On May 13th 1985, a Police Department helicopter hovering above 6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia made history: it dropped 11/4-pound blocks of C-4 explosives, making it the first time a U.S. city bombed itself. The bomb killed 11 people, including five children, and burnt out 61 houses as fire raged through the residential area. The Police Department had known people were inside. In fact, they were its very target.
Article continues after advertisement
Those murdered were all members of MOVE, a collective founded in 1972 that set out to live in accordance with what its founder, John Africa, called ‘Natural Law,’ embracing a lifestyle in defiance of technology-centered existence. Living such a life, John Africa argued, required the banishing of electricity, machinery, running water, processed food, and products of inorganic origins. More than a temporary attempt at living without modern technology, it was an experiment whose permanence MOVE was willing to defend, by arms if necessary, against the mounting aggression of the state.
With members including Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Minister of Information at the Philadelphia Black Panther Party, MOVE was directly inspired by the armed militancy of black power movements, seeking self-defense through armed protests and, if attacked, police shoot-outs. In tune with the by-now familiar fate of those engaged in the Black radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, many members of MOVE ended up in jail and others faced the unthinkable: the violence of a state set out to obliterate any trace of you and your political experiments, by bombs if necessary.
In labeling technological critique a case of phobia, critics have effectively rendered its claims and positions unreasonable, and thus, unworthy of rational consideration.
The crucial question that remains unanswered is how a commune minding its own business—besides immediate self-defense—could face such a brutal death on that spring evening in 1985. How could this unthinkably lethal response by the authorities be justified? The population needed to be convinced that the victims were worthy of such extreme violence. At the heart of this attempt, and still laying siege on all manners of technological critique today, was the trope of the “techno-phobe,” justifying the unjustifiable.
*
Those reading newspapers in the years and days leading up to the 1985 bombing would have encountered MOVE as a band of savages in need to taming. Their refusal to engage modern technologies was a particular topic of concern. Journalists spoke of ‘uncouth’ and ‘ungroomed’ savages who cleaned their teeth using roots instead of toothbrushes, refused running water and only ate raw vegetables. They quoted neighborhood members calling MOVE members “a pack of pigs.” More than anything, media commentators saw in MOVE’s “near fanatical commitment” to rejecting Western technology an expression of fear: the irrational fear of change and progress, and with it, the stubborn holding on to backward ways of life. In the stories told in newspapers, MOVE’s presumed techno-phobia lodged it firmly not simply in the past, but in an animal past, giving rise to a community whose connection to ‘humanity’ is about as a clear as that of the pigs MOVE kept on their premises, and whose lives were, by extension, about as worthy of preservation.
MOVE is, by no means, the only commune to be stigmatized as, and reduced to, the figure of the techno-phobe. In the early 1910s, a South-African community had already encountered the same fate. The founder of Tolstoy Farm was none other than the Indian anti-colonial scholar and lawyer Mahatma Gandhi, who one year earlier had published his Hind Swaraj, a thorough rejection of Western techno-colonialism and its ‘ingenious devices’ in which he declared that he “cannot recall a single good point in connection with machinery.”
A named dedication to Leo Tolstoy’s pacifist philosophies of resistance and Schopenhauerian asceticism, the eleven-hundred-acre Farm served a double function. First, it was a safe hub and organizational headquarters for Indians in the face of anti-Indian segregation in apartheid Transvaal. Second, it became an experiment in techno-negative living, transforming the theoretical inquiries of Hind Swaraj into lived practice. At Tolstoy Farm, one would be hard-pressed to find any of the European technical objects dismissed by Gandhi. It was mandatory for members to engage themselves in the handicrafts, manual labor and agriculture, facilitating significant self-sufficiency—what Gandhi, following Tolstoy, called ‘bread labor.’ To Gandhi, this was not a matter of personal preference, but of moral duty: “He has no right to eat who does not bend his body and work.” A society in which only a few perform bread labor was, for Gandhi, a society set up for vice and misfortune. At Tolstoy Farm, “the obligation of Bread Labour” was carefully lived by. It forbade the uptake of any technologies that would reproduce the segregating effects of urban technological life, preferring instead the tools of non-machinic crafts (e.g. spinning, weaving, smithery, tilling the soil) that re-center human labor and its immediate fruits for the Farm’s community.
Despite MOVE and Tolstoy Farm holding distinct qualities, they encountered a singular indictment: that of being victims of techno-phobia. Gandhi in general, and his Tolstoy Farm in particular, have long been condemned for holding a fatally phobic relation to technological life. By such reasoning, the refusal of technology equals a fear of technology. What interests me in accusations of techno-phobia is less whether they are right to condone Tolstoy Farm’s and MOVE’s suspicion of Western technologies, and more the work that this subtle, but crucial labelling of ‘techno-phobia’ does by reducing the divergent set of techno-negative emotions that fuel critiques of technology to just one specific feeling. What is the effect of leveling the diversity of techno-negative feelings (frustration, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, boredom, indifference) into the singularity of ‘phobia’?
