Be a Luddite

I seen him smash things
Watched Ned Ludd chill out

It's a cliche to point out the fact that the accelerating pace of technological innovation has us spinning, societally speaking. People (generally, but not entirely younger folks) who grasp the capabilities and impact of new tech sprint forward creating new ways to communicate, to work, to travel and live. Those (again, generally, more mature - at least chronologically) who feel overwhelmed by the dizzying waves of change resist at the risk of being called out as Luddites.

Turns out the Luddites might've been onto something.

Here's how Brian Merchant, author of new book entitled "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" started an opinion piece he penned earlier this week in The Washington Post:

"I test drove the first-generation Tesla Roadster. I once lived on Soylent powder shakes for a month. My Twitter account is almost old enough to drive. I wrote a book about the iPhone.

Also, I’m a Luddite."

If you're like me, beyond being dead handsome, witty, and humble, you associate the word "Luddite" with backwards, regressive fear of the modern. Merchant sees a different perspective, one that he first encountered in reading a relatively obscure 1989 academic work by a sociologist at The Sorbonne named Raymond Boudon entitled "The Analysis of Ideology". 

First, a bit of historical table-setting. The Luddites came to prominence in the early 19th Century in Nottingham, England. They were not, as we might've been taught, idiots who feared modern technology. Rather, they were skilled and sophisticated textile artisans who made comfortable middle-class livings by weaving any number of high-quality goods using traditional methods. As the Industrial Revolution gained traction ndustrialists realized they could churn out greater volumes of product (generally lower-quality) using cheaper labor. All of which threatened the Luddites' livelihoods.

Gotta drop some Beasties to
celebrate Whit's birthday

The Luddites, named for the apocryphal Ned Ludd, who was said to be the first to smash an industrial loom, demonstrated their resistance to mass-market technology by destroying locality-specific types of machinery they deemed threatening to the traditional way of doing things. Ultimately, the movement was suppressed by the government, who deployed more than 12,000 troops to quash it, in ways both bloody and jurisprudential. 

In his discussion of Luddism, Boudon asks the reader to examine its rationale not from the perspective we get from modern history books (the irrationalist view, as he calls it, or fear of modernity) but from that of the Luddites themselves. Bit of victors write the history books thing going on, says Boudon. The Luddites themselves were rational actors, busting up mass-market looms because of the threat to their livelihoods, and only doing so after they failed to reach any kind of agreement with wealthy industrialists about an equitable distribution of profits. As Boudon writes, "Luddite workers tried to oppose the introduction of machines because they were a clear threat to their jobs and the means to live. From their own viewpoint, machines seemed to be a[n] undisputed cause of unemployment."

So it turns out the Luddites weren't radical anti-technologists at all. They just sought the means to integrate new technologies in ways that were fair to workers. And that sounds fairly familiar as we turn back to our own age where AI threatens jobs from copywriting to journalism, where Amazon runs shipping centers that create inhuman stresses on its employees while grinding local retailers to fine dust, where CEO pay reaches stratospheric levels in comparison with the workers who make their products and enable such compensation. 

As Merchant writes in comparing the time of the Luddites to our modern era, "Then, as now, leaders dazzled by unregulated technologies ignored their potential downsides."

Like Merchant, I dig modernity and technology. I would've been terrible at living in the 19th Century. I like my phone, and podcasts, and Wordle, and streaming soccer matches. But as an observer of the world, it's impossible to ignore the inequities that grow larger and larger as global society becomes more and more advanced in so many ways. In fact, we may inhabit a world where economic inequality is as great today as it was during the Industrial Revolution. And that, friends, seems unsustainable if not grossly unfair.

Merchant closes his piece in The Post with these words, "The clothworkers of the 1800s had the right idea: They believed everyone should share in the bounty of the amazing technologies their work makes possible.

That’s why I’m a Luddite — and why you should be one, too."

I'm not Spartacus. But I'm definitely Luddite curious.