Episode 242: Anti-Technology Extremism with Mauro Lubrano

Coordinated and Produced by Elisa Garbil

Today host Dominic Bowen is joined by Mauro Lubrano. Mauro is a Lecturer in International Relations and Politics at University of Bath and earned his PhD from the University of St Andrews with his research revolving primarily around terrorism and political violence. 

The rise of AI coinciding with the rise and intensification of global crises shows a surgence of groups who want to dismantle the technological system as we know it today. It raises the question as to whether anti-technology extremism has the potential to become a significant driver of political violence. In our conversation with Mauro today, we hope to gain an insight on Anti-Technology Extremism. He recently published a new book Stop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism which discusses this topic. 

Mauro’s PhD thesis and more recent works examine the processes of terrorist innovation, seeking to understand the rationale and dynamics of operational and strategic changes in terrorist organisations. His most recent project has embarked on a systematic analysis of organisational dynamics in horizontal and ‘leaderless’ terrorist networks, looking at how ‘informal’ leaders manage to provide operational guidance and inspiration in decentralised settings. Mauro’s work has been published in multiple leading journals, including Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, and Perspectives on Terrorism, and he has collaborated with several think tanks and public institutions across Europe and the USA.

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Transcript:

Dominic Bowen: Hi, I’m Dominic Bowen and welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we dissect the risks shaping our world and the Hidden forces steering tomorrow’s crisis. Today we’re diving into a threat that too few people are talking about and even fewer understand in a racing world where we’re all looking at artificial intelligence.

Digital dependency and bioengineering breakthroughs, the growing undercurrent is rising in resistance, and it’s not just skeptics, it’s not regulators. Extremists people who believe that the only way to reclaim human agency is to actually dismantle the entire technological system. Our guest today is Dr. Maro Lubrano. He’s a lecturer in international relations at the University of Bath, and he’s the author of Stop the Machines, the Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism. His research spans terrorism, political violence. The evolution of radical movements, and today we’ll explore a disturbing question. What happens when the rejection of technology stops being academic and starts becoming violent?

This isn’t sign fiction. It’s happening now from the fringe manifestos to real world sabotage, anti-technology extremism is becoming a credible and a complex threat that we should all understand. Dr. Marrow, welcome to the International podcast.

Thank you so much, Dominic. It’s great to be here.

When we sit down as a team and we are brainstorming themes and international risks and what topics we should be discussing, I just love the fact that I’m continually bowled over.

When the team comes to me with, I’m thinking about this team and I’m like, what is that theme? I’m well educated. I speak to a lot of people. I travel a lot, and this was one of those, I’m like, who’s anti-technology today? Everything’s about pro technology. Even the alt right and NRX movements and everything is heading towards more and more technology, but.

I think this is a theme. This is something that we need to understand. So I’d love to hear from you. I mean, we’ve had guests like Alyssa Wicky MEbA Park, Elizabeth person talking about variety of different forms of extremism and anti-technology extremism isn’t something that’s been coming up. So can you help us understand what is it, how real is the threat?

If I’d like to start answering this question by telling you how I personally encountered this phenomenon the first time. I was in Berlin in May, 2019 for various reasons, and I happened to see that there was going to be a meeting in an archist social space.

And the topic of the meeting was the fall of ai fighting artificial intelligence as part of the technological dominion. I’m more or less quoting. I might have rephrased it a bit, but this was the gist of the topic. And it was happening in the same week that the rise of AI conference was happening in Berlin.

So it was meant to address the issue of AI at the time when in Berlin there was going to be a lot of talks about ai, but a lot of tech enthusiasts. So I decided to attend the meeting. Just out of curiosity of course, at the time I was a first year PhD student specializing in terrorism and political violence, working on a completely different topic.

If anything, I was working on how. Violent extremists and terrorists adopt new technologies rather than attack technologies. But obviously that that to that, that, that meeting picked my curiosity. I wasn’t really expecting to find inspiration to write a book. I. In all honesty, and the first hour of the meeting was quite tedious.

There was not much going on except to discuss what AI is, what AI can do the implications of AI and so on. And it wasn’t really well attended either. It was probably like 12 people. But then towards the end of the meeting, they got to, the million dollar question, what are we going to do about this?

