What Will the Next Tech Rebellion Look Like? Ask the Luddites (fastcompany.com) 61
In 1811 working men felt threatened by the arrival of wooden, water-powered looms. And yet "The Luddite rebellion came at a time when the working class was beset by a confluence of crises that today seem all too familiar..." writes Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant. In an upcoming book called Blood in the Machine, he writes that "amid it all, entrepreneurs and industrialists pushing for new, dubiously legal, highly automated and laborâsaving modes of production."
Fast Company has an excerpt from the book asking whether history is now repeating itself. Its headline? "A new tech rebellion is taking shape. What we can learn from the Luddites." The reason that there are so many similarities between today and the time of the Luddites is that little has fundamentally changed about our attitudes toward entrepreneurs and innovation, how our economies are organized, or the means through which technologies are introduced into our lives and societies. A constant tension exists between employers with access to productive technologies, and the workers at their whims...
The biggest reason that the last two hundred years have seen a series of conflicts between the employers who deploy technology and workers forced to navigate that technology is that we are still subject to what is, ultimately, a profoundly undemocratic means of developing, introducing, and integrating technology into society. Individual entrepreneurs and large corporations and nextâwave Frankensteins are allowed, even encouraged, to dictate the terms of that deployment, with the profit motive as their guide. Venture capital may be the radical apotheosis of this mode of technological development, capable as it is of funneling enormous sums of money into tech companies that can decide how they would like to build and unleash the products and services that shape society.
Take the rise of generative AI...
Among other things, the author argues that the unending writer's strike in Hollywood illustrates "the hunger that executives have for automating even creative work, and the lengths to which their workers will go to have some say in that disruption."
And they ultimately conclude that in the end the "disrupted lives" will include more than gig workers...
Thanks to Slashdot reader tedlistens for sharing the article.
Fast Company has an excerpt from the book asking whether history is now repeating itself. Its headline? "A new tech rebellion is taking shape. What we can learn from the Luddites." The reason that there are so many similarities between today and the time of the Luddites is that little has fundamentally changed about our attitudes toward entrepreneurs and innovation, how our economies are organized, or the means through which technologies are introduced into our lives and societies. A constant tension exists between employers with access to productive technologies, and the workers at their whims...
The biggest reason that the last two hundred years have seen a series of conflicts between the employers who deploy technology and workers forced to navigate that technology is that we are still subject to what is, ultimately, a profoundly undemocratic means of developing, introducing, and integrating technology into society. Individual entrepreneurs and large corporations and nextâwave Frankensteins are allowed, even encouraged, to dictate the terms of that deployment, with the profit motive as their guide. Venture capital may be the radical apotheosis of this mode of technological development, capable as it is of funneling enormous sums of money into tech companies that can decide how they would like to build and unleash the products and services that shape society.
Take the rise of generative AI...
Among other things, the author argues that the unending writer's strike in Hollywood illustrates "the hunger that executives have for automating even creative work, and the lengths to which their workers will go to have some say in that disruption."
And they ultimately conclude that in the end the "disrupted lives" will include more than gig workers...
Thanks to Slashdot reader tedlistens for sharing the article.
Re: Smash Capitalism, Workers Unite (Score:2)
It leads to power in those who own the machines (Score:2, Insightful)
We need the work to get salary to pay for the work others do. Automating more things means we need to work less to get the products/services done, and thus less work is needed to pay for them. This is where economic growth has come from, a given amount of people can achieve more in the same time. This has lead to prosperity, but also to depriving natural resources as we simply can afford to consume so much more.
In the real world, those who own the means of production and automation use their advantage to exploit everyone else, ironically to their peril, especially in the United States where we promote sociopathic individualism. The elite spend their vast resources lobbying to ensure they pay no taxes and compound the money they earn...to the degree they could never even spend it all. It's a huge dick-measuring contest with severe consequences for everyone else on the planet.
Throughout history advancements i
The new fight IS the old fight (Score:3)
Since the beginning of computing, we have this dream of having everything centralized in a mainframe computer being pushed by the biggest corporation around, where they have total control of every byte and you have to rent computing time.
This nightmare was fought over and over since then, but they're getting better at it and we're getting dumber.
Re:The new fight IS the old fight (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the beginning of computing, we have this dream of having everything centralized in a mainframe computer being pushed by the biggest corporation around, where they have total control of every byte and you have to rent computing time.
In the beginning it wasn't a dream, this was how computing was for the first couple of decades or so. Before the development of the Microprocessor and the resulting Personal Computer, workstations were connected to a central mainframe by a serial port, and would share time on the CPU to get their work done. It was done back in the day due to not being able to make a computer that could fit in an office, let alone sit on a desk.
