Elements of Technology Criticism originated as a blog post. It was a modest, single-author attempt to roughly synthesize the last several years of the emerging field of technology criticism into a set of recurring general principles. Shortly after publication in 2018, the post went softly viral as a community of tech left thinkers responded to it, reacting to the way it distilled, albeit imperfectly, many ideas that had been circulating in our discourse.

The goal was to build a set of first principles that could be further developed by relevant literature. I do not claim ownership over the list’s ideas or statements, but rather took care and pride in assembling a list that was sufficiently mutually exclusive and categorically exhaustive, while being inclusive of a range of different thinkers’ collective contributions. To continue the open source spirit, I invite participants to contribute to the first official “crowdsourcing” of literature, sources, images, texts, files, and work that could develop this list further.

We will attempt to answer the question: How might we elaborate, adapt, or update this list towards a criticism of technology?

Our workshop will be an open, informal, and generative session. Participants can spend time before the workshop thinking through the points, and, then addressing them in real time as a group.

I request that participants to come to the sessions with the following:

• Read the fourteen points. No background in technology, critical theory, or technology criticism is required. In fact, approaching the text tabula rasa can be helpful.

• Arrive with a perspective on which point resonated most with your impression of the challenges presented by platform technologies and your sense of what a healthy criticism of them might look like.

• Conversely, choose one point that you disagreed with. There are many angles on this. Did you think two are too closely related? Did you think one required clarification? Did you just plain disagree? Come with a perspective on why. Perhaps most importantly, do you think something is missing?

• Come with two texts (broadly conceived) that you think articulate, represent, or provoke one of the fourteen points. Ideally this is related to a point that resonated with or provoked you (as described above). One should be obvious—for example, “X author develops this point in Y text.” This will help us add to this “canon”. The second one should be a little stranger. Push it slightly. How does X text both represent and also challenge our assumptions about these fourteen points? Work from the perspective that all points are in need of a robust fragmentation of their assumptions.