Rina Chandran interviews Thomas Dekeyser in Rest of World about refusing AI

Rina Chandran interviews Thomas Dekeyser in Rest of World about refusing AI

Rina Chandran’s interview with Thomas Dekeyser was published March 17, 2026, in Rest of World. Dekeyser argues that refusing particular technologies need not mean rejecting progress: resistance can imagine a different future from one defined by a narrow idea of progress. He connects current opposition to a long history of people resisting technologies they considered harmful. Dekeyser says contemporary technology can appear to serve a small group with political or monetary interests while bringing others job losses, diminished social interaction, surveillance, and climate harms. He describes disempowerment when organizing and campaigning seem to bring little movement toward different futures; when technology feels unavoidable, he says, material destruction can offer temporary release. He links resistance in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere to colonial patterns that treat populations as labor or data and extract natural environments for AI infrastructure. His argument also concerns what makes a life meaningful. Dekeyser says the AI narrative prizes efficiency, speed, and intelligence, while many people value community, care, and growth. He presents refusal as a struggle against a vision of human life made secondary to machine intelligence. The interview does not establish how widespread these views are or how much influence resistance has over technology decisions.

Publication: e3ab8fbf-23aa-5211-2bd7-fb11bc598a6a

attribution — pass: The byline names Rina Chandran, and the text says Dekeyser spoke to Rest of World. The reading presents the arguments as his views from an edited interview, not as established fact or as Escape Meridian's opinion.

The pushback against AI is not a rejection of “progress,” but the creation of a future that doesn’t diminish what it means to be human, he told Rest of World.

summary — pass: The reading leads with Dekeyser's central thesis that refusal is not anti-progress. It then follows his main threads: tech serving the few, disempowerment, colonial patterns and the meaning of human life. Its language is plain. It omits his role as a University of Southampton lecturer, his book Techno-Negative, the Big Tech facade argument and Promethean shame. These are optional details, and their absence does not block understanding. The question follows from his point about temporary release.

Not anti-progress, only refusing a particular, narrow idea of what “progress” should look like.

date — pass: The reading's March 17, 2026 date matches the 17 March 2026 dateline and the originalPublished instant (UTC). The page was modified in June 2026, but every passage the reading uses is the core interview body, which is plainly original. There is no hindsight framing. This is a publisher page, so no archive disclosure is needed.

By Rina Chandran 17 March 2026

support — pass: Each claim is source-stated and backed by an exact excerpt. The summary keeps his hedging, such as 'can appear' and 'for many'. Its statement that the interview does not establish how widespread these views are, or how much influence resistance has, is a fair limitation and not an invented claim. Although the page was edited after publication, the cited text is plainly part of the original interview.

When tech surrounds us in a way that feels both omnipresent and inevitable, material destruction offers a temporary release from that disempowerment.

media — pass: No media was selected, and no verified candidates were supplied, so there is no media identity or relevance to check.