A first problem is that while techno-phobia, as a pejorative designator, is commonly uttered, it is rarely defined. It is assumed to function on its own, with reference only to itself. It falls into the fallacy of circular reasoning, whereby phobia is immoral because it is wrong, and it is wrong because it is immoral. The result is a concept devoid of signification on its own terms. Along the way, phobia has been stripped entirely of its clinical origins and psychoanalytic definitions. In psychoanalysis, phobias are qualified by a chronic anxiousness that has roots in sexual neuroses.
Further, at least in Freud, phobias have multiple stages, and themselves take on multiple forms. Which expressions of phobia do accusations of techno-phobia insist on? What, if any, are techno-phobia’s libidinal origins or investments? How do those separate it from, for instance, what we may call techno-mysia (the active hatred of technology) or techno-neurosis (a more general mental aversion towards technology)? The critics of techno-phobia offer us no leeway into such questions. But that which makes it doubtful as a concept—its inconsistency—is also what becomes an advantage when employed as an insult to demonize an adversary.
Undefined, yet forceful; such is the work of an insult. Without reference to either its defining qualities or specific expressions, the label ‘phobia’ can be applied almost anywhere whilst losing little of the severe moral evaluation that appears inherent to it. In fact, it is extra powerful precisely because it requires this little analytical precision; labeling a person as fearful can, in theory, be sufficient to challenge the critic of technology’s legitimacy.
In a twisted way, the techno-rationalist has, for all their allergic reactions to techno-phobia, a fearful slant of their own.
This moral judgement is based upon a vague definition of techno-phobia by way of what is it not. When the economics journalist Henry Hazlitt coined the term in his 1946 Economics in one Lesson, it was as part of his anti-leftist attack on unions looking to safeguard jobs in the face of automation. The defining feature of techno-phobia, in this work, is the lack of rational logic: “The technophobes, if they were logical and consistent, would have to dismiss all this progress and ingenuity as not only useless but vicious. Why should freight be carried from New York to Chicago by railroads when we could employ enormously more men, for example, to carry it all on their backs?” From its beginnings, techno-phobia was simply a means of describing a presumed antithesis to technological rationality.
Multiple decades later, in the philosopher Alan Drengson’s typology of technological attitudes, techno-phobia is again defined as, first and foremost, becoming saturated with negative emotions that exist outside of “reasoned awareness.” To be phobic is to be swayed by not just fear, but irrational fear. To paint technological refusal with the brush of irrationality in this way is to psychologize it. Techno-negativity becomes a question of a psychological disposition, emerging from within a psyche lacking the capacity for reason. It becomes a case of personal lack, not collective and careful deliberation on the joys and horrors of technological life. In labeling technological critique a case of phobia, critics have effectively rendered its claims and positions unreasonable, and thus, unworthy of rational consideration.
*
Today, the insult has lost little of its force. Amongst others, CEOs of Big Tech are quick to ridicule those critical, on whichever grounds, of their latest technological ambitions as misguided techno-phobes. They employ techno-phobia as a category against which to define the ‘proper’ path of technologization. The ‘I’ who calls the other ‘techno-phobic’ implies that their own relation to technology is a rational one, unaffected by any irrational fears, and governed by the principles of logic and reasoning. Not bound by any superstition or dogmatic thinking, the techno-rationalist presents themself as venturing into terrains previously off-limit—unknown lands, dangerous inventions, sacred ideas. Perhaps at times, the techno-rationalists do appear to inhabit the fold of rationality, and the absence of fear, they claim for themselves.
Yet, those reduced to the label ‘techno-phobe’ commonly carve out their own version of rationality, neither inferior nor superior to that of the techno-rationalist who relies on a narrow demarcation of, and a monopoly over, what constitutes ‘reason.’ One need only read John Africa’s manifesto, to identify the structures of logic underpinning MOVE’s decision to cut-out modern technologies. But, how immune to fear are the techno-rationalists really? What if, for all their resounding confidence, phobia underpins techno-rationalism?
The techno-rationalist encounters, and confronts, the world through their large-scale technological mastery of it. Heidegger saw this early on: contemporary ‘technics’ sees the non-human world (animals, forests, the elements, etc.) as what can and should be treated as existing largely for human use. One need not be a hardcore Heideggerian to see some truth in this; the world is increasingly treated as existing ‘for us.’ In approaching the world this way, techno-rationalists come to fear the reverse possibility: the possibility of the non-human sneaking up on them, piercing them, engulfing them or, simply, withdrawing from them. The non-human needs to be kept at a safe distance, locked away or far removed from human affairs. Because they can grasp the non-human world only in terms of its rational control, they come to witness the non-human world as a site of anxiety that needs to be ordered and managed, lest humanity lose its superior status.
And so, in a twisted way, the techno-rationalist has, for all their allergic reactions to techno-phobia, a fearful slant of their own.
__________________________________
From Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser. Copyright © 2026. Available from University of Minnesota Press.
Source:
lithub.com
