Utopia in the Factory

Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics

Rhiannon Firth, John Preston

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English

Palgrave Macmillan
01 August 2025

Media studies; Sociology: work & labour; Impact of science & technology on society; Artificial intelligence

This book is open access.

The idea that automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics might lead to a utopian future for humanity is a powerful one both in mainstream and radical discourse. The paradigm of ‘Industry 4.0’ where digital manufacturing enables the seamless production of goods (and services) and ‘lights out’ factories where machines and robots effortlessly produce for our future needs and wants are powerful drivers of a capitalist, free market cybertopia. For some radicals, technology and automation produce the conditions for a Fully Automated Luxury Communism, drawing on an interpretation of Marx, where human work would be replaced by a life of leisure and abundance for all. For others, an earlier discourse – cybernetics - and the use of AI and social media in communication and co-ordination enable forms of radical organization through ‘anarchist cybernetics’.

This book questions that technological optimism – particularly cybernetics, automation and AI – through a critique of these technologies and organizational forms. Cybernetics and corresponding technologies and forms (particularly Industry 4.0) can never capture human forms of creativity and working practices. Furthermore, there are similar problems with the ‘cybernetic paradigm’ as a radical form of organization or social movement in terms of human autonomy, creativity, desire and social prefiguration. As counterpoint the book shows, through empirical evidence and drawing on interviews with workers or activists in a variety of organizational forms, that tacit knowledge and autonomous and spontaneous human projects (what the authors define as ‘hobbying’) are critical in the physical act of making and co-operating.

By: Rhiannon Firth, John Preston
Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan
Country of Publication: Switzerland
Dimensions: Height: 210mm, Width: 148mm,
ISBN: 9783031871313
ISBN 10: 3031871316
Pages: 193
Publication Date: 01 August 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Chapter 1- Introdcution.- Chapter 2- The Utopian Promise of Cybernetics.- Chapter 3- The Dystopian Realities of Cybernetics.- Chapter 4- Industry 4.0 Utopias? Human potential and prefiguration in advanced cybernetic manufacturing.- Chapter 5- Co-operative Utopias in Automation.- Chapter 6- Hackspaces and Automation as Hobbying.- Chapter 7- Conclusion: De-naturalising cybernetics - against a dystopian future.

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, UK. 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.