People who criticize new technologies are sometimes called Luddites, but it’s helpful to clarify what the Luddites actually wanted. The main thing they were protesting was the fact that their wages were falling at the same time that factory owners’ profits were increasing, along with food prices. They were also protesting unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the sale of shoddy goods that discredited the entire textile industry. The Luddites did not indiscriminately destroy machines; if a machine’s owner paid his workers well, they left it alone. The Luddites were not anti-technology; what they wanted was economic justice. They destroyed machinery as a way to get factory owners’ attention. The fact that the word “Luddite” is now used as an insult, a way of calling someone irrational and ignorant, is a result of a smear campaign by the forces of capital.
Whenever anyone accuses anyone else of being a Luddite, it’s worth asking, is the person being accused actually against technology? Or are they in favor of economic justice? And is the person making the accusation actually in favor of improving people’s lives? Or are they just trying to increase the private accumulation of capital?
Reblog got turned off on this post but I want to share it anyway.
The thing the Luddites were railing against still hasn't been solved! Like. Your boss brings in a shiny new set of tools to make your job more efficient. Okay!
Does it make your job easier? No, you're still on the clock so they'll find something else for you to do with the extra time. But how about that extra pay? It's about +$0.50 an hour. Well, okay, I guess nothing's really changed.
Oh, except now they're doing mass layoffs, since there just isn't enough demand for everybody to be working at this higher efficiency.
Luddites are often characterized as anti-technology. But in reality, they were anti-exploitation. The story of the Luddites, the conflict between rich capitalists and impoverished laborers, set the tone for many other class conflicts that followed. Understanding Luddism’s roots is deeply relevant for contemporary Catholic social thought on labor justice, especially in the era of AI.
Link here. Note: this was written by a guy I went to school with, do me a favor and spread it around--Levi is pretty dope.
Had a revelation: techno-fascists hate queers but love AI. If we made using chatgpt seem Trans or whatever they don't like, then they would stop giving AI companies money. This would, finally, pop the bubble.
To make this happen we would need a lot of money and some very brave drag queens.
From Jerry/Tycho:
" This is the point of inflection I'm at too. We didn't reason our way into this, so we can't reason our way out. But we can move the battlefield to the realm of aesthetics, which they have no true recourse for. This is something I think about all the time, that's why I talked to Dabe about cooking up our Luddites Union stuff. "
Woke up to a message in my inbox sending me death threats for defending AI. I could report this person, but they're a child and it's all in good fun here. KYS is basically like "aloha" on the internet; it can have multiple meanings. 🙃
But they're all pissed off cus I apparently told artists to "give up on their dreams". And before I blocked them I should have asked... I'm sorry, but what was your dream again? Being an animation drone at Disney so their regurgitated slop has that manmade touch? Hitting 1M subscribers on the YooToobs? Cus if so, yeah that's a dumb selfish dream and you should give up on it. Nobody's saying to stop making art, idiot. But if you wouldn't make art unless you can make money off it, who needs you?
Everyone talks in circles about AI and plagiarism and IP rights and cancel culture, and nobody wants to deal with the ACTUAL PROBLEM that as every other job either disappears or becomes unbearable, everyone is clamoring into the entertainment sector and clawing each other's eyes out when there isn't enough room. It's not that I have no sympathy for Tumblr artists; living paycheck to paycheck drawing furry porn for irritable clients five states away is a terrible position to be in. But if you can admit you're barely surviving doing this right now, why do you think this system will ever benefit you if we stay on this trajectory and just "make a few tweaks"? What Hollywood wants is absolute control over our culture; they want fair use protections whittled down to a nub so they can edit our collective memories at will and silence all uses of their property that don't perceive the art in the exact fashion pre-approved by corporate. And if we don't laugh in Hollywood's face now, and tell them they don't control shit and that anyone should be able to express themselves however they want, regardless of skill, talent or popularity, by 2040, the only available careers are going to be "influencer" or homeless (and both amount to pan-handling anyway).
Your beloved entertainment industry is a bourgeoise lemon; you can patch the tires, you can keep the engine running for a little longer, but this machine was only designed to hurt you. Throw it out! Hater also took umbrage at my suggestion that people should study to be nurses instead, and compared it to everyone being told to specialize in the STEM fields in the early 2000's, when the tech sector quickly became oversaturated. And to be fair, I can't predict how automation is going to progress; maybe we will be blindsided by a breakthrough that resolves the nursing shortage in the next few decades and renders medical degrees a waste of time and money. But my underlying point still stands, that we need to be focused on building a socialist society where the hard, dirty work that actually keeps people alive is properly compensated - a society that focuses on staffing positions that are meeting actual existing needs instead of inventing new artificial demands so that every special snowflake can cosplay as a thought leader.
Nursing is objectively noble work that is projected to only become more necessary as technology advances to extend the lives of old and disabled people, because it is unpleasant manual labor which requires a lot of fine motor skills, adaptability, attention to detail, and bedside manner, a combination which makes it particularly difficult to automate. The reason so many people who went into the STEM fields are feeling betrayed now, is because they were sold on the lie that specializing in intellectual labor automatically entitled them to a ticket into the owning class... which is the same lie the art industry is telling you. Also, may I point out that just because not every person with a degree in Information Technology is a millionaire, doesn't mean the early 2000's prediction that scientific literacy was going to become an increasingly important survival skill in the modern age was wrong. In fact, if you were more tech literate, maybe we wouldn't be having this debate. The world doesn't need another CEO, but if you can do the grunt work of hardware repair - a service communities actually need - you can make an honest living for yourself. Can't draw or watch furry porn on a busted iPad, now can you?
