Amir H. Payberah - 2026-02-26
From the killjoy to Luddism, the same logic of refusal appears across different contexts.
In Sara Ahmed's work, the killjoy refuses dominant happiness narratives that expect people to remain compliant and silent in the face of injustice. By disrupting comfort, she challenges norms that cover up inequality in the name of harmony. Luddism, in turn, refers to 19th-century textile workers who resisted industrial machines because they rejected the exploitative economic system those machines supported. Refusal is the shared logic between these two figures and the reason we selected the following three papers for our upcoming co-liberative computing reading circle.
Paper [1] examines the tension between domestic life and platform capitalism, showing how smart home systems not only automate but also reorganize everyday life. Through accounts, permissions, and shared payments, they create “platform families” that reshape roles and authority, turning the home into a programmable space aligned with platform capitalism.
Paper [2] challenges this reformatting of domestic life at the design level. By introducing the Smart Killjoy as a norm-critical persona, it exposes the gendered and exclusionary assumptions embedded in smart technologies. Rather than accepting promises of efficiency and harmony, the Smart Killjoy questions them and reveals the power structures that platform narratives treat as normal.
Paper [3] situates these concerns within a broader political economy. It reclaims Luddism as a collective response to inequalities intensified by algorithms, framing refusal, resistance, and re-imagining as connected strategies, and extending them beyond the smart home and design critique into wider struggles over class and power in data capitalism.
And refusal connects all three texts. It questions what is treated as normal, challenges systems that reinforce inequality, and pushes us to imagine more humane and just ways of designing and living with technology.
[1] “Delete the Family”: Platform Families and the Colonisation of the Smart Home, M. Goulden, Information, Communication & Society, 2021
[2] Unleashing the Smart Killjoy, Karin Ehrnberger, Loove Broms, Cecilia Katzeff, Interactions, 2025
[3] Towards Algorithmic Luddism: Class Politics in Data Capitalism, Vassilis Charitsis, Mikko Laamanen, and Tuukka Lehtiniemi, Information, Communication & Society, 2025AI: Reflections from an AI Project in Latin America, M. Ciolfi Felice et al., ACM CHI, 2025