The work in the current exhibition  ‘We Work Like Peasants While AI is Out There Painting and Writing Poetry’ at POST Nijmegen (NL) is hopeful. The hope is, according to Lieke Wouters’ introduction in the accompanying brochure, that we might all become Luddites.

“Ever since the Luddite uprising was put down in 1810s, working people have been locked into a similar state of anxiety over how technology will impact our livelihoods. For two hundred years, we have rarely been free from concern that this machine or that program will make our work redundant, less skilled, or simply worse”, according to Brian Merchant in his seminal book on the Luddite struggles. Today, these concerns are mainly focused on the advances in artificial intelligence and surveillance. There is renewed attention for refusal, resistance and re-imagining of technological innovations at work by digital Luddites or more general through algorithmic Ludditism. At the exhibition, on display until may 11, you can immerse yourself with some of the most recent artistic efforts in this direction.
 
The artists in this exhibition are critiquing bullshit jobs and algorithmic exploitation, creatively mobilizing against work algorithms. They work against, and look beyond, the dystopia of inhuman societies and numbing labor. It is indeed reminiscent of the Luddite struggle, but applied artistically to today’s technological innovations. It shows the promise of this type of work and evokes further experimentation and creative resistance for the future.
Unlike the Luddites, these artists are not actually smashing the physical infrastructure of oppressive technologies. They are showing different ways to resist and reimagine the possibilities of creative disruption and opposition. An example is Ana-Maria Cojocaru’s 2174: Future ruins of an Automated Past that visualizes the current repulsive design of self-service checkouts and entrance gates in supermarkets and shows how in the future these places might be left ruined, destroyed and abandoned. Such visualizations question and provoke. It could be supplemented with further calls to action, for example Not to Go to the Albert Heijn anymore, or invitations to defiant research on how to counter supermarket surveillance like the Miscalculating Risk project that varia hosted in Rotterdam, or which La Quadrature du Net is working on. There could be more literature available and further linking of actual social movements working in this direction. Still, the exhibition proves a welcoming starting point for imagining creative forms of conspiring against such development we all encounter in our everyday lives.
The more moving work in the exhibition is a three-channel video Unknown Label by Nicolas Gourault about the “invisible, underpaid and sometimes mind-numbing labor to support new automation processes.” It shows the work of microworkers that are employed to draw the outlines of people and objects in video footage of self-driving cars. They talk about their questions and dreams during this monotonous work, and we can listen to the music they put on while doing their tasks. The video also narrates how workers investigate ways to use for example a VPN to be able to work as though they are from another country with higher wages. It connects you with these ‘ghost workers’ and gives insight into the micro-resistance they engage in. It is about their personal habits, thoughts, the patterns of their everyday work life. It shows the interfaces they have at their disposal.

The video offers a close look at the complexities of today’s work related resistance. Luddites’ of today have to engage with data mining, abstract power relations, uncertain futures, chokepoints of creative labor markets, and all kinds of technologically erected barriers to alternatives, as Jathan Sadowski argues in The Mechanic and The Luddite (2025). The video supplements the abstract analyses, and the tactics and strategies of algorithmic agency as recently theorized by Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré in their 2024 book Algorithms of Resistance. In this video a more embodied and personal story is shown which tugs you in. Through the personal encounters, we might get a feel for some of the existing weapons of the weak for today’s world.
The tech platforms and systems can, and must, be resisted collectively. It needs some plan or collaborative strategy. Logjams could be one of them. Tytus Szabelski-Rozniak shows in the exhibition a trio of blue panels that explain what a logjam can bring about. A logjam is for example created when you order many cheap items to one place. What happens next? Many riders could appear in one place. It is possible to agitate among the riders. Media attention could be used. A strike could be called. The panels show such possibilities in rather simple diagrams. Does the strike succeed when there are platform negotiations? Would the platform rise wages for non-strikers? Or can we envision new relations between riders and for example restaurant owners? Should we even consider establishing a novel co-op platform? It likely all starts with protest or subversion. The outcomes will often not be what we hope. But we can at least creatively investigate the options and map out probable outcomes. We better come prepared. The panels oversimplify and suggest some clear logic for what in real life will be more fuzzy processes, but at least they visualize some more hopeful Luddite inspired disruptions, and some scenarios to better avoid.
I certainly got hope it will lead to further collective action and more (future) instances of Luddite resistance. As Craig Gent recently wrote in his book Cyberboss: “While technologies of management are intended to curb and direct worker (mis)behaviour and extend control to every corner of the workplace, worker resistance demonstrates guile against adversity, displaying cunning intelligence to re-thread power and technology against management”. Indeed, this is the hope that this accessible and congenial exhibition conveys.

Maybe not all of us will become Luddites. Still, as the machines are ‘hurtful to commonality’ according to the writings of the Luddites (that Kevin Binfield collected) we can at least involve as much people as possible and insist on the commonalities between us all. In this way multiple forms of resistance can be connected, and collective concerns can be shared. We would need more exhibitions like this, we could engage more people, organize workshops and exchanges like the ECHO event during this exhibition, and learn from each other’s experiences. As this exhibition is nicely situated in de Paraplufabrieken, next to the publisher and printer Proces-Verbaal, a hairdresser, the nice atelier of the performance duo Naaistreek and also the bookkeepers of Buro Queer, it made me think how to further find commonalities in these surroundings. And also how to get even more self-organized collectives and social movements involved. I think the connection to (former) squats or the kind of infoshop (56a) that Sanela Jahiç shows in the exhibited work “No to AI, Yes to a Non-fascist Apparatus” could be important. Especially when, as Dan McQuillan (as part of this work) explains, the technologies get ever more necropolitical and fascist. More artists and designers, writers and academics, activists and publishers, hairdressers and bookkeepers, could and should be somehow involved.
Artists are the ones taking the lead here, while they are themselves also under pressure of platforms and algorithms. Artists struggle with AI that takes over painting and writing poetry, like the exhibition title states. But there is also something promising, as these artists seem to be able to take up Luddite action against work as the main concern of their work. It is interesting to see where this leads to in the future. Like Alina Lupa shows, contributing an opening performance to this exhibition, artistic protest and opposition can be empowering, investigative, promising. It can lead to further future organizing and experimentation. And maybe, by explicitly relating to and resisting new technological developments and by taking cues from the Luddites, it can become even more so.

Will artists all become Luddites in the future? Well, at least this exhibition invites further bold creative inquiry of work in relation to latest technological developments. Luddism surely remains a prominent and provocative source of inspiration for further developing this in the future. Can we force the hidden operations of contemporary tracking and surveillance into view and (at least temporary) annul their effects, like the Luddites already did with earlier technological innovations some 200 years ago? How to take this on without being “crushed by the full power of a violent state” as, in the words of Brian Merchant, the Luddites were back in the days? Andrew Culp and Thomas Dekeyser propose in Counter Signals 5 (2024) that it is about finding new forms of sabotage that evolves “alongside the social-technological transformation of computing”. They propose we look at the work of CLODO (Comité Liquidant ou Détournant les Ordinateurs), or the protesters in Hong Kong which were tearing down surveillance cameras “not simply to render them inoperative, but to photograph, from up close, the products and logos of the large network of corporate-state actors facilitating state surveillance and oppression”. Will artists in the future be ready to develop further creative work in this direction? Just considering this might, I think, at least spark some additional bold experimentation and exciting future creative action.