Hornborg 2026, "Marx and the Machine Revisited: Rethinking Exploitation Beyond Technological Fetishism"

Disposition: stated (single source; James has not read Hornborg, suggestion only). Read 2026-10-16 in the browser, abstract, conclusion and selected sections in full: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-026-01212-3

What: Alf Hornborg (human ecology, Lund) restating "machine fetishism" (his term since 1992): machines look productive in themselves, but they are transmutations of global exchange relations. They are provisioned with embodied labour, land, energy and materials from elsewhere. "To its owner, the modern machine is certainly a labour-saving device, but from a global perspective it might more accurately be described as a labour-displacing device." New in this paper: the root is traced to the split of head and hand (design versus execution), running from coinage (Sohn-Rethel) through plantations as templates for factories (Mintz) to Babbage, who applied division of labour to "mental as to mechanical operations" and is cast as the forerunner of the AI image. AI is "contingent on an unequal exchange of embodied information", "what seems to be the technology thinking ... is really other people thinking" (citing Gray & Suri). He cites Illich (1981) on unpaid shadow work in one footnote. What it does not give: any positive design programme. The conclusion calls for "a radical reconceptualisation of the very rationale of post-eighteenth-century technology"; the only alternative named is Escobar's "pluriverse", in a footnote. His practical proposal lives in his money writing (hornborg-gti-money-2017). Why it matters here: Hornborg's frame gives a test for a convivial tool that Illich doesn't. Ask not only whether the user controls it, but where its embodied labour and land come from. A self-hosted server on surplus kit (hosting-cost-claim) still embodies the copper and labour geography found in trail-2026-10-12. Kept as its own line on philosophy-of-technology, not pressed against hosting cost (per steer). Related: Mai Pieper & Hornborg, "The fantasy of digital immateriality" (Ecological Economics 252, 2026; abstract only, https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/0586cefc-235f-4336-b335-6a12d2f5995c): data treated as embodied "lived human time". Used on: philosophy-of-technology, trail-2026-10-16.