And there were a few suggestions around the room. Some of them, evergreen of counter movements such as let’s switch, speak to the countryside, start an, a tech-free commune. Someone else suggested to go to the AI conference and start distributing leaflets to raise awareness.

But there was this one person that was quite skeptical of all these solutions. And said no. Enough with all of this. We’ve tried it. It doesn’t work. If anything, we’ve been doing it for decades and it doesn’t work. And this person was then encouraged to suggest their own solution.

And, the person quite honestly said I actually have I don’t know, I wouldn’t know where to start, but I cannot rule out a future where I don’t punch someone in the face for wearing Google glasses. And I found it like quite a remarkable comment. I’m not sure to what extent it was actually serious about it.

But I started taking bits of time off of my PhD to research this and, everybody was ever dealt with political violence and terrorism. Every, but virtually everybody knows about the Unabomber. Te Kaczinski waged one man war against technology from 1978 to 1995, but. I didn’t really know much about other contemporary movements that were waging such a similar war.

And turns out that there were, as you said in your introduction, very few people that did. And so I took it upon myself to write this. And what I found initially was. Few scattered attacks and didn’t really make much sense at the beginning. And I thought that most of this was directed towards emerging technologies such as nanotechnologies, as such as AI and so on.

But what I soon realized was that there was nothing about scattered in this pattern. It was actually a well orchestrated campaign against technology and which can be found in different mere is not necessarily only rooted in one specific ideological meres and the ide in the ideological mere where I think this is more rooted the instruction anarchist, the eco extremist and the eco fascist.

So this is very much something that has been. Developing at the fringes of this, broader movements. But it’s becoming more and more it is moving towards the centers of these movements and and examples of anti-technology violence are all around us. We just, we’re just not looking for them.

And we see them, we sometimes mistake them for something else. One of the, examples here can be, the El Paso shooting few years ago, which everybody. Correctly labeled as eco fascist. But in the manifesto of the shooter, he made the point about technology as well. He also added the fact that, his dream job is, was probably gonna be automated and so on.

So this component has been there for a long time, at least 15 years. But I guess we’ve not really been looking for it because, terrorism studies tends to look at whatever the biggest threat or the moment is.

But yeah, this is very much something that is, has been growing and is very much something that I argue as the potential to escalate even further and become a driver of political violence.

And Marrow. The rise of AI and this rise of AI theme and it’s reference to this rapid advancement and the integration of artificial intelligence technologies across industries, across society, which is already I. Fundamentally transforming how we work, how we interact, how we solve problems. In your book, stop the Machines. You explore how physiological rejection of technology is crossing into this operational violence. What’s the tipping point? What’s the tipping point that convinced you that this wasn’t just a fringe ideology, more than just about punching people in the face, you wear Google glasses and actually something legitimate, a legitimate driver of political violence that we’re likely to see in the coming years?

what I think is the most remarkable aspect of anti-technology extremism is the fact that it is a very flexible ideological current. It’s very flexible in the way that it can combine with different. Struggles in the anarchist mil combines with the class struggle and the fight against the techno elites in the eco extremist military combines with the fight to defend nature and to avenge nature and the eco fascists, it combines with white supremacy and so on.

Now, what all of these mils have in common. Is that the end goal is to get rid of technology as a whole. So it’s not really about ai, it’s not really about Sure. Ai, is making things, is giving renewed momentum to at least the narrative so far of anti-technology extremists.

But. This has been going on for a while. And it’s not just ai, it’s not just nanotechnology. Is technology as a system. Now, what is technology as a system? It’s not necessarily just, again, its individual components, but more or less all anti-tech. Extremists would agree that tech as a system is made up of three main components.

The physical, which is the one that we can see cables, wires, plastic, and so on. The ideological, so the idea of progress, the ideology of progress, the idea that we can always pursue progress. And then the human humans are part of this system, the cog in the machine.

All of them agree on this idea, the mega machine, which is again, made of these three components. This is a concept that was developed by Lewis Mumford, of course, in the thirties, and it was then adopted by all the scholars, but ironically also adopted by Antech extremists, who, especially the anarchists and eco extremists, who completely buy this idea of the mega machine and see humans ideology and and the physical manifestation of technology as part of this.

