[Minorcompositions] Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 40 Utopia in the Factory?

[Minor Compositions]

*Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 40 Utopia in the Factory? 
<https://youtu.be/M5SM40ry6vQ>*


/Discussion with Rhiannon Firth & John Preston on their new book /Utopia 
in the Factory. Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics

There’s long been this seductive idea that automation, AI, and robotics 
might finally deliver us into a kind of post-work utopia. You can find 
it everywhere, from Silicon Valley pitch decks to certain corners of the 
radical left. The story goes something like this: in the age of 
“Industry 4.0,” digital manufacturing will allow for seamless, 
frictionless production. Factories without workers –“lights-out” 
facilities where machines run the show – become the emblem of a 
capitalist cybertopia. And then, on the other side, there’s the more 
radical dream: that these same technologies might be the conditions for 
Fully Automated Luxury Communism – a reimagined Marxist vision where 
automation liberates humanity from labour, ushering in lives of 
collective leisure and abundance. Still others turn back to cybernetics, 
seeing in the feedback loops of AI, networks, and digital communication 
new ways to organize – an anarchist cybernetics for the 21st century. 
But the book we’re discussing this episode, /Utopia in the Factory. 
Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics/ by Rhiannon Firth and John 
Preston, asks us to pause. It questions that technological optimism, not 
just in its capitalist manifestations, but in its radical appropriations 
too. What happens when we start to see automation and cybernetics not as 
tools of liberation, but as systems that can’t quite grasp the messy, 
tacit, and creative dimensions of human work and cooperation? Through a 
close critique of automation, AI, and the cybernetic paradigm, they 
argue that these technologies can never fully capture what makes human 
making and organizing meaningful. Instead they show, through interviews 
with workers, makers, and activists, that autonomy, creativity, and 
desire – those spontaneous, often hobbyist forms of collaboration – 
remain essential. These are the forms of life and labour that resist 
being coded, automated, or optimized. And perhaps, they suggest, it’s in 
these spaces – of hobbying, tinkering, and collective improvisation – 
that other futures begin to take shape.

Also available on all the usual podcast platforms

*Bio*: Rhiannon Firth is Lecturer in Sociology of Education at the 
Institute of Education, University College London. She is interested in 
anti-authoritarian organising within, against and beyond the crises of 
capitalism. Her research focuses on grassroots utopias, mutual aid and 
the pedagogical and prefigurative practices of radical social movements.

John Preston is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. He 
has pioneered an original stream of research in the sociology of 
disasters and existential threats. His work also explores the sociology 
of education and, most recently, skills and AI.

For more on the book: 
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-87132-0

Intro / outro music: “Sucked Out Chucked Out 1” by The Ex, from “The 
Dignity of Labour”

-- 
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
https://www.minorcompositions.info

Linktree of all our stuff:https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions
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