Utopia in the Factory: Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics
Utopia in the Factory: Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics
English | 2025 | ISBN: 3031871316 | 208 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 4.4 MB
English | 2025 | ISBN: 3031871316 | 208 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 4.4 MB
This book is open access.The idea that automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics might lead to a utopian future for humanity is a powerful one both in mainstream and radical discourse. The paradigm of ‘Industry 4.0’ where digital manufacturing enables the seamless production of goods (and services) and ‘lights out’ factories where machines and robots effortlessly produce for our future needs and wants are powerful drivers of a capitalist, free market cybertopia. For some radicals, technology and automation produce the conditions for a Fully Automated Luxury Communism, drawing on an interpretation of Marx, where human work would be replaced by a life of leisure and abundance for all. For others, an earlier discourse – cybernetics - and the use of AI and social media in communication and co-ordination enable forms of radical organization through ‘anarchist cybernetics’.