Related HN discussion on this story from 3 weeks ago: [2]
[1]: https://archive.ph/ZUiC7 ("Rethinking the Luddites," The New Yorker)
it's a way to prevent the will of power combined with lazyness from taking this technology away from the people. if/when they manage to do this, then it'll be even cheaper to control people, so this is a logically more efficient objective
I find discussions about the Luddites online to be deeply illustrative not of the Luddites themselves but of a person's political beliefs. The Luddites did indeed fight for their community and livelihood, but theirs came by dismantling another one. For hundreds of years prior the textiles trade was dominated by the Mughal Empire. British colonization in South Asia, fed by a multitude of factors including industrialization, dismantled the subcontinent's dominant position in the market and eventually catapulted British textile production to the world stage. This created the skilled textile jobs that were eventually mechanized and displaced. The Luddites then did not want to turn back the textile market fully back to a world dominated by South Asia but into the middle where they owned the means of production.
Accelerationists view Luddites as obstructionists. Labor sympanthizers view Luddites as a movement for labor protections. The wider view of history paints a more subtle picture.
That doesn't happen until after the luddite's first appearance in ~1816 [1]
> This created the skilled textile jobs that were eventually mechanized and displaced.
No, The displacement is what the Luddites were railing against. Weavers had been highly paid, profitable and skilled occupation from the "dark ages" onwards. Technological advances meant that they were ruined almost overnight. The concept of high minded observations on empire are anachronistic embellishments[2]. The weavers just weaved, the merchants sourced the raw materials. the concept that the average weaver knew the conditions, circumstance, much less people that produced it is on very shaky ground. I suspect that given that the producers were Christian, much less protestant, would have meant that sympathy would have been limited. Given how xenophobic people were back then.
The wool trade supplied wealth to large parts of the cotswolds, east anglia, the lowlands and other places.
The weaver's guilds had a hand in various wars, revolutions and many other social developments between 1100 and at least 1500.
[1] https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/2534... page 39, turning point is 1830
[2] https://www.marxists.org/history/england/combination-laws/ne... They are literally talking about powered frames, and nothing else.
According to Parthasarathi [1], Indian cloth already began having issues from the 1720s as East India Company contracts begun squeezing out local merchants. From the late 1760s, Indian weavers begun having trouble. South Indian weavers reported that in 1779 their incomes had dropped 35% since 1768 (Parthasarathi p. 78-79.) The Luddites first appear in history around 1811, a good 40 years after the beginning of the decline of Indian cloth.
1830 is much too late for the "turning point" as the Cuddalore Weaver's Protest had already occurred by 1778 [2]. I suspect your source comes from before the opening of the East India Company records.
> No, The displacement is what the Luddites were railing against.
Correct, I never disagreed.
> Weavers had been highly paid, profitable and skilled occupation from the "dark ages" onwards.
> The weaver's guilds had a hand in various wars, revolutions and many other social developments between 1100 and at least 1500.
The class consciousness of weavers only appeared from the beginning of industrialization. Weavers guilds operated in different economic and social circumstances with very different economic arrangements than the Luddite-era weavers. Guilds often enjoyed exclusive market privileges and thus had much more pricing power than weavers in the post-feudal era.
> The weavers just weaved, the merchants sourced the raw materials. the concept that the average weaver knew the conditions, circumstance, much less people that produced it is on very shaky ground.
Of course, at that time the flow of information and general levels of education were low. But it's hard to imagine that weavers weren't aware of the prodigy of Indian textiles at the time. Indian exports dominated the textile market until the late 18th century and weavers would have been competing for sales to merchants with Indian exporters. Naturally most weavers would be completely unaware of the contracts and pricing power of the East India Company at the time and its knock-on effects in India. I'm not trying to imply that the Luddites cheered on the EIC in their exploitation, and don't think they did at all unless there's evidence of the contrary.
> I suspect that given that the producers were Christian, much less protestant, would have meant that sympathy would have been limited. Given how xenophobic people were back then.
Europe and the Islamicate world had a lot of mutual animosity and respect for each other at the time. The British viewed Mughal wealth and organization favorably, and this was the basis for the term "mogul" as used in "business mogul". [3] Whether that would lead to sympathy or not is unclear.
> Technological advances meant that they were ruined almost overnight.