Now the point is. That the system is beyond reform. We cannot reform the system and we cannot distinguish between the good technologies and the bad. Because being this a system, all parts are dependent on one another. It’s impossible to distinguish the technology that allows us to cure cancer from the technology that allows us to drop bombs.

It’s all part of one system. You cannot get rid of the. bad parts because all of it is beyond human control and is enslaving humanity. Therefore, the only way the only solution is to eradicate it is to bring about the collapse of the system. And all of these mils adopt in different interpretations of acceleration is strategy.

Now, these days we tend to associate accelerationism mostly with the far right accelerationism as a longer history, of course, it, finds its origins of Marxism, but is also present in other ideological mil, including the anarchy and the extremist. Now, the way that they operationalize this strategy is different from the way that the far right does.

The goal is still the same, to bring about the collapse of the technological system so we are not really talking about groups of people that want to get rid of certain technologies that want that upset about the role of specific individuals In this process, we’re talking about groups of individuals ideological mils that want to eradicate the entire system. And the more we accelerate the pace of technological progress, the more this mils find it urgent to respond to this. And if anything, I’ve been saying that it’s not about specific technologies, but. What you find in many of the anti-tech documents that I’ve been analyzing is that there’s this idea that we are at a point, close to a point of no return, is I’ve adopted the idea of the singularity, which they think is gonna be a point where, this collective intelligence of the machine surpasses intelligence of humans.

They think that there would be a war between people who support technologies and people who don’t. Some of them argue that this war has actually already started and it was Kazinski was started in 1978. So they linked their struggle to that of kazinski, even though there’s many differences from Kazinski and anarchist.

But all of them think that we are, close to a point of no return, meaning. There is a sense, a feeling of urgency to step up to upgrade the level of commitment, level of violence that they’re carrying out. So this, I guess, is what convinced me that this wasn’t just Another ideological fringe that was, not here to stay. I do believe that this is all of the ingredients to become a recurrent and if not a driving force of political

And I’d love to hear the trajectory over time and how this has evolved. ’cause I feel like, man, going back to nature or humans going back to nature is not a new trend. Just if we just look at the last couple of weeks and, the last couple of days at the time of recording this, Israel is purportedly attempting regime change in Iran and assassinating, senior military intelligence, politicians, we’ve got Russian backed. Attacks, sabotage attacks in Sweden and several other European countries this month.

Yesterday the US Pacific commands raised its force projection condition to Bravo and implemented additional Charlie level security measures across the Indo-Pacific region, citing potential real world threats. The trusted Traveler program was suspended on u all US bases across the Indo-Pacific region.

Military units across the Indo-Pacific region were ordered to strengthen their security. And at the same time, the US president is deploying the National Guard without the request of the Californian governor. The first time since 1965. This has occurred. So I was really happy when this weekend I was able to go away with my son to an island in a really remote spa of the Archipelago in Sweden, no mobile phone connection and just disappear for the world for three days.

It was awesome. It was great for my soul, it was great for him. And so I get it. I get that the world is a complex place and being glued to our technological devices and our works being work and our performance and our key performance indicators, being tied to technological devices is stressful. I get it.

It was great. It was a really great few days to disappear from the world, and in your book you talk about how technology is identified as a source of insecurity and some people have gone as far as to say, the only way to restore a genuine connection with nature and rediscover the true meaning. Of being human is to eradicate technology and to do away with a techno industrial civilization.

So I get that. I get that. I think there’s some merit to that, but I think it’s potentially also throwing away a lot of advancements we’ve made at the same time. So I’d love to hear from you, how has this anti-tech extremism developed over time and what can we learn from the historical trajectory? ‘Cause this is not a new phenomenon. Persons and man and humans wanting to go back to nature. What have we seen over time?

So in the book I actually start with a sort of historical overview over the last sort of three centuries. So since the first industrial revolution, and I’m sure that many aware of the story of the LA dates a group of skilled workers who. Engaged in acts of machine breaking, and now the lads are one of those curious cases of history where, history itself has not been very kind to them because what they were trying to do was to protect their livelihood, to protect their jobs, really, they were not against technology as such, they were against the unmitigated introduction of technology.

