I see so much criticism to luddites, to the point that it became some sort of insult, but people forget to consider the context. I remember reading in a book called history of the wealth of nations, from leo huberman, about the living conditions of the textile workers during the beginning of the industrial revolution, and it was of extreme poverty to the point that an interviewed parent was thankful that his sons were dead, because they wouldn’t have to live in this world anymore
The beginning of the industrial revolution is a very convenient point in time: the readers can associate the industrial revolution with poverty and guess that everyone lived a happy life before that. I think everyone knows that the conditions for the workers were bad - but guess why they became workers in the first place? Why didn’t the people stay on their farms and lived a good life there? Of course because they didn’t own farms, and their lives were already miserable before the industrial revolution.
maybe wanna brush up on history.
People didn‘t stay on their farms because there were big land reforms in the late 18th and early 19th century. In places serfdom was abolished, in England common land was privatised. The were loads of people who suddenly had no means of surviving and capitalists suddenly had a lot of desperate workers ready to be exploited.
I was thought Luddite’s were people who didn’t understand technology and we’re afraid of it. Turns out Luddites were based as hell. We need some Luddites to start showing themselves again due to AI and the data centers.
Industrial automation dramatically reduced the cost of making cloth and these costs were passed down to the consumer which benefited everyone. The profits however were now only shared with a much smaller group of people, driving wealth inequality. Cotton mill workers weren’t well paid to begin with either.
With even better automation we can liberate human spirit from a lot of low-fulfillment work and create a space for actualization. But in the same time we have to deal with the socio-economic system far currently requires work to survival. That needs to be adapted.
The Luddites were a 19th century guerrilla movement that smashed textile machines, burned factories and threatened their owners. But they were not motivated by a fear of technology […] the luddites […] were engaged in the most science-fictional exercise imaginable – asking not what a technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for. The Luddites, you see, were skilled weavers whose intense physical labor produced the textiles that clothed the nation. The difficulty of their trade – both in terms of esoteric knowledge and physical prowess – allowed them to command high wages and good working conditions.
All that was threatened by the advent of textile machines, which produced more fabric in less time, and required less skill. The owners of textile factories bought these machines with profits derived from the weavers’ labor, and then used those machines to grind down the weavers. Their hours got longer, their pay got shorter, and many of them were maimed or killed by the new machines.
Weaving engines are ingenious and delightful machines. The Luddites had no beef with the machines – their cause was the social relations that governed those machines. By painting Luddites as mere technophobes, we strip ourselves of the ability to learn from history. The lesson of the Industrial Revolution is that merely asking what a machine does and not who it does it for and to can lead to literal genocide.
Nice title manipulation 🙄
Oh no someone manipulated you into learning truth and facts. How horrible.
truth and facts.
🤣🤣🤣
Doesn’t break any rules. Editorialization is covered in the sidebar.
Facts don’t care about your feelings ;)
There are no facts in your title, just manipulation. 🙄
