Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Page 33
They didn’t hate or fear it for being new technology, either. “If workmen disliked certain machines, it was because of the use that they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new,” as one historian noted. There were plenty of cases where workers were staunchly in favor of new tech: they had asked hosiers to adopt a machine that would more thoroughly tally the thread count in a garment, to attest to the quality of their work. But the hosiers largely refused to adopt it, preferring to retain the unilateral power to determine the quality of a garment themselves, and to offer workers the prices they approved of, regardless of quality.
✏️ Not a fear of tech, but rather how it’s being used 📖 (Page 33)
Page 38
They have built larger operations to gather workers under one massive roof and economize on labor. They’ve built factories. They know that people won’t like them, but they stand to make a lot of money. Pointing to the doctrine of laissez-faire or gesturing toward progress, they announce themselves as the future. (You might blame this trend on the teachings of Adam Smith: Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, and has exploded in popularity among businessmen in recent decades.) Some now seem to feel that innovation in and of itself is a virtue.
✏️ The justification to modernize at the expense of anything else. Where problems start? 📖 (Page 38)
Page 38
So you face a choice: Do you buy the machines to keep up, so you too can lower your prices-and apologize to these men and women whom you’ve known all your life, whom you’re now helping to put out of work? Or do you stand with the cloth workers as your income ticks down?
✏️ A choice that begs for a third option, but who will offer it? The state? How can this play out differently? 📖 (Page 38)
Page 48
There’s a conspiracy on foot to improve and improve,” he [George Mellor] said, “till the working man that has nothing but his hands and his craft to feed him and his children will be improved off the face of creation.”
✏️ Resonates and feels relevant to today quote 📖 (Page 48)
Page 50
In one of the most odious segments of his Politics, Aristotle lays out his defense of “natural slavery” - that some men are simply better suited to be servile, essentiallyand muses that enslaved persons would not be necessary if only the labor they carry out could be automated. “If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus,” he wrote, and “if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.” Or: automation might abolish slavery. Aristotle owned slaves himself, and this helped enshrine the idea that a certain class of people are interchangeable with machines, an attitude that would undergird the actions of elites in coming millennia. The philosopher also helped inaugurate the tradition of insisting that exploiting the human laborer is a necessary evil on the path to full automation, which is always just around the bend.
✏️ Just a reminder about what Aristotle thought regarding slavery. Also how it is basically a necessary evil until automation comes around.. But all in all some people appear to be better suited to slavery anyways?? 📖 (Page 50)
Page 55
The machine breakers had prepared for this uprising; they were organized, strategic, and intentional in their displays of power. Those quiet months over the summer had evidently been put to productive use. “The practice of these men was to assemble in parties of from six to sixty, according as circumstances required, under a supposed leader… who had the absolute command of them, and directed their operations; placing the guards, who were armed with swords, firelocks, etc. in their proper places, while those armed with hammers, axes, &c. were ordered to enter the house and demolish the frames,” wrote the Nottingham Review journalist John Blackner, “and when the work of mischief was completed, he called over the list of his men, who answered to a particular number, and he then gave a signal for their departure, by discharging a pistol, which implied that all was right.” The leader of each of these parties went by the same name: General Ludd.
✏️ Revolution requires meticulous planning, organizing, leadership, trust, etc. It’s not just passion and spontaneous. It happens slowly, then all at once. 📖 (Page 55)
Page 77
The entrepreneurs’ faith in “progress” was rooted in the trendy philosophy of the Scottish economist Adam Smith. “Laissez-faire,” the Luddite historian Brian Bailey wrote, had become “the political dogma of the English bourgeoisie. In fact, it represented freedom for the employers and intolerable repression of the workers.” Smith had published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, and while initial reaction was limited, it became influential in the following decades. The book, a synthesis of recent strands of economic thought, presented the doctrine of laissez-faire, or “let people do” (as they see fit), as a science. It was profoundly pro-free trade, pro-entrepreneur, anti-regulation, and anti-monopoly.
