Comment on The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down
treadful@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
“Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.”
The problem with Luddism is that it objectifies unwanted behavior. Instead of “hiring children to run machines is bad,” the argument becomes “the machines are bad.”
The machines are just machines. They have no inherent benefits or harms. It’s always the people and what they do with them.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Luddism was about industrialization taking jobs away. It was not against the machines. The machines were seen as a tool of the wealthy plutocrats taking away their jobs. They sabotaged the machines as revenge. They didn’t blame the machines, they blamed the wealthy. But they couldn’t get revenge on the wealthy so easily.
treadful@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
They still took hammers to machines and not the wealthy. The modern variant of Luddites are talking about banning technologies outright instead of uses of said tech. Also, the discussion I’ve seen online is almost always strictly black and white and often ignores the people, instead focusing on the tech.
The actions and words of the Luddites don’t seem reflect what you’re saying from my PoV.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
They took hammers to the machine and not the wealthy because they had access to the machines and not the wealthy.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I don’t think that’s true, at least not generally. To my knowledge, they saw themselves as enforcing the law. Indeed, old laws banned certain types of machines, limited who could possess them, and how many. These corporations had been influential in previous centuries, and so laws protected their interests, but also balanced the interests of individual members. (Today we would probably call it a cartel or trust, rather than a corporation.)
At the time of the Luddites, these laws were no longer enforced. They had tried before the courts and by writing government, but their lobbying was unsuccessful. So they took it upon themselves to break the “illegal” machines and again limit competition and productivity.