You wanna know what's killing art? Look in the fucking mirror. This week, a story 2 thousand years old, which has already been adapted to film dozens of times, is set to gross $1 billion at the box office, because Christopher Nolan "makes a good popcorn movie". That my friends, whether made by human hands or by computer, is slop! If you want to succeed outside the artistic hegemony, if you want to make something that really breaks the mold and challenges audiences and pushes us all forward as a species, you have more tools to do that now than ever before. But the public has shown time and time again that what they really want is a machine that will give them the same thing over and over, and now we have a machine that can do exactly that on the cheap. And I'm sorry, if your only gripe is that you've been denied your slice of the bullshit pie, I'm not interested in coddling you.
PS: I don't know how we're not constantly talking about this, but the only reason Tumblr artists are able to sustain themselves at all is because all transactions take place under the table. Under the current law, technically any profit you make off commissioned fanart is considered theft from the IP holder. I'm genuinely not sure these people hear themselves when they say that copyright law will protect their right to make a living off their hard work.
Every time an AI apologist calls me a Luddite, I laugh so hard because there is something wildly AI-coded about applying a word to a situation without knowing what that word actually means. "Hey, ChatGPT, give me a mean name to call people who resent attempts to forcibly restructure their entire society via the introduction of a dubious new tech!" / "I think the word you're looking for is Luddites."
So let's talk about the original historical Luddites!
Were they anti-technology? I know this will shock AI apologists, but it's complicated. There's nuance. Shocking, innit?
The Luddites are historically known for being super-pissed by the presence of automated looms, so they were definitely against that piece of technology, but we don't see them protesting against underground sewers, synthetic fertilizers, or any of the other techs popping up left and right around them. (Eventually the movement spread to other fields for all the same reasons, but it started with weaving and that's where we'll be focusing because that's where the term and concept originates.) So why looms in particular? Why were these people who used to spend HOURS weaving a few yards of fabric at home so pissed off that there was a machine to do it for them, and faster? Well, I could honestly go on all day, but I'll try to keep it relatively brief.
The led to insane levels of unemployment and took money (and thus food in a time before widespread social services) away from work-from-home mothers, the disabled, families that did a bit of weaving in the evenings to make ends meet, etc etc etc. Small businesses, wiped out. Artisans whose families had been weaving for generations, redundant. Families that need a little extra to get by, fuck 'em, there's a profit to be turned by the people who really matter! If a few (thousand) people have to go hungry or lose their home or suddenly can't afford medical care, I'm afraid that's just the price of progress.
They led to super unsafe working conditions. Why would you turn off your motor loom just because it needs to be cleaned? Those things will go 24/7 if you've got a human supervising them, so it's faster and turns a greater profit to make people fix any problems while they're still running. And since people are being worked relentlessly, sleep deprivation was also an issue, making people clumsier than they might otherwise be. People were losing fingers and hands frequently as a result of this mindset. Further, the air in these new factories was chock full of cotton/wool dust. This leads to a condition called "white lung" where the lungs became increasingly clogged. It was a pretty horrible death. Dying in a fire or explosion must have seen almost merciful in comparison, so good news if you're an early factory textile worker! Your odds of dying in a fire or explosion before white lung can make every breath agony, are actually reassuringly high. All that fluff in the air is highly combustible and you live in an age where most people smoke. Have fun with that!
Child labor! Obviously, kids had always worked in Britain, but they were working alongside adults on farms, or at home, being (for the most part) properly supervised by people who loved them and understood the limits of their little bodies. Factory owners looked at those little bodies and only saw how suited they were to sweeping out underneath automated looms, clearing jams in tight spaced, etc. As mentioned above, this was all happening while the workers were sleep-deprived and the looms were still running. Children, too, were losing limbs. Sometimes they were even crushed to death (to the great displeasure of factory owners who had to turn off the looms so the mess could be cleaned up, and so much fabric would be ruined when some inconsiderate child's blood was splashed all over it).
So why smash the looms instead of just organizing and demanding better working conditions? At the time it was still common for factory owners to call in the military to shoot protestors. The military was fully authorized to shoot protestors dead, and if you don't believe me, go look up Peterloo. And, of course, all these people who suddenly can't find jobs elsewhere (because weaving was all their family never knew and was how they stayed self-reliant for centuries) now need money badly if they want to keep themselves and their kids alive. You'll put up with a lot if your kid is hungry.
Mass unemployment, unsafe work conditions, the risk of getting shot if you protest, being forced to also send your children to work in dangerous factories so they don't starve. All in the service of creating a bland, uniform, often-defective product (what, you thought these factories had a QC department?). One that used to be crafted by hand, safely and ethically, by trained artisans.
So on the one hand, people who use "Luddite" as an insult to the anti-AI crowd are right on the money. People are being forced out of jobs, their surroundings are becoming increasingly unsafe, art and skill have been rendered redundant (only not really because AI sucks at pretty much anything that's not predicting weather). But the people using the word as derogatory are so ignorant of context, that they actually think it's a mortal insult to accuse people of being angry about these things. And the more they lean on AI, the more ignorant of context they will become until they are rendered entirely incapable of critically analyzing anything for themselves.
While they do that, I'll be over here jealously guarding my critical thinking skills and my moral compass, thank you very much.
I'm not suggesting we start smashing up data centers or anything, but maybe (metaphorically) smash the systems that led to them being forced down our throats in the first place...