So if there is a lesson to be learned already in this case, is that if the introduction to the technology is mitigated. Perhaps we’re gonna see fewer people being upset about it. How do we mitigate it? Regulations could be a good start. Of course, nowadays regulations are harder to implement arguably that back then ’cause technology moves so fast.

And the boundaries between different, technologies not so well defined, but that could be a good start. So if we look at the example of the ladders, we see that. These were, again, skilled workers that were mostly concerned about the material impact that technology was going to have on their life.

If we move forward, towards the end of 19th century, the beginning of the 20th, we see that concerns about technology, which are expressed by many individuals, meaning including scholars, poets artists, and so on. This concern take on a more ontological dimension if you want. And yeah, technologies is identified, as you’ve also said, is this source of insecurity about, ourself as human, our relationship in nature, relationship with one another, and so on.

And these feelings throughout the 20th century have then developed. Sometimes a specific technology would be identified as as the main source of insecurity. Generally throughout the sixties and seventies and eighties, you have these various movements within anarchist milas within radical environmentalists and animal liberation rights, mil milas that sort of promote the rollback of civilization to allow us to restore a more genuine balance and a more genuine connection with nature with one another.

This also led to, in the eighties and nineties, to the emergence of the Neo Luddites movement. I say so-called because they wanted to link their struggle to that of the original Luddites, although the Neo Luddites did not engage in accident machine breaking, but the link that they were claiming to have wasn’t really that genuine because if the lots were concerned about the material impact of technology the neo lots were more concerned about this ontological dimension. And were identifying certain technologies as nefarious for humans and society, including computer technology, chemic, chemical technologies, bio technologies and so on.

But we then have this upgrade, this qualitative upgrade with theater Kazinski, who was active throughout this entire period, was started engaging acts of political bonds at the end of the seventies, and then continued throughout the eighties and half of the nineties before he was rested.

With Kazinski, we see that the concern is not really on the material or ontological level. It’s on an existential level. Kazinski argues that technology ultimately constitutes an existential threat. It’s going to lead to the extinction of humanity or to the subjugation of humanity to the system.

We can see this sort of evolution in the concerns about technologies from the material to the ontological to the existential. And I think that what we can do to to address this as to re as to mirror this evolution. We mentioned regulations, those could be good to address the material and ontological dimension, but ultimately there also needs to be a revolution in the way that we consider technologies in the first place, the way that we the way that we use technologies in the first place.

Now, as you also said, it is very easy to empathize with some of the arguments of design technology extremists. For those like me who don’t really understand technologies that well, this can feel overwhelming, can feel a bit concerning, even scary. But we of course don’t need to sympathize with this feelings, but there’s something there that we can easily understand.

Now, what I try and say in the book is that we shouldn’t securitize these movements that are trying to eradicate technologies. ’cause I don’t think that will lead to any, effective solution. We obviously need to counter them, but, within, in a proportionate manner.

What we really need to do to address this ontological and existential feelings. Is to change the way that we interact with technology, to not interrogate ourself on what this technology or what technology in general allows us to do, but what sort of activities it allows us to to perform. If these activities do not lead to a genuine relationship with nature and with one another, then they should probably not be pursued. And I know it’s easy to say, it’s probably much easier say said than done. But it could allow us to prevent this ideology to further spread because as we’ve been saying it, there is a lot of fertile ground for it because people are concerned about certain aspects of technological progress.

People are concerned about certain certain technologies that are promising to reshape society completely. And in every technological revolutions. Any, in any of the four industrial revolutions we’ve experienced so far, there’s winers and there’s losers, and we need to, make sure that the losers are not going to be attracted to this sort of violent responses to these processes. We need to make sure that there are no losers in the first place, although that’s quite hard to achieve, but at least to severeties between them and this idea extremist ideology.

Yeah, so you talked about the winners and the losers, and whilst most modern day violent extremist threats are driven primarily by racial, religious, or anti-government ideologies, but this anti-tech extremism now recognized as a growing concern by counter-terrorism experts. It’s not as prominent as other extremist movements and anti-tech have been identified by security agencies as targeting critical infrastructure, and they’re often motivated by a mix of personal grievances and broader ideological opposition to technological systems. So who are these anti-tech extremists? Where do we find them? What are they doing? What do they look like?

