Review by Jacob Pleasants

I Have Been Thinking About This Book a Lot

This is one of those books my mind keeps coming back to. It’s not a book about schools or education technologies. Indeed, it’s not really a book about any specific domain of technology, although he does include deep dives into several exemplars, all of which are fascinating (especially the technologies of risk). No, this is a book about how to think about technology in a capitalist society.

This book has a strong point of view and takes normative positions. Yet my goal is not just to tell you what to think but to show you the value of an approach for how to engage with technological capitalism. (p. 24-25)

In this review, I’ll give a brief overview of the approach that Sadowski puts forward. My main goal, though, is to show how his approach very much can help us make sense of education technologies. So even though this is not a book about education, it’s one that educators very much ought to read!

Let’s get into it.

First, Sadowski insists that we think about technology and capitalism as operating jointly. 

Technology and capitalism work in tandem to create mutually reinforcing systems, which we must then work for, within, and against. We cannot understand one without seeing how it is connected to the other. They have fused together into a dual system: technological capitalism. (p. 2)

There is, of course, quite a bit that could be said (and Sadowski does say) about the nature of capitalism, how it operates, and what it means for capitalist logic to make its way into our technologies. Here’s one highlight:

Capitalism is also built on the alchemy of abstraction. By this I mean it is a system that excels at taking a concrete, specific thing like the house you live in and turning it into an abstract, universal category called an asset. Or, taking a collection of similar but different things like varieties of apples grown in different places and turning them into a singular, standardized category called a commodity. (p. 11)

So, how does one go about doing the kind of ruthless criticism of technological capitalism that Sadowski argues is necessary? He argues that what we need is a materialist approach that seeks to understand what technologies actually do in the world.

Materialism sets about shining the interrogative light on a system and demanding answers to the questions: What do you do? How do you work? Who do you work for? As simple as these questions are, their answers can be hidden under layers of obfuscation: The technical obfuscation of black boxes and esoteric expertise. The legal obfuscation of trade secrets and nondisclosure contracts. (p. 33)

A materialist approach stands in contrast to the more typical narratives around technology that are based largely in hype and imagination, whether from the boosters or pessimists. He urges us to set aside these often hyperbolic conversations about what technology might do, even if we imagine ourselves to be critical.

At its most severe, criti-hype can amount to just repeating verbatim the ad copy from press releases and company websites but doing so with sarcasm in your voice or a flashlight under your chin. (p. 32)

Sadowski offers us two models on which to base our materialist practice: the Mechanic and the Luddite. When used in combination, these ways of thinking and doing can give us powerful ways of engaging with technology - not just critiquing, but also shaping our technological futures. He describes them as follows:

…in the analytical sense I’m using here, being a mechanic is as simple as pursuing a curiosity about how the world really works and what you can do in it. (p. 36)

The mechanic, in the model for materialist analysis I have sketched here, offers a way to repudiate the gatekeeping over who operates the machines and who oversees the machines. Beyond making all the stuff in this world more accessible to everybody and supporting people’s abilities to tinker with that stuff, the mechanic should also set us on the pathway to a more subversive technopolitics. It is not enough to simply “fix” the systems that already exist—in the sense of restoring and maintaining the machinery of capital—we must also scrap and salvage, take apart and build anew. (p. 39)

Luddism is about asserting the ability to make meaningful decisions about the directions and applications of technologies that structure our lives. Technology is far too important to be thought of as just a grab bag of neat gadgets. And it’s far too powerful to be left in the hands of billionaire executives and venture capitalists. I want technology—I want the future—to work for the many, not against us. We deserve a say in who creates it and how it’s controlled. (p. 46)

To sum up: We need to think about technology as inextricably linked to the logic of capitalism. The Mechanic and the Luddite are two personas that we can use to examine the material reality of capitalist technologies: the ways they function, the purposes they serve, and whose purposes they serve.

