Jordan, S.B., Hoffman, A.L., Garcia, P., asad, m. and Smirnov, N. (2022). Essay. A Conversation on Refusal. Refuse: A Journal of Iconoclasms.

Available online at https://refusejournal.com/a-conversation-on-refusal/

This panel was built in parallel with the building of the Labor Tech Research Network as a
501(c)3 nonprofit. So congratulations to all of us! And congratulations to Winnie Poster for her
hard work! As we began imagining, and manifesting this infrastructure of support for a group
that really does represent some of the more radical forms that research around labor and
technology can inhabit in and outside of academia, in part represented by this panel today and
also by this amazing audience, we had to hold many meetings where the driving question really
is: what is the utopian ideal of Labor Tech for us? How can we get there? What do we need?
And, to be quite honest, I find myself often without language to describe what I want and need,
as I sit, as we all do, in these times of coinciding crises of police and pandemic and propaganda
and patriarchy, and politics and pollution and everything else. And instead, I find myself very
much focused on what I don’t want, what I refuse, what I know I’m not and what I won’t
perpetuate to the people around me. And these times, they really illuminate the slippery ethics
of refusal, as people move in and out of industry, take or deny their monies, cancel, callout,
defund, quit. In one conversation, I heard of one of our members joining a harmful multinational
that they had spent years criticizing and in the same conversation about another member of our
group who refused unrestricted Google funding on the terms of ethics. We never truly know
what choices we would make until we have to make them. As we build the Labor Tech Research
Network, and as each one of us here works on ourselves and our communities more broadly, it
felt imperative to draw us together in a conversation, to communicate about where we are and
about what is pressing upon our ethics, to reassess and reinvest in our commitments, to refuse
that which does not serve us and to identify what is needed, what we all collectively need and
how those needs coincide and conflict across all of our diverse, beautiful, committed parts.