[Commlist] New book: Techno-Negative

Announcing a new publication from the University Of Minnesota Press:

*Techno-Negative*

A Long History of Refusing the Machine

*Thomas Dekeyser *

*_https://mngbookshop.co.uk/9781517917739/techno-negative/_* 
<https://mngbookshop.co.uk/9781517917739/techno-negative/>

*__*

*20% Discount code*: LSMNGUPS26*

*Valid until 11:59 BST, 31st December 2026. Discount only applies to the 
MNG website.

"This is a brilliant and brave book that brings to the fore the brute 
refusal that haunts the history of technology. I call it brave because 
it is, in fact, much easier for scholars to call for the reform of 
technology rather than its refusal. But in this techno-negative history 
from below, Thomas Dekeyser makes it abundantly clear that reform is 
futile." —Sarah Sharma, author of /Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against 
Big Tech/

The history of technology is often told as a history of progress, moving 
optimistically and inevitably from one emancipatory invention to the 
next. /Techno-Negative/ turns this story on its head, taking us on a 
journey to the critical junctures where people have pointedly rejected 
and tried to undo, rather than adopt, new technologies. Beginning with 
Archimedes's decision to destroy his own war machines, this book 
explores the will to negate technology as a deep - but persistently 
condemned - current in history. As he presents a new theory of 
technological power, Thomas Dekeyser argues that technologies, never 
neutral, operate as "ontological policing," drawing the boundaries of 
humanness as they are unequally leveraged by select groups. Looking 
beyond the Luddites to medieval monks banning tools, seventeenth-century 
loom burners, revolutionary lantern smashers, and computer arsonists, 
Dekeyser shows how people have long recognized and resisted the machine 
as a violent, sometimes deadly force implicated in defining who counts 
as human and whose lives (and ways of life) are worth saving.

Against the ubiquitous demands to reform or accelerate technological 
"advancement" that have failed to disrupt our present, Dekeyser proposes 
a spirited alternative: abolition. He challenges us to rethink the terms 
of our technological present and future. In a time when Big Tech grows 
increasingly enmeshed with authoritarian control, /Techno-Negative/ is a 
conceptual declaration, and source of inspiration, for those searching 
for a new paradigm of technological politics. Retail e-book files for 
this title are screen-reader friendly.

* Thomas Dekeyser* is lecturer in human geography at the University of 
Southampton.

*University Of Minnesota Press | 24 March 2026 | 240pp | 
9781517917739 | PB | £20.99**

*Price subject to change.
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