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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