Great question. As I said, I identify the main hubs of anti-technology activities. Within the, anarchist, the eco extremist and the eco fascist milia. Now insurrection, anarchists are a extremist tendency within the anarchist movement.

The anarchist movement is generally quite nonviolent and passive, even embraces istic ideals. But there is this extremist fringe within them that argues that, revolution is to be pursued by illegal and violent means. Now within this movement, anti-technology violence has risen to prominence in the last 15 years.

One of the first spectacular attacks that occurred in the last 15 years was in 2012 when the CEO of a nuclear engineering group was kneecapped on the streets of January in Italy by a an anarchist cell. Since then in anti-technology, feelings have been growing within in the insurrection now what they believe is that technology is at the same time an autonomous enslaving essence that enslaves humanity.

And a tool that the Techn elites can use to construct what many call the Prison Society. Now, technics, it’s easy to grasp, is an amalgamation of the traditional sociopolitical elites and science researchers and so on. The Prison Society is this sort of. New totalitarian regime that will be enabled by technology, which will be achieved first through repression that is widespread surveillance and other technologies that can, so to control how people behave to that.

And then this process will then move to the stage of. Prevention when basically humans will be so embedded within this system that they will embrace all of its values without raising any critical thought.

This is how then anarch is trying to prevent this from happening. They’re employing a pronged strategy. On the one hand, they are attacking critical infrastructure, something you’ve mentioned. On the other hand, they’re attacking symbols of the tech and industrial society now, critical infrastructure power plants.

Internet and train. For example, there was recently before the inauguration of the last Olympic Games in Paris, there was an attack on the high speed train in France. And anarchists were allegedly behind that. Even more recently, right before the the current festival a few weeks ago, anarchist carried out a sabotage that left the area in without electricity for a few hours. On the other hand, as I said, they’re also attacking people.

Not so frequently, and anarchists do not tend to resort to little violence. Unlike eco fascist and eco extremist, they prefer to send a message rather than kill people. And examples are for, I’ve mentioned that the knee capping or the nuclear engineering group. Occasionally there are parcel bombs that are sent to specific CEOs, but those are usually intercepted before they can harm anyone.

Eco extremists are bit of a weird phenomenon. That emerged in 2011 in Mexico to then spread toward the parts of South America and Europe. Originally, they find influence in instruction anarchism, radical environmentalism, the uniform.

But they soon underwent a few processes of ideological innovation. And adopted this new sort of identity. Now, some of the main groups that have have em embraced eco extremist ideas have declared that they see technologies as immense barrier that is divided world of humans to na from nature.

And they claim to be part of nature and they fight to defend nature and they embrace principles like indiscriminate violence because they believe that nature is not discriminate. Therefore, they will not be discriminated in their violence. The spikes disclaims, they have actually carried out sabotage.

Targeted attacks and other forms of attacks. When I said that they’re a bit of a weirder phenomenon is because they’ve also embraced different forms of nihilism and misanthropy in their ideology. The interesting thing about them is that they have no goal. That is, they’re not fighting to save nature. They’re not fighting to build a better word. They’re just fighting to avenge nature and ideally in the most optimistic scenario, contribute to the demise of the tech society. But they’re also very. Convinced that, their struggle is a sort of a doomed one. There’s a lot of defeatism in ideology. They believe they stand, they don’t stand a chance against the tech industry, society, but they prefer to go down fighting rather than waiting for the technological apocalypse to happen. So in a way that is similar to that of the anarchies, they attack critical infrastructure.

They attack individuals that are related to technologies in Mexico. In the early 2000 tens, they killed nanotechnology scientist, but they also have claimed responsibility for random attacks against individuals and people that have nothing to do with technology. And this is part of their whole idea that indiscriminate violence is the way to fight technology because they claim basically no one is innocent. If they haven’t identified as e extremists.

Finally, the eco fascist as this sort of growing fringe within the broader, far right, movement. It’s a fringe that actually has quite a long history dating back to the mid 19th century or also certain eco fascist ideas were present in the green wing of the Nazi party.