What we have now is greed, not necessity, driving the push back to a central computing system. The greed of wanting to control, not only every bit of data we generate and use, but every bit of our personal information as well. The current trend needs to be stopped, and stopped quickly.
This nightmare was fought over and over since then, but they're getting better at it and we're getting dumber.
We aren't getting dumber, we're being manipulated by the lack of education needed by our population to understand how handing over our personal information to "Big Corpa" is harmful to our society, and the offer of "free stuff" in exchange for our signing our right to privacy over to said "Big Corpa".
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What we have now is greed, not necessity, driving the push back to a central computing system
Are you sure about that? How well do decentralized websites work? Who pays for the cost of hardware and electricity? Google spends about $120 billion per year running their business. Even if you say most of that can be cut when you don't need to serve ads, we're still talking about billions or tens of billions annually.
Actually I'm not even sure it would be legal to run decentralized websites at scale nowadays, with a lot of supposedly democratic countries coming up with laws that ban various content if a p
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Where would this be? 'Cause it ain't here and now.
Re:The new fight IS the old fight (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember the mainframe days. You rented DASD, CPU time, time on a terminal, time with terminals (which were on serial leased lines). Every bit of data was on their servers, and the mainframe owner could do what they wanted. Double fees? Sure thing. Not like people have a choice between paying for that or going back to pencil and paper.
We had a time where we had a reprieve from that. Now, with stuff being moved to the cloud, and cloud storage being the primary, if not the only way to store stuff, going back to that monopoly is something we need to avoid, if not for the control a monopoly has... but because those eggs are all in one basket, nation-states are mounting expensive attacks, and would score a propaganda coup if they destroyed the provider's storage, similar to how CloudNordic was ransomwared and wiped off the map.
Overall, we need to move back to decentralized computing and storage. Otherwise, it will not be good for anyone.
For example, come a recession, a lot of businesses in 2008 discontinued support on their servers, took shortcuts, maybe even ran software unlicensed, to make it through. Once the economy got better, they were able to true up everything, replace or pay for support again, and life went on. With 100% cloud, if a business can't make their cloud payments, they get shut down, period... and cloud stuff adds up, and prices are only increasing. Having one's own on-prem hardware means that even if the business can barely pay for power and lights, they can still run on a shoestring until things get better, as opposed to shuttering for good. Cloud computing is going to cause a lot of businesses to fail in a recession, which normally would have been able to pull through.
Re: The new fight IS the old fight (Score:3)
I don't know about you but I only store anything in the cloud for my own convenience. It's actually A LOT cheaper for me to store stuff locally. Should be for you as well, unless you live in some parallel universe where hard disks cost more than a cloud subscription over the MTBF of the disk itself.
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The "parallel universe" he's describing is the early 70's, when what you had at home and/or office was a dumb terminal only able to write text to a screen/paper and capture input.
There's literally no local storage other than printing stuff.
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The "parallel universe" that I mentioned was how life was in the 1980s in a lot of shops, be it dentist/orthodontist offices, libraries, department stores, and may other places. The only local "storage" might be a printer attached to the terminal.
At the time, it provided good security. Someone mistyped their password more than 3-5 times wouldn't just lock their account, but lock the terminal, and the terminal would be locked forever until someone called into the mainframe company, gave verifable unlock in
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The "parallel universe" that I mentioned was how life was in the 1980s in a lot of shops
Seems a bit at odds with what you said here:
Now, with stuff being moved to the cloud, and cloud storage being the primary, if not the only way to store stuff
I.e. the words "now" and "only", however...
Yes, one does have local storage now, but there are some services which are 100% cloud only that you can't really self-host. We lost this battle for email, where if you don't use a cloud hosting provider, you have to constantly deal with blackhole listings and hoping you don't wind up on someone's shit list for some random, arbitrary reason. This is why people are throwing in the towel, and migrating to M365, Titan Email, Gmail, or another provider.
This has never not been the case. Hosting your own email service from a residential broadband connection never was a particularly good idea. In fact, there really isn't any kind of electronic communication with global reach that doesn't rely on some kind of infrastructure outside of your control, and there never has been. The closest to that would be short wave radio, but the hardware and power demands are beyond reach fo
"Little has changed" (Score:2)
Not the same at all (Score:5, Interesting)
The Industrial Revolution certainly automated a bunch of labor, but it didn’t really reduce the amount that each person had to work all that much. In addition, it created a system where people had to stand in one place for 12 hours a day and do the same motion over and over and over. Very different than pre-industrial labor, and it absolutely destroyed the human body.
