Hello and welcome to our paper on making as Emancipation Lessons and Reflections from
Luddism. Designing with and for Social Justice is a core mandate in HCI and refers
to how we attend to the ways in which people experience oppression and marginalization.
Much of the social justice work in HCI is constructive or making based meaning.
It seeks to understand and address justice challenges by building qualitative and or
quantitative research apparatus, making prototypes, crafting professional designs and
creating venues, classes and policies, among others.
But another line of work which echoes critical theory traditions in social justice,
argues that building a better world requires material, political and epistemic approaches
that undermine, unlearn, dissolve and undo unjust structures and epistemologies in place
so that new ones can arise.
In other words, this approach involves unmaking, which we define as modes of
thinking, expression, and action that take on an issue by taking away, taking apart and
or taking down what currently exists.
Unmaking has recently witnessed an increasing attention in HCI.
We see it applied for pushing the boundaries of design and interactions through dissolving
or collapsing assemblies, eliminating emotional, mental or ecological harms that
accompany design objects tending to device and infrastructure repair, and to leveraging
speculative aesthetics to contest phenomena such as gentrification.
While these unmaking works are underpinned by an imperative to remove certain harms or
restrictions, they do not explicitly frame unmaking as emancipation for social justice.
Given that HCI is interested in unmaking, HCI is committed to emancipation for social
justice and unmaking is necessary for emancipatory change.
What should our field then know about unmaking that supports emancipation for
social justice?
Drawing on recent calls to engage with Historicism in HCI, we sought an answer by
turning to the past and finding a case study that can sharpen our understanding of
unmaking as a tactic for emancipation.
Our historical case study here is Luddism, a movement of 19th century weavers and textile
workers from West England who experienced increased workplace mechanization that led to
cutting down their work hours, replacing their labor altogether, and producing
inferior cloth.
Their attempts to petition officials to make constitutional changes to regulate machine
adoption failed.
Prompted further by the Napoleonic War, economic hardships, increased famine levels
and trade union illegalization.
The textile designers and makers started in 1811 to go into factories at night and smash
big mills, shearing frames and automatic looms since they were the machines reducing
or impacting their labor.
They also knighted a mythical leader named Ned Ludd called themselves after him and
became a widely organized movement.
The movement was met with urgent statutory changes which set harsh penalties on machine
breaking. And by 1813, the state was largely able to put an end on machine destruction
through armed presence at factories and capturing and executing several Luddite
leaders. The Luddites were ultimately not able to stop work mechanization, and they
were historically disparaged as technophobes.
Yet as evident by our investigation, which spanned recent interpretive accounts of
luddism in critical media studies, literary studies, the digital humanities, general
historical accounts, and luddism books on the Luddite writings and songs, pseudonyms
and trials, as well as references on technological innovation.
In 18th and 19th century England, we find Luddism has cast the longest shadow, even
though it is not the only historical movement that involved unmaking technology.
Today it is actually celebrated for giving us a common name for machine breaking against
injustice and inspiring critical thinking and action around technology adoption.
In our paper we identified distinct unmaking practices that the Luddites leveraged, which
made their movement enduring.
These practices, which we described next are relevant to HCI today.
First, the Luddites smashed machines in partial and strategic ways, just enough to
incapacitate them very quickly.
They also resorted to symbolic practices such as knighting Ludd, creating a collective
under his leadership and chanting about his bravery during raids.
The Luddites also widely distributed letters, ballots and manifestos around
machine breaking. So their unmaking was both practical and symbolic.
The Luddite unmaking was community engaged.
They used a variety of tactics to build rapport and solidarity with local
communities, such as secret oaths and getting people from a wide range of
occupations involved, all which created a unified unmaking culture.
The Luddite unmaking was emancipated, acting in material and rhetorical dimensions as an
ideological struggle to seek justice for the artisans, production, labor, gang and social
identities from the dominance of efficiency and commercialization.
It was selective.
Unlike prior industrial conflicts in which workers wrecked all machines, raw material,
finished goods and even private employee properties, the Luddites only destroyed
machines which cut down their wages, facilitated the employment of unskilled labor
and separated complex tasks into discrete steps that allowed for surveillance and power
to be shifted to managers.
Unmaking was therefore a targeted response to detrimental changes in the workplace rather
than a blanket hostility towards all forms of technology and progress.
The Luddite unmaking was antagonistic, unlike what we see in the HCI unmaking
literature, where the object destroyed are found in the lab or discarded or made to be
unmade. The impacted machines and factories here were in use.
They belonged to others and that involved real capital loss.
This also left no room to evade conflict and harsh public exchanges, which involved
machine inventors, the press, factory owners, parliament members and the army.
Lastly, as we said earlier, the Luddite unmaking was enduring evident by how it has
continued to inspire thinking and theorizing on dismantling unrestricted technological
developments. What makes Luddism relevant to our field today is that the Luddites had a
critical awareness of negative technology impacts akin to what we see in HCI and their
actions executed with selective and immense craftsmanship.
Recall the careful and critical traditions of HCI.
At the same time, Luddism shows aspects of unmaking we do not widely discuss in HCI.
This includes a recognizing on making not framed within plans to make new things or
repair them In light of them, we see unmaking as a means to revert to a past state
of work arrangement with the on makers being content with mere destruction to emancipate
the present from undesirable circumstances rather than to make or repair new things.
Further through examining how the Luddites operated on social material and rhetorical
fronts, we are inspired by how much work on making requires across multiple registers and
in ways that are not straightforward nor self-evident.
This warrants greater attention in HCI and design.
Third, Luddism shows us the other often powerful stakeholders who may not consent to
unmaking. This calls upon our making this course to investigate and make explicit the
antagonistic and paradoxical facets that accompany Unmaking for Emancipation to
identify pathways for navigating them.
Luddism teaches us to incorporate the importance of creating situated and organized
contexts where participatory unmaking can occur and the performativity of shared
symbolic tactics that could endure pushback and inspire future generations.
The Luddites further resorted to machine breaking only after non-violent means had
been exhausted. Given that many of his endeavors for emancipation are making based
Luddism makes us ask what are the limits of our normative practices?
What if we have to go beyond the making?
Lastly, while we do not suggest going as far as destroying machines and factories, we must
know that tending to the ways in which people experience oppression and
marginalization through making may not suffice.
Sabotage is projected to increase just as social change, based purely on nonviolent
struggle is being questioned.
An ethics of unmaking is then in order.
Given the ethical paradoxes likely to be involved.
Thank you. Please read our full paper and I will leave you with these powerful lyrics
from one of the Luddite songs.