Comment by wetherc
2 days ago
> or a “what would happen if the Luddites won” scenario.
Worth also noting that the Luddite movement wasn't a wholesale, fervent rejection of technology: they neither rejected technology nor were inept at using it. The uprising was of skilled textile laborers who protested certain types of technology on the basis of how those technologies were applied and who they truly benefitted (i.e., the ruling rather than the laboring class). They were more concerned with how the tools would depress wages, displace skilled workers, and reduce the quality of the product produced than with technology as some boogeyman that should be systematically dismantled, and their protests were violently responded to with harsh legislation and military intervention.
Lumping them together with a Space ISIS is probably a bit of an unfair comparison
Yep. They were concerned about working conditions. For any tech worker that has ever moaned about return to office: Congrats you're a luddite.
Great irony in this comment
> They were more concerned with how the tools would depress wages, displace skilled workers, and reduce the quality of the product produced
This is true, but it's important to note in context that they were wrong, and that society is better off on balance given the quality/value available in the modern fashion market. I mean, duh, as it were.
You're 100% right that the real people were nuanced and intelligent and not well suited to the caricature that gets used as a mild slur in communities like HN. That's doesn't constitute a well-formed argument against technology per se.
Were they wrong? Didn’t a lot of those people end up in tenements in factory towns and down in the mines? It was a few generations before things really started to get better. I’m all for progress, but I’m not really up for disposing of people lives with a “to make an omelet you have to break some eggs” mentality.
> Didn’t a lot of those people end up in tenements in factory towns and down in the mines? It was a few generations before things really started to get better.
Obviously any individual can "end up in tenements or mines" and one can't disprove an assertion like that.
But broadly all social metrics were showing an inexorably upward trajectory in the Britain of the 19th century, cranking into a hockey stick toward the end of the century and into the 20th. It's just not true to argue that the Luddites were right as a matter of general policy.
> I’m not really up for disposing of people lives with a “to make an omelet you have to break some eggs” mentality.
To be only a tiny bit glib: that's a statement of thermodynamics, not social policy. Eggs break, period. Change is change. You can make specific arguments about things like backstopping sudden unemployment, but folding it into a discussion about Ludditism (or rather the Butlerian Jihad, I guess) isn't the right way to do that.
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Removing automated looms means everyone has fewer textiles while a few workers benefit. I think most people like the current abundance vs. being forced to spend a large fraction of their household budget on clothing and only having a few outfits in total.
Company mines were because the extraction sites were remote and goods were expensive and so they got exploited as they had essentially no independent supply beyond what their employer would sell, since the employers weren't really interested in living wages and were all too happy to exploit a captive workforce. That sort of condition will become highly relevant again if we ever get space colonies, because air & food will be scarce.
But it absolutely is difficult and disruptive to people's lives when this all changes. I have a family history talking about my great grandpa losing his job to machines and a great uncle losing a finger to bread slicing machines back when sliced bread was new, showing what that meant for our family. Yet I can also see how the past couple of generations adapted to that to find new ways forward. None of them decided to stick with the idea of being a "master tinner" they all found other ways to produce things people actually wanted.
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> This is true, but it's important to note in context that they were wrong, and that society is better off on balance given the quality/value available in the modern fashion market. I mean, duh, as it were.
i don't know that. how could one know that? you been to the alternate reality where the luddites won?
Stalling technological progress to preserve their high-paying jobs, in short. Wealth redistribution efforts succeeded without them.