But basically what eco fascism says is that there is a connection, a deep connection between the environment and the idea of nation between environment and nationhood. And modern technology is a force that is. So it’s leading to a decay, the decay of the white race, and is leading to the of society in general. They want to reestablish this romanticized and idealize idea of the past, where in their own worldview, all different people of different ethnicities lived. Separated. They weren’t mixed in a past where again, in their own worldview white people ruled at the top of the, of a natural hierarchy. They identified na nature itself as fascist, and therefore they embraced this idea. So they want to get rid of all of the modern technology to reestablish this. Disconnection. They also engage in violence that targets critical infrastructures. Although in the eco fascist milieu, the violence against technology has been for the time being replaced by violence against minorities and against all the groups of people that at Eco Fasc Sea as the, as a more pressing issue.

There’s a few documents where they discuss this and they say that basically before you can establish a. For Eco Fascist Society, you have to address certain problems including competition with other nations, which is a sort of argument to explain why they’re not pursuing the eco fascist goal here and now.

And it’s yes, they are attacking critical infrastructure, but they’re not prioritizing this because. For example, they also mentioned competition with China. They also mentioned competition with other countries. And so they want to get to a point where they have addressed these concerns to then move and establish this eco fascist society.

And so you’ve used the word fascist and eco fascist quite a lot, and in your book you mentioned the critiques and that these can be rooted in concerns about labor, about employment, about environmentalism, about philosophical critiques of industrial society. And these are concerns that many mainstream people have.

So I’m wondering. What makes someone an anarchist, an echo extremist or an echo fascist, as opposed to just someone who’s concerned about income inequality or someone who’s just concerned about climate change. What is the difference between a mainstream person who’s worried about income inequality and someone that you are calling an eco fascist? An eco extremist, and an anarchist?

Yeah, this is a great point and a very important one because we need to distinguish between. Concerns about technologies that are legitimate and valid, and reaction to technologies that pursue extremist goals. Now, I think that what makes an instruction aist, anco fascist, or an eco extremist that has embraced anti-technology ideas it’s this notion that you cannot reform the system, you cannot improve it. You need to get rid of it. It’s this idea that there is a zero sum game and a cosmic battle that we are fighting against technology that one cannot thrive without the other one being degraded. The other one being nature or ourselves as humans.

There is also a very strong man perspective on this. It’s good versus evil. There’s no side in between. There’s no third opinion. There’s no third solution. It’s either you stand with technology or you stand against it. There’s one way of looking at this. This is very modest interpretation of reality, and the whole idea surrounding technologies.

Of course, also informed by conspiracy theories or at least conspiracy thinking. The idea that there is. Someone or something behind the scenes that is a work to to advance a specific agenda. So it’s a struggle for supremacy. At the end of the day, there is no middle ground, there’s no possibility of compromise.

Again, you cannot reform the system. I think it all boils down to this. You cannot reform the system. You need to destroy it. We can engage in discussions about what is wrong with technology and what is wrong with our society all day. We might come up with very valid solution that will lead to very good improvements.

Improvements can be tangible and quantifiable, but this sort of anti-tech extremists will still believe that we are that we are reproducing a system that is inly oppressive. And and contributing to enslaving us all. I once was in an anarchist social space

great people, very nice, very kind. The moment I told them that I was research and I was interested in chatting with them, they were like, yeah, sorry, please leave. You are part of the problem whether you realize it or not. You are part of the system. You’re part of everything that is contributing to this.

So is this, strong mannequin perspective on it and this idea that the whole system. Needs to be eradicated because there is no part of it that can be saved or reformed.

And so with that in mind, what might the future hold for anti-tech extremism? How do you expect this movement to evolve in the coming years?

when we look back in 1995 we see that the Unibomber was promoting the idea of an anti-technology revolution made up of anti-tech warriors, made up of people that were committed to eradicating technology made up of people who had only one and one goal in mind. Technology. What we see in STEM nowadays, as I’ve mentioned earlier, is that anti-tech extremism. Is a very flexible ideological current that can be combined with different form of struggles with the class struggle, with fight to defend nature with white supremacy. But we can also imagine other ones. We can imagine a combination with religious perspectives. And if anything, the extremists actually starting from 2015, did embrace form of pagan animism and combine them with technology. So technology, so anti-technology, incredibly flexible, ideological current.

