Historically, the commons is conceptually rooted in concerns over shared expertise derived from material resources. Contemporary understandings increasingly examine varied commons rooted in the general intellect—an affective and ideational production across people. Too often, this focus reduces technology to either a tool for, or impediment to, building and accessing robust commons, and overlooks the colonial inheritance of contemporary theory. As a corrective, we follow efforts to rehabilitate the Luddites as not antitechnology, but as technology ethicists, and theorize technology as a coproducer of the general intellect. Situating Sophie Zhang’s and others’ activism as exemplary of a productive neo-Luddism, we argue that technology constitutively remediates the general intellect and as such is central to the ethics of the commons. From this, we advance the argument that rhetorical sabotage is key to promoting a general intellect against the corporate interests and technical-colonialism too often coded into commons.

Questioning modernity’s humanism, rhetorical theory has increasingly sought to describe the rhetorical force of the material. Central to this movement has been Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT). While Latour’s theory is useful, his general aversion to rhetoric prevents ANT from fully explaining processes of translation or the politics of networks. This essay mobilizes Bernard Stiegler’s theorization of individuation and technics as a necessary corrective to ANT. Their hybridization facilitates a theory of rhetoric as the architechnical organizer of networks. I develop this position by analyzing Facebook’s mobilization of the slogan “time well spent” after revelations about their problematic role in the 2016 US presidential elections. This case demonstrates how rhetoric translates memory to build networks, reshaping the subjectivity and politics of involved—and excluded—actants. Such an approach overcomes the rhetorical shortcomings of ANT and Stiegler while refiguring discussions regarding systems of individuation, rhetorical subjectivity, and power in networked relation.