In 1811 working men felt threatened by the arrival of wooden, waterâpowered 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.