The computer-AI revolution has drastically reduced that repetitive, mindless drone work. Literally the opposite effect.
And BOTH of these revolutions have raised the quality of human living. Spectacularly. You really think the Industrial Revolution was so evil and bad? Please, by all means, hop into your Time Machine and go back to the 1700s, where you farmed for 16 hours a day, you never left your village, the only entertainment was drinking and dancing a jig, you had 8-10 kids before you were 30 because your wife was definitely gonna die in childbirth, 8 out of your 10 kids were gonna die before the age of 5, and you were lucky if you made it to 60. No medicine if you got sick and no painkillers when (not if) you wound up in agony from some gruesome old-times injury. No dentistry. No deodorant. No running water. God I could go on and on.
And, yes, capitalism is brutal, but if you think it’s the root of all evil, please by all means move to North Korea or Iran, and let me know how it goes. China and Russia are a tad better, but at 1/5 of western capitalist levels of productivity, no thanks. Enjoy it, comrade.
F&*ki&* luddites and their modern day equivalents. If you’re smart, you’ll ignore them. They want to make your life much, MUCH worse for a warped, twisted view of the world. They’re just plain wrong. “Alternative facts”.
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Maybe that is the plebe's Ace card: want kids? pay us for them
Re:Not the same at all (Score:5, Informative)
The idea of gays hardly being a thing in the '90s is obviously laughable, but it's actually even more wrong than it might appear. Turns out the proportion of gay people among the population appears remarkably stable throughout recorded history:
https://journals.sagepub.com/d... [sagepub.com]
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I remember the 90s ... vaguely.
Alternative lifestyle folks were not obvious in society ... but they were there ... quietly.
We all knew back then that if you were straight you did not go to a "bath house" in the USA. In Japan it is different ... very different.
And straight people NEVER went into closets that lacked external light switches.
Yeah, those Naughty Nineties were really something for straight people ... and the Alternative Lifestyle people enjoyed watching those 'up-tight straighties'.
Re: Not the same at all (Score:2)
There are a lot of causes of that, and none are particularly bad. Among the reasons people had more kids in the past was because they needed additional farm hands. Nowadays kids don't do labor so they don't bring in anything until adulthood. Combine that with modern inventions like condoms and birth control pills, and it's no wonder populations decline. Often when people have big families these days, it's for religious reasons. See Mormons.
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And what's wrong with that?
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Most of your complaints about conditions in the 1700s had nothing to do with the technology available, as much as it does the availability of technology.
We didn't yet have vaccines, but we had antibacterials, running water, sanitation, painkillers, and more. We also had, as a species, the ability to have enough of these for everyone. We did not, however, distribute these things equitably, for the same reason in the industrial revolution we did not distribute the rewards of new productivity equitably, and wh
Re: Not the same at all (Score:1)
You are so silly. They didn't have all that back then for everyone, and they don't even have it now. The Rich had it, but that's it.
You're overselling your case (Score:2)
The claim that agricultural workers worked 16 hours a day is simply inaccurate. Except perhaps at harvest, most worked less time than they did in the factories they ended up in. And it's also important to note that the factories destroyed a significant source of income for agricultural workers who, in the winter, worked on spinning and weaving in the cottages.
You're right however in your claim that the introduction of technology improved standards of living in the medium term; the problem was the short term
Re: You're overselling your case (Score:2)
Always more work? (Score:3)
Really? That may be the experience today, when the number of farm labourers is very small. But in a society where almost everyone works on the land, the idea that there's always meaningful additional work seems unlikely. So my bet is that in practice work hours were far less. And that's what the Bank of England says as well
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.or... [stlouisfed.org]
Re: (Score:2)
True for the Americas, but much less true for Europe in the 1700, where people did indeed live up to 100 in increasing numbers.
Only if those in charge ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... are stupid.
Unlike past times this time we could easily move into an age of universal abundance of we managed the resources correctly.
UBI is a real thing and it's no coincidence that really smart and powerful super-rich investors also call for UBI. It's actually cheaper to have a modest write-off for the proletariat than have them become super-pissed with nothing to lose and destroying the wealth for all. Only total dimwitts don't see this and those are likely not to have the lions share of Investment savvy.
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Universal adequacy, but not abundance (Score:2)
If you look at the per capita GDP of all but the VERY richest countries, the value of any realistic UBI will not be at super comfortable level.
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... are stupid.
