Nothing About This Is Inevitable: Gavin Mueller on Automation, AI, and a Different Future
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Deezer This episode closes out a three-part conversation with Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam), author of Breaking Things at Work. In Part 2, Mueller traced Marx's own ambivalence toward machinery through the split between orthodox and heterodox Marxism, Frederick Taylor's theory of workplace control, the Technocracy Movement, and Norbert Wiener's early warnings to organized labor about automation. In this final part, Mueller brings that history into the present. The conversation moves from Shoshana Zuboff's early sociological research inside computerized factories to her later, better-known work on surveillance capitalism, and from there into Mueller's own reading of artificial intelligence: the argument that AI systems depend on training data gathered without most people's consent, the concept of cognitive offloading, and the rapidly growing, cross-partisan resistance movement against AI data centers. Mueller closes with what he calls Luddism's real legacy — not a rejection of the future, but the insistence that a different one is still possible.
About Our GuestGavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where he also teaches Marxist Theory for the Critical Studies MA at the Sandberg Instituut. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, is a Contributing Editor at Jacobin, and sits on the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine. He is the author of two books. Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021) — the book at the center of this three-part conversation — argues that machine-breaking has functioned throughout history as a rational form of labor politics rather than an irrational reflex against progress. Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy (Routledge, 2019) examines how piracy operates from within the media industries it disrupts, rather than simply against them.
Show Notes & Timestamps00:00 Introduction
02:21 Shoshana Zuboff and Computerized Labor
05:18 AI and the Automation of Work
07:50 Training Data Without Consent
09:54 Cognitive Offloading and Social Degradation
14:30 Resistance and Data Center Opposition
18:03 The Good Life and Luddism's Legacy
23:01 Next Time on Notions of Progress
Key Concepts & Terms– Surveillance Capitalism — Zuboff's term for an economic model built on extracting human behavioral data and converting it into predictive products sold in new markets.
– Cognitive Offloading — Mueller's term for the practice of handing routine thinking over to an AI tool, with the risk that independent judgment weakens from disuse.
– Luddism — in Mueller's argument, drawing on historian Eric Hobsbawm, a rational labor tradition of resisting how new machinery gets deployed against workers, rather than a blanket rejection of technology itself.
Fascinating Historical InsightsBefore Surveillance Capitalism, There Was the Factory FloorLong before she became known for her work on surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff was a sociologist studying early computerized factories — workplaces where embodied labor was already being translated into displays, buzzers, and lights, a shift Mueller connects back to the same managerial goals Taylor pursued decades earlier.
A Debate About ConsentMueller points to the Anthropic author settlement as a concrete instance of the training-data question he raises: a case in which an AI company's use of copyrighted material became the subject of a formal legal resolution, rather than remaining an abstract argument about data ethics.
A Resistance Movement That Crosses Party LinesMueller describes local opposition to AI data centers — driven by concerns over electricity and water use — as a movement that has drawn support across the political spectrum, making it, in his account, one of the more unusual coalitions to form around technology policy in recent memory.
The Word “Luddite” Doesn't Mean What Most People ThinkAs established across this three-part conversation, historian Eric Hobsbawm's rehabilitation of the Luddites reframed their machine-breaking as organized labor strategy rather than blind technophobia — the historical throughline Mueller carries into his reading of AI in this closing part.
Coming Up NextEconomist Michael Roberts (author of The Long Depression) joins Notions of Progress to lay out his Marxist account of capitalism's boom-and-slump cycles and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
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About the ShowNotions of Progress is a podcast tracing ideas of progress from antiquity to the age of artificial intelligence. Hosted by Marshall Madow — an independent researcher whose MA in History (Cambridge) examined Georges Sorel's epistemology of myth, and whose MSc (Oxford, Saïd Business School) focused on Complexity Science and Leadership — the show surfaces the debates rather than settling them, tracing how thinkers from Hesiod to Hayek, Plato to Peter Haff, have understood what it means for humanity to move forward, at what cost, and for whom.