I think that the escalation of anti-technology violence will persist along these lines. I might be wrong, but I don’t necessarily think that, at least in the next few years, we will see the rise of a anti-tech movement in the way that Kazinski described it. And the differences between the ideological medias that make up contemporary anti-technology extremism remind us of this flexibility, but also remind us of the how unlikely it is again, in the short term to see the rise of.

A movement committed exclusively to the fight against technology, but the ingredients for escalation are there. The idea that I’ve mentioned earlier that anti-tech extremists see technology as a mega machine, makes the idea that anti-technology extremists see. Technology as a mega machine contributes to this id, to this feeling that we are being, that we are under siege and also justifies and legitimizes violence against humans.

And the fact that anti-tech extremists believe that nature and our own our and humanity itself are at stake means that, the stakes are quite high. That what we stand to lose pretty much everything. Therefore, that could strengthen this feeling of urgency that many anti-technology extremists have. And this link, this brings me to a third point, which is. The fact that many of these individuals, many of these a tech extremists embrace an apocalyptic mindset whereby they see, as we said earlier, that we’re close to a point of no return and therefore they need to do more to prevent this or to, again, accelerate the process of collapse.

This leads us to the final point, which is all of these groups are employing strategies that exactly geared towards accelerating this. So I believe the future of anti-technology extremism will see these anti-technology ideas, converging towards the center of this movements. And gaining traction, especially as as we said earlier, AI continues to advance, as all the technologies continue to emerge on a almost daily basis, and as the fifth or the sixth industrial revolution unfold.

It might be that in the future we will see the rise of a, of an anti-tech movement in the way that Kazinski contemplated it con co. The way that kaki envision it. But I believe that this flexibility of anti-technology extremism at the moment represents its most remarkable quality because it would allow it to be combined to different kinds of struggle.

And if we see this next to the four qualities that I also just mentioned, mega machine, an effort to preserve humanity and nature. Apocalyptic mindset, an accelerationist agenda. Then we can we see how all of these ingredients are geared towards escalation.

And Mara, when you look around the world, when you look at what’s happening in a variety of countries and regions, what are the international risks that concern you the most?

Looking at the events that have been occurring over the past few years and keeping an eye on all of these anti-tech extremists, one of the things that I’ve tended to see is that, anarchy, for example, have now started targeting companies that work on defense industry companies that work on technologies that have force.

Do I use nature and so on. So that can definitely be one of the events that I that I particularly concerned. The re-arming of Europe or the arming of, the new arm race that, we see globally basically, but then also the rising tensions within. Countries at the domestic level, the rising polarization that we see between between the rising polarization that we see within country.

Let’s not forget that one of the goals of the Eco FA is to kickstart racial war. So all of the tensions that we now see between people that are support migrants and people that are against migrants, all of these tensions that we see. Surrounding ideas such as regret, replacement theory and so on are of course concerning when it comes to these developments.

And let’s not forget the. Digital dimension, which might sound quite ironic because we’re talking about anti-technology extremists, but they do use technology quite a bit. They are present online. If anything, that’s how they communicate. That’s why they, post their communicates or their manifests or whatever.

And of course we all know what implications the digital dimension has on violent extremism, how it contributes to the spread of these ideas, how it contributes to new and shocking forms of extremities that are emerging these days. and now is allowing these individuals to operate on a decentralized and leaderless way.

I think that’s quite significant and thank you very much for explaining that. And thanks very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast Marrow. Thanks a lot Dominic. It was a pleasure to be here. That was a really interesting conversation with Dr.

Marrow Lubrano. I really appreciated hearing his thoughts on the anti-technology extremism. Mauro’s a lecturer in international relations and politics at the University of Bath, and he recently published his new book, stop the Machines, the Rise of anti-technology extremism, please go to the International W Podcast website and subscribe to our newsletter to ensure you’re getting our latest news, insights, and book reviews, as well as podcasts in your inbox every two weeks.

Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Elisa Garbil. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We’ll speak again next week.