Not anti-technology, but anti-capitalist: A critical theory of AI. An interview with Professor Simon Lindgren

Abstract

In this interview, Professor Simon Lindgren – Professor of Sociology at Umeå University, Sweden, and founder of the DIGSUM Centre for Digital Social Research – reflects on the intellectual trajectories, institutional frustrations, and critical theoretical commitments that underpin his recent and forthcoming scholarship on artificial intelligence. Drawing on Critical Theory of AI (2024), the Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence (2023), and the forthcoming Discourse Machines (2026), Lindgren argues that AI functions as an “empty signifier” – a concept sufficiently loose to serve almost any ideological agenda, yet firm enough to reshape policy, power relations, and everyday life.

He critiques responsible AI and AI ethics frameworks as structurally insufficient and introduces his concept of “bias bias” to describe the tendency to reduce systemic inequalities, such as racism and sexism, to technical calibration problems. Lindgren addresses the deepening of inequality through corporate concentration of AI development, the marginalisation of minority languages, and the collision between cheating discourse and efficiency discourse within universities. He advocates for a literacy-centred, de-dramatising pedagogical response to generative AI, stressing that domain knowledge remains essential for meaningful human–AI collaboration. The interview concludes with Lindgren’s clarification that critical scholarship is not anti-technology per se but is fundamentally opposed to the capitalist structures and determinist logic that currently govern AI’s development and deployment.