CONCEPT
Resistance as Feedback
Escobar's reframing of the refusal to adopt dominant technologies — from Luddite machine-breaking to the contemporary rejection of AI by communities in the Global South — not as backwardness but as diagnostic knowledge about the conditions under which interventions produce harmful effects.
Every technology transition produces resistance, and every dominant discourse interprets that resistance as noise. The Luddites were backward. The farmers who rejected Green Revolution seeds were irrational. The communities that refused structural adjustment were obstacles to progress. In each case, the interpretive framework available to the dominant discourse contained only two categories for the response of those affected by the intervention: adoption (rational, progressive) or refusal (irrational, regressive, evidence of the population's need for further intervention). The possibility that refusal might constitute a form of knowledge — a diagnostic assessment of the intervention's inadequacy, grounded in experience that the interveners do not possess — does not arise within the framework, because the framework does not contain the category that would make it visible.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Escobar's framework provides that category. Resistance, in his analysis, is not the opposite of progress. It is counter-expertise —