this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
116 points (89.7% liked)
Technology
59148 readers
2428 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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 because people hire children to run them."
The machines are just machines. They have no inherent benefits or harms. It's always the people and what they do with them.
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.
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.
They took hammers to the machine and not the wealthy because they had access to the machines and not the wealthy.
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.