Unlike past times this time we could easily move into an age of universal abundance of we managed the resources correctly.
Those in charge aren't stupid, but they sure as hell are *greedy*. That's how we get into the current inequality situation, and it is going to get worse.
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The problem with UBI (which I actually believe is the only way forward when our machine-augmented productivity soars to the point our basic needs are met with essentially no effort) is that it will be designed, implemented, and overseen by the obscenely wealthy.
UBI will not be a social wealth redistribution scheme. It will be a way to keep the masses just barely content enough that they don't riot and take everything back from the 0.1%. It's a gilded cage.
I think I'd choose ... (Score:3)
... a 2030 "gilded cage" over 1850 "freedom". Especially if that gilded cage includes modern medicine and an abundance of dirt cheap or free (beer) ways to spend your time because the bots are doing all the cores now.
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First, people tend to evaluate their success relative to others near them. Today most countries already have the resources to feed and house everyone in conditions that would seem miraculous to most people 500 years ago. (imagine safe drinking water whenever you need it, and enough calories that your children don't starve. The goal posts move - and the should move - progress has made most pepole'
What good is being rich if nobody is poor? (Score:2)
I mean, if Bill Gates wants you to suck his dick odds are you're gonna do it.
But take away all that power he has (read:money) and suddenly it's no different than some rando demanding a blow job from you.
For some reason we all act like money isn't power when it comes to *us*. It's those "lusers" who have to do what the boss tells 'em. We're too good for that. Usually because we've got some little fiefdom we carved out where we can pretend to be the big
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Submit the form to remove your data. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
https://myspace.com/ [myspace.com] is still there, still used, just less so ...
Alternatively... (Score:2)
Myself, I give a shit. Neither side is producing anything worth a fuck.
WTF (Score:2)
The biggest reason that the last two hundred years have seen a series of conflicts between the employers who deploy technology and workers forced to navigate that technology is that we are still subject to what is, ultimately, a profoundly undemocratic means of developing, introducing, and integrating technology into society.
Inventing doesn't inherently have to be democratic. You can invent and keep it to yourself if you want. Democracy is not meant to be, nor should it be, applied to everything. That aside, inventing already is quite democratic: Vote with your wallet.
Individual entrepreneurs and large corporations and nextÃwave Frankensteins are allowed, even encouraged, to dictate the terms of that deployment, with the profit motive as their guide. Venture capital may be the radical apotheosis of this mode of technological development, capable as it is of funneling enormous sums of money into tech companies that can decide how they would like to build and unleash the products and services that shape society.
And there's nothing morally, legally, or ethically wrong with this. If you invent something that causes no physical harm, it's your right to dictate what you do with it. There is a political system where the government decides what is and isn't good for society, a
Re: WTF (Score:2)
> If you invent something that causes no physical harm, it's your right to dictate what you do with it.
If this is true, itâ(TM)s only true if you invent in a vacuum. In the real world, every inventor benefits tremendously by innumerous public goods. Accordingly, in an equitable system, the public receives benefit and is allowed some say in deployment.
Alas that we do not live in an equitable system. Even inventors and innovators suffer a lot today, thanks to an insufferable intellectual property regi
Re: WTF (Score:2)
In the real world, every inventor benefits tremendously by innumerous public goods. Accordingly, in an equitable system, the public receives benefit and is allowed some say in deployment.
They already do. They buy it and deploy it if they want it.
Re: (Score:2)
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The Luddites were wrong, and always will be wrong.
70 years, 3 generations, of chronic underemployment. If you were lucky, you could put in 80 hour weeks of factory labour, for most it was scrounging for some gig work. Hang out at the docks and maybe lucky to get a gig delivering some coal that pays for today, when there is still tomorrow.
Granted it was a variety of problems, people getting kicked off their land was a big one, those spinsters maybe didn't make much but they made something and it was enough to live, combined with their sustenance farming. An
A personal take on that era (Score:2)
My grandmother's ancestors were reasonably well off back in the day, they were craftsmen making clothes - I can't remember if it was wool, cotton, linen or whatever. Then the Spinning Jenny was invented and they descended into poverty, they moved on into making bricks - and the leading cause of death was the accidents endemic in the trade back then. I can't remember if she had siblings - although I think she did - but she escaped the poverty by marrying an engineer.
So what does our future look like? Ther
Competition competition (Score:2)
IF the free market is working properly, all super normal profits will be competed away as other supplier enter the market or increase production or reduce prices. Unfortunately too often manufacturers do achieve a de facto monopoly - often by the use of trade marks these days - and can therefore continue to make excessive profits; if people insist on Heinz Beans...