Taking The Mechanic and the Luddite to School

Bringing these kinds of ideas to our schools is what Civics of Technology has always been about. Sadowski’s concepts occupy familiar space for us, but even if they are not radically novel ideas, he gives us some useful language and models that are worth playing with. I think it’s worth considering how we could utilize his imagery of the Mechanic and Luddite. One way to do this is to think about how we could bring those models to bear on education technologies. Another is to consider how we could make his materialist approach to technological capitalism part of the school curriculum so that we might prepare our young people to think differently and critically. The former is very much in line with the overarching project of critical EdTech studies (e.g., Macgilchrist, 2021; Selwyn, 2010). The latter aligns with what Dan Krutka, Phil Nichols, and I laid out a couple years ago when thinking about how to bring technoskepticism to schools (Pleasants et al., 2023). 

On EdTech

How often do we hear that EdTech has the “potential” to revolutionize teaching or “enhance” student learning? The materialist approach has no patience for such vacuous, idealist discourse. Adopting the persona of the Mechanic, we instead need to take these systems apart and look at what they actually do. Dan Meyer, via his Mathworlds blog, provides a pretty great example of what this looks like in practice. He has especially aimed his sights on AI “tutors” such as Khanmigo or Math Academy, showing how the lofty promises made by the developers are belied by a close look at how those technologies actually work (and the design decisions behind them). By rendering these technologies visible, we can easily cut through the hype and see that they are, in fact, poor imitations of teaching. Notice that being a Mechanic doesn’t mean that we need to get into the code or be an expert on machine learning!

Taking on the Luddite persona, we ask whose interests the supposedly “revolutionary” technologies actually serve. We especially look to reveal the capitalist values and motives the lie underneath the narratives of beneficence. Ben Williamson (e.g., 2021) has exemplified this approach in his interrogations of the market-driven logics of digital platforms. A recent article by Komljenovic, Birch, and Sellar (2025) further takes up that idea, mapping how EdTech has been thoroughly tied to the capitalist impulses of rentiership and assetization. As we begin to unravel who these technologies truly serve, we might turn to our fellow Luddites Michelle Ciccone and Charles Logan for wisdom on how to refuse them.

So, there are Mechanics and Luddites among us, inspiring us to take up the proverbial wrench and hammer. It’s safe to say, though, that this is a minority position in the overall education technology landscape, which continues to be dominated by hype and narratives about its “potential.” What would it look like if more school leaders and teachers became Mechanics and Luddites? 

On the Curriculum

Could our schools teach students to become Mechanics and Luddites? What would that look like? I, of course, think our schools absolutely can and should do this. And in small pockets here and there, we have models and examples of what this could be. We might take inspiration from Ruha Benjamin’s Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab or Sepehr Vakil’s Young People’s Race, Power, and Technology project. Both of those efforts show how young people can become Mechanics as they pick apart technological systems and Luddites as they question the power relationships in those systems and seek better alternatives.

Of course, the bigger question here is what it would look like to make those kinds of educational approaches core parts of the school curriculum. Yes, I know that this sounds like a pretty remote possibility. But if we take the imaginative leap, what might we see? Take those places in our schools that already focus on developing students’ technical skills, but greatly expand what they do. Make them into places where students aren’t just learning how to code or how to solder or lathe, but places where they can also critically investigate the technological systems that surround them. Places where they can subvert the capitalist structures that pattern those systems and envision (and even construct) alternative realities. As Mechanics and Luddites, we could prepare students to not simply be cogs, but machine breakers as well as builders. 

Yes, this sounds like a real long shot. Educating Mechanics and Luddites means promoting student agency rather than preparing them to be docile workers or eager consumers. At a time when the “workforce preparation” logic seems to be ever-growing, 

References

Komljenovic, J., Birch, K., & Sellar, S. (2025). Mapping rentiership and assetisation in the digitalisation of education. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-14.

Macgilchrist, F. (2021). What is ‘critical’ in critical studies of edtech? Three responses. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 243-249.

Pleasants, J., Krutka, D. G., & Nichols, T. P. (2023). What relationships do we want with technology? Toward technoskepticism in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 93(4), 486-515.

Selwyn, N. (2010). Looking beyond learning: Notes towards the critical study of educational technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(1), 65-73.

Williamson, B. (2021). Making markets through digital platforms: Pearson, edu-business, and the (e) valuation of higher education. Critical Studies in Education, 62(1), 50-66.