The Luddites weren’t backward technophobes. They saw factory owners using tech to degrade their livelihoods and they fought back — first by trying to negotiate, then writing to Parliament, and finally smashing the machines.
As workers today organize and strike over bosses using digital tech to upend their industries, there’s a lot we can learn from the Luddites’ story. I was thrilled to dig into it with @brianmerchant!
@parismarx@brianmerchant The real lesson was that they were trying to delay the inevitable. Can you imagine if we were still trying to support the whalebone hoop-skirt industry today "because jobs"?
@parismarx@brianmerchant I agree. Tech should work for us. But supermarkets make us check ourselves out, and we're forced to work with tech to pump gas and much of tech is making life worse, not better...we need it but we need skepticism and more public control of it.
@parismarx@brianmerchant Here’s the thing. When we call someone a luddite today, we’re not referencing the actual historic luddites. It’s like how everybody expected the Spanish inquisition in actual real life because they sent out letters of notification well ahead of time.
@kierkegaank
You're definitely right that the term took on a life of its own—it's how language goes.
But I do think it's a good jumping off point when someone calls you a Luddite for not getting on the AI bandwagon.
Basically employing the term (in this specific context) is using name-calling to distract from the labor rights issues. So it can provide a good opportunity to redirect the conversation back towards labor and away from personal feelings about technology.
@artemis@parismarx@brianmerchant You can still misuse the term in its contemporary meaning. I’m not a luddite because I laughed at NFT’s. They were never the future.
AI has some seriously dangerous issues if you’re being realistic. Many of which can’t be predicted. People who don’t recognise that are laughable when they blurt out luddite
LOL about the NFTs (I always laugh when NFTs are involved).
A lot of people think new tech is always the future simply because, well, it's tech and it's new, and somehow they extrapolate from this that anyone who dislikes any given new tech obviously is afraid of new tech in general.
But of course what happened with NFT fans escalated to the level of actual cult-style group thought-control, so they were not great at making sense at all.
@kierkegaank@parismarx@brianmerchant > It’s like how everybody expected the Spanish inquisition in actual real life because they sent out letters of notification well ahead of time.
TIL, huh.
Granted I never much looked into how they actually operated.
Add comment