The rise of the super-discounters has brought some degree of change overall; the Aldis and Lidls of Europe have brought food prices down to a rem
From Don Lancaster (Score:3)
"Employees are a hassle, a waste of time and a psychic energy sink. You should avoid them at all costs. Your incredible secret money machine should have 0.834 employees -- that is 83.4 percent of you, nothing more,no less. The remaining 16.6 percent of you should go for fun and rewind time. Spend much less time on your money machine and the job will never get done. Much more and you'll be grinding yourself down."
CEOs have taken that to heart since it came out.
Isaac Asimov had the idea even sooner in regards to Solaria, scene of The Naked Sun. Why deal with other humans at all?
Sigh. (Score:4, Insightful)
"profoundly undemocratic"
Sigh. Big, tired, please-stop-with-this-droll-nonsense sigh. We know that when you lambast "undemocratic" systems, what you're critical of is capitalist exchange and ownership, courtesy of Karl Marx.
The solution to problems similar to early pre-industrial 1800s socioeconomic changes is not failed late-1800s industrial era economic theory.
We saw how that played out - at least those of us who's ancestors survived being starved to death by the "less undemocratic" alternative means of production you'd have for us.
Perhaps it'd behoove the people who've written this article to brush up on their economic theory - quite a bit has happened in the past 150 years proving, and mostly disproving, the economic theories of prior eras.
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When does 50 years of runaway inequality, stagnant wages, environmental ruin, and work intensification get to disprove something?
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Let's be clear what we're talking about here. What's trying to be "disproven"?
I'm working off the assumption that use of "undemocratic" is code for "not sufficiently redistributive in the Marxist fashion" - as is typically the case these days, and for the past 100 odd years, when Marxists want to seize the means of production.
Make no mistake, neither the capitalist nor the communist duopoly of agendas brought to us by the same group of people roughly a century and a half ago are the solution here. Neither i
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Let's be clear what we're talking about here. What's trying to be "disproven"?
Trickle-down economics would be a good start.
I'm working off the assumption that use of "undemocratic" is code for "not sufficiently redistributive in the Marxist fashion" - as is typically the case these days, and for the past 100 odd years, when Marxists want to seize the means of production.
Undemocratic means undemocratic, the fact that it leads to a ridiculously high proportion of the value produced going to the owners of the means of production in line with Marx's theories is just an inevitable side-effect of how undemocratic businesses are.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's be clear what we're talking about here. What's trying to be "disproven"?
I'm working off the assumption that use of "undemocratic" is code for "not sufficiently redistributive in the Marxist fashion".
There are, of course, other alternatives [counterfire.org] which you seem to have failed to consider, or even acknowledge.
It's a big world, and 'simplifying' things to a false dichotomy of democratic or communist, or even capitalist or communist, would be to ignore reality as it is today, and hence be a bad starting place for determining what we should do going forward.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, there's your problem. "Undemocratic" can also just mean "undemocratic", as in the majority of people have little or no control over choosing their leaders or government policies. Which describes, for example, the Soviet Union, which was profoundly undemocratic. Structurally, it was an oligarchy. It was also redistributive only in the sense that the small group of peop
The Future Encyclopedia of Luddism (Score:2)
An alternate history:
https://thereader.mitpress.mit... [mit.edu]
Better ask some Quakers and Mennonites (Score:2)
Tech gives with one hand, and take with another (Score:1)
I'm unimpressed by the scale of perspective here.
Go back further.
Go back to when agriculture first started and then when some societies chose to turn their backs on technology and went back to hunting and gathering.
Go back to Plato talking about how written literacy damaged oral literacy and memory.
Even just the story of Adam and Eve with the apple could be about this. /r/tedwasright
The Luddites lost ... (Score:2)
What can we learn from them? Nothing ... until a few decades later the entire industry largely disappeared abroad ...
In a time of very high unemployment already, skilled workers were being replaced by automated systems, and their response was to smash the automated machines, the response was to shoot the protestors and call in the army to suppress them
The post has issues (Score:2)
What the automated looms meant was, literally, starvation. Yes, *dying*, because they weren't needed, and there were no jobs.
Now, there's a simple answer: BMI. And not US welfare, which literally puts you below the poverty line - a *real* income, one that you can afford rent, utilities, and, oh, yes, food. And a national healthcare system.
Or did any of you snots even *look* at what the strikers are asking for? Things like "enough hours to get healthcare", because right now, a lot of them are *not* given eno
Hire a hacker for social messengers (Score:1)