allows anarchists to judge technologies according to their promotion of hierarchical or nonhierarchical social practices, leading to three options for action: abolitionism, guarded adoption, and active promotion.