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The Majority Report had an excellent interview with this author Brian Merchant who wrote the book “Blood in the Machine” about the luddites. It is quite interesting that luddites were not against technology, they were against the owner class using machines to replace skilled workers with unskilled workers using mechanized systems for lower pay and taking all the profits.
The interview went for nearly an hour but is worth a watch. It starts at the 30 min mark. https://www.youtube.com/live/SOsFm5H_M3w?si=KNxbkNnziDdh0l7V
There are also two rather excellent podcast episodes about luddites and the book, one by 99 percent invisible that discusses more about the concept in general and another by Cautionary Tales that is focused on the luddites and what they did.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/live/SOsFm5H_M3w?si=KNxbkNnziDdh0l7V
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The interviews on The Majority Report are so good and in depth.
I always feel bad when I tune them out while working. I can’t help that I do that. Sucks.
Time them out? What does this mean?
I meant “tune”. Edited above. Phone autocorrect.
Cool! Thanks.
They probably meant to say tune out.
I listen to them at work the night after. I’ll be listening to Fridays show tonight.
Alright fine, I’ll be a Luddite now. Every time we ‘upgrade’ or ‘make progress’ it is really about controling the working class and circumventing a previous business model. Capital pays more and more for the inputs: fuel and technology, in order to justify their control. And then once they have it, they use progress to justify poor labor protections. They never use the predicted best solution, or even a compromise, they use the solution that offers them more power.
Don’t be a Luddite: be a socialist.
Because the entire problem with luddites is blaming the wrong cause.
Automation of menial labor is the best possible thing that can happen to humanity, and to the humans working those jobs.
Except our system is so fucked that “no job” = “go die on the streets you worthless layabout”
Every job lost to automation should be celebrated by a socialist society, as it means more of us are moving up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
That’s how I’ve felt for a long time. What a stupid world we’ve built where reducing the number of jobs is considered a bad thing.
And yet the only thing political parties across nations can agree on is they want more jobs.
You can be both, and a lot of us are. A Luddite wouldn’t be opposed to the automation of jobs in a socialist society, nobody is being exploited in that case.
We question and oppose the tech right now because that isn’t the society we live in. It isn’t really about the tech at all, it’s about who controls it and how they’re using it.
Luddites do not offer solutions: Socialists do.
Don’t waste effort opposing tech when you could spend effort promoting socialism: You won’t oppose tech anymore than the Luddites did (IE with limited initial success followed by absolute annihilation)
Socialists have actually been successful, unlike Luddites.
Absolutely. And I celebrate every act of sabotage, from people putting traffic cones on robotaxis to people shooting down drones flying over their land.
Although, Marx’s critique still stands, in that the Luddites, while they generally correctly noticed the problem that within capitalism new technologies generally serve to further disempower workers and devalue their labor even further, didn’t have a shred of an answer. As it turns out, solving problems is more complicated than smashing things that are pissing you off.
Hence why the Luddites are a fondly-remembered image but the march of technology hasn’t slowed down literally at all.
Except he did have an answer, people just misunderstood it as “smashing things that are pissing you off”.
Sorry, who are we talking about here? If you’re trying to say Marx had more sophisticated answers, true, but I was saying the Luddites didn’t have an answer. If the Luddites had a more sophisticated answer, they never acted on it.
Ah, my apologies, I misread your comment
Clickbait title written by a sorry excuse for a journalist. Gregory Barber should go write top 10 lists for Buzzfeed.
Buzzfeed would be a step up from Wired.
I love technological progress and am no Luddite but the technology that’s most visible to consumers rarely just makes everyone’s lives better. For every truly transformative tech like smartphones, there’s a dozen “disruptions” that just replace some previously functioning part of society with something shittier. (Like phone trees instead of a customer service agent. AirBnB causing rent to rise while breaking zoning laws. Generative A.I. has potential but so far, it’s mostly just automating content farms. Crypto wasn’t a real technological innovation but Silicon Valley VCs pretended it was.)
In a competitive market, even those shitty “innovations” would eventually translate into lower prices but we live in an age of weak enforcement of laws to create and foster competitive markets. Of course there’s a rise in pissed off consumers when all the upside goes to profits/shareholders.
Smartphones disrupted so more industries than they are at risk now because of any new techs, disrupting previously functional parts of the society. They sent home thousands of workers, ruining the life people with previously highly regarded jobs, from retail to bank and finance. Why do you regarded their introduction as “better”? Probably because we were just younger, and you were more open to changes, and when they caused turmoil you didn’t felt the consequences.
(I am not against smartphone or technology, just trying to point bias and selective memory)
GPS is dope.
AI is dope as well. Still they all have impact on the market.
For sure they were companies relying on the tasks that gps does now to make a living. They most likely had to reinvent the business or die.
This is how market works since forever. Something is introduced, people make money out of it and push other people on the streets. It’s an organizational problem, not a technological problem
Unpaywalled
the fact that i was paywalled trying to read this pretty much says all one needs to know about where such a sentiment could be coming from. HMMMMMMMM
The Luddites weren’t wrong, their jobs were taken by technology.
My job was taken by Dave.
Always make me laugh seeing these neo-luddites. They’re cute as hell
😘
I personally refer the term Butlerian Jihadist, especially when it comes to being against AI generated content.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man
