Why You Should Be a Luddite(currentaffairs.org) |
Why You Should Be a Luddite(currentaffairs.org) |
> The Luddites, Brian shows, weren’t anti-technology. In fact, they embraced new machines that helped them do their jobs better. They were against machines that destroyed workers’ livelihoods and rendered their skills useless. The Luddites rejected technology when it was used to enrich capitalists at the expense of laborers. Their dispute is best understood not as being over “technology” but about who gets the benefit of new technologies and who decides what kinds of technologies will be implemented
> The Luddites, again, were not anti-technology. They were anti getting trampled on and anti having no say in the way that this industrial development would take place. And when they lost that battle, this was the cost. It was decades and decades of mass immiseration.
In the context of 1800s industrial revolution, this means employing child labour, hugely unsafe machines that cause amputations and death, draconian death penalties against the Luddites, long working hours, and things like that. All for a small pitiful wage.
THAT is what this is about: outright exploitation that would be spectacularly illegal in well-organized countries today, and is called things like "de-facto slavery" in places where it still happens. If not having these things is "subsidizing" people then one of us doesn't know what that word means.
I find this argument stupid and disingenuous. Technology exists to reduce or eliminate labor. If you're pro technology only until it makes you, the human, redundant, you're anti-technology.
It's a weak attempt to reframe people upset about losing job market relevancy as some noble human rights advocates.
This smells like the "Yet you participate in society, curious!" comic. Is this just for upvotes' sake? "Job market relevancy" during George IV meant returning to the coal mines at best.
Do you know about actual Luddite activity and what sources do you have and how do you interpret them? Or are you just making a point in a vacuum about your opinion on semantics?
Are you sure you're not an AI advocating for a world ruled by AI capitalists where us primitive humans have no role whatsoever? :P
The key solution is technology that empowers men.
- Self-driving cars should be an option for drivers to flick on and off at will.
- Mechanized looms should be custom built to enhance the craft.
- Computers should submit to their user's will and design.
None of that is guarenteed to continue.
Corporatized technology devours resources, and subverts human authority - with dark patterns and authoritarian policy.
Automation homogenizes the input and output, making products the same.
When every resource is under computer control, there won't be any need to have a capitalist own the profits. There won't be a need for employees to buy the output.
The concept of new startups will be flattened out by centralized resource control.
The technological revolution eats it's own future.
Why bother being a luddite?
The prognosis for technology is already terminal. Let's accelerate the decline.
I raise you decentralized/federated democratic resource control.
A bunch of items can be also made from interesting abundant materials, ultimately making them available is the challenge. (Gimme that glass and carbon nanotube 3D printer. And a home EUV lithography machine. We can already make a sputtering chamber almost on the cheap...)
Anything else you want to add before you prematurely condemn technology?
Yes, it is about the collective "you," and always has been.
To suggest otherwise is preposterous.
It’s not just that you’re artificially keeping prices high, in a globalist world, someone else would do it and all the workers would lose their jobs.
It's not about convenience vs compassion. Luddism is not convenient nor compassionate for anybody
Ultimately, the luddites are just trying to prevent capital from destroying the working class.
Not that this would be apparent because nobody read...
The Fucking Article
The latter obviously. I'm not arguing with Luddite philosophy, but more with the author of the article making a claim that they were not anti-technology and then proceeding to explain how they absolutely were.
And "fighting for the consumer" is how we ended up with low-wage countries with little safety regulations making our stuff, and occasionally dying for it. This is also how we ended up with all sorts of other negative externalities ranging from worker exploitation to environmental impact.
You can't capture reality in simplistic one-liners.
My job market relevance plummeting would be my personal problem and I don't see a reason why my employer would be responsible for solving it for me.
Of course actual capital fights tooth and nail to prevent this, even if this means literally getting people to starve and unable to earn with a job, even agricultural.
There are known fixes, starting from making basic services and items free (eating the material cost which is pennies actually), employing more people running these as they're currently all understaffed.
Abundance is the expected outcome of the technology. Including abundance of leisure time. Capitalism however requires scarcity for profit and oppression to keep the rich special.
We have an abundance of housing, so why are some unhoused? We have an overabundance of food but some people are hungry and malnourished. Things might get more dicey with water soon.
At some 90% of human labor would become obsolete and we as a society should spend some time planning how to handle this situation. UBI is one such solution.
I think that continue paying people doing meaningless work just to preserve their dignity is stupid and counterproductive.
As you said, it's "we as a society" needs to figure out a solution. If society ignores this problem, then I think the anti-technology aspect of Luddism is at least understandable IMHO.