Correct but their relative market position came at the expense of the market position of the Mughals. The guild based systems which created guaranteed markets of the middle ages were already long broken by the time of the Luddites. The very ruin from relative riches due to mechanization itself was based on riches based off the ruin of the Mughals. That the Luddites were trying to protect their own lifestyle is neither enigmatic nor evil. The Mughals attempted the same. But instead of trying to cast the Luddites as virtuous heroes, it's important to contextualize them as parties who were protecting a treasure that they had received at another's expense.
[1]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/transition-to-a-col... The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800
[3]: Parthasarathi p. 103 and Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial Andhra by Swarnalatha
All that wondrous science has come from this system. No. Evidence is evidence. This thing works, and works dramatically well. We live like Gods compared to people of the 1800s. My wife and I noticed this the other day. They fought wars back in the day for a fraction of the spices that I buy ethically today.
No retvrn. Forward only.
There's maybe a world in which we select for the biggest wins for human lifespan, like modern medicine, and filter out the parts that are destructive. But that's not the world we live in.
Some of us do. If you're at the poorer end of society things are still pretty damn bleak. People live with long term treatable illness. People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water. People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery. Sure, those of us who can afford them have lots of shiny gadgets that save us from a bit of manual labor, but that's not really worth much if stepping outside of your front door means you're scared of being mugged.
I'm not saying I'd give any of it up. Hell no. I'm saying that a few less rockets and a few more homeless shelters might go some way to helping balance things out a little.
Almost every single one of us does. The great, huge, gigantic majority of us does. Few realize it though.
None of what were treatable at the 1800.
> People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water.
In relative terms, almost none. I'm not sure how they compare in absolute terms, but just the answer not being obvious while the population increased by an order of magnitude already makes your claim quite bad.
> People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery.
And nobody had no prospect back them.
You can complain that there are some people living almost as badly as people lived in the 1800s. But it's not the majority by far, and you can't claim they are currently living worse.
And, of course, none of that is reason to not demand better things.
Back then there were cities in the US where a third of newborns wouldn't see their first birthday. Look at us now! We stand like a colossus. Our children stand healthy. Strong.
You've created some fictional subjugation narrative that is nothing near the truth.
One of the key points made in the book, which is full of wonderful data and is a GREAT read if you’re into that sort of thing, was the idea that *wealth is much more unequal than income*.
From Vox’s coverage of the book:
> You hear a lot about income inequality, but as this chart makes clear wealth inequality is much more severe. In the United States, just 1 percent of the population owns about 35 percent of all the wealth. Even in relatively egalitarian Europe, the top 1 percent owns around 25 percent of the wealth. In both continents, the top 10 percent owns over half the wealth.
It’s hugely important to understand that point, which gets lost frequently.
Wealth inequality > Income inequality.
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/10/5561608/9-charts-that-explain-...
You can’t argue about the benefits of the system — they are material. You can try to argue about global incomes rising. But it’s a hard argument to win when it comes to global wealth distribution.
Really? It has produced a climate destabilization that may well destroy civilization within the next decade or two.
"Alwsys has been Moon guy gets shot in the back" meme ...
seriously this has been documented over and over most prominently and especially in Jacques Ellul's "La Technique" https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
This seems naive to me (setting aside the issue of even defining or identifying "the driving force behind technology"). The Romans were famously engineering-minded and they certainly weren't doing it just for the improvement of the human condition; it had material and political consequences which they wanted to see realized. From my understanding of history this is true in pretty much any era and any location throughout history. Certainly there have always been people inventing new tools for the fun of it, or to improve their and others' lives, but it's not at all clear to me how you could show that the balance between these motivations has shifted so dramatically only in the last ~200 years. It seems far more plausible (to me) that technological development has always been a fulcrum for accumulation of wealth and power, and that our current moment is better explained as a shift in whose wealth and power is benefited (kings and emperors replaced by multinational corps and capital owners), rather than a complete reorientation of the nature of technology itself.
We really didn't. At least, not at the time, and certainly not everyone. Plenty of people throughout history have been adamantly against the rapid progress of technology. The Luddites are the most famous group but there have been lots more.
Even if you ignore those people for being frankly a bit weird, the driving force behind technology for the first ten thousand or so years has been the improvement of the human race and to win in the struggle to survive. Those were definitely noble goals. Compare that to the past 200 or so years and much of the progress has been about the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of a few extraordinarily rich people. The technological gains have been spread widely, sure, but they've come at a high cost. That's different to the past where the gains have come with very little cost.
We could transform society to benefit everyone using technology if we wanted to. I suspect we won't though. We'll sell a few AI powered gadgets to the masses, and that will cause power over everyone to coalesce in the hands of a few people. That's not really much of a win.