Review of Stop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism by Mauro Lubrano (Polity, 2025)
In August 2011, a mail bomb exploded at the Monterrey Institute for Technology and Higher Education in Mexico. Two scientists at the institute were injured — one mildly, escaping with light burns, the other more seriously, with shrapnel from the bomb piercing his chest and perforating his lung.
At first, the Mexican authorities did not know who had carried out the attack. State Attorney General Alfredo Castillo Cervantes told the press that it might have been the action of a criminal gang, or perhaps a disgruntled student. Yet they soon realized that it had been a deliberate terrorist attack.
The bombing formed part of a campaign against scientists involved in the development of nanotechnologies. The perpetrators called themselves the Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS), a group that would go on to proudly adopt the label “eco-extremist.”
The worldview espoused by the Individualists — “nature is good, civilization is evil” — sums up the ethos of a variety of groups and ideologies. Building on the legacy of figures like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, they want to bring down techno-industrial civilization in a protracted guerrilla war against what they call “the megamachine.”
This political subculture is the subject of Mauro Lubrano’s new book, Stop the Machines. Lubrano analyzes the development of anti-technology extremism and predicts that it will grow in significance as the impact of technology on human life becomes ever more overbearing.
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Auteur: Olly Haynes