📖 (Page 77)
Page 77
“It was a deliberate attack on the existing economic policies and dominant economic assumptions,” the economic historian Kirk Willis wrote. Monopolistic mercantilism, the order of the day, à la the East India Company, was out. Competition, free-market economics, and deregulation were in. So was the factory, and the factory owner, as the chief engines of economic prosperity. “Adam Smith’s discussion in The Wealth of Nations united two key concepts: division of labor as a motor for generating prosperity, and market systems based on selfinterest as a fuel for that motor,”
📖 (Page 77)
Page 77
Two of Smith’s earliest and most influential advocates were the British prime ministers guiding England’s post-Revolutionary War economic policy: the Earl of Shelburne and William Pitt the Younger.
📖 (Page 77)
Page 100
Often called the grandfather of the factory, Arkwright did not invent the idea of organizing workers into strict shifts to produce goods with maximal efficiency. But he pursued the “manufactory” formation most ruthlessly, and most vividly demonstrated the practice could generate huge profits. Arkwright’s factory system, which was quickly and widely emulated, divided his hundreds of workers into two overlapping thirteen-hour shifts. A bell was rung twice a day, at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. The gates would shut and work would start an hour later. If a worker was late, they sat the shift out, forfeiting that day’s pay. (Employers of the era touted this practice as a positive for workers; it was a more flexible schedule, they said, since employees no longer needed to “give notice” if they couldn’t work. This reasoning is reminiscent of that offered by twenty-first-century on-demand app companies.) For the first twenty-two years of its operation, the factory was worked around the clock, mostly by boys like Robert Blincoe, some as young as seven years old.
✏️ Pioneering ruthless factory conditions. Also, his secret to his success really wasn’t innovative, but labor exploitation, particularly children. 📖 (Page 100)
Page 101
His main difficulty did not “lie so much in the invention of a proper mechanism for drawing out and twisting cotton into a continuous thread, as in…training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.” This was his legacy. “To devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright,” Ure continued. “It required, in fact, a man of a Napoleon nerve and ambition to subdue the refractory tempers of workpeople.”
✏️ The legacy of breaking people into hard working conditions. The bonkers choice of adapting workers to the rhythms of the machines and the dictates of capital, not the other way around. Choosing that direction vs the opposite could create two pillar opposite worlds. 📖 (Page 101)
Page 102
We have acclimated to the idea that such exploitation was somehow inevitable, even natural, while casting aspersions on movements like the Luddites as being technophobic for trying to stop it. We forget that working people vehemently opposed such exploitation from the beginning.
✏️ The power of propaganda and selective history 📖 (Page 102)
Page 122
To Booth, the expanding rebellion hinted at more than worker disputes. It heralded radical possibility. To George, there was nothing theoretical about the situation. “Look at Booth,” George said, he’ll come here and talk about the evils under which we working men groan, by the hour together, and air all his newfangled notions that he’s picked up through the Socialists; he knows very well that machinery is destroying us and nothing but the workhouse will be left for us soon, and yet he’s never got farther than talk. Join us lad, join us, you’ve talked long enough, it’s time for action now… It’s true these machines aren’t taking Booth’s trade out of his fingers, or he’d happen to see things in a different light.
✏️ Booth wanted a political solution. He saw the framework of society as out of joint and needed remodeling. Mellor wanted action. I would assume the answer is both, right? questions 📖 (Page 122)
Page 122
I quite agree with you, my friend, as some of you well know, respecting the harm you suffer from machinery, but it might be man’s chief blessing instead of his curse if society was differently constituted,” he said.
✏️ Said two hundred years ago and said again by Ted Chiang now.. It’s not the machines that are the problem but how society is constituted. followup 📖 (Page 122)
Page 125
“If the capitalists and the millions of unemployed would abandon large towns and cities for communities of moderate size,” Booth said, “and were all employed as economically as such a union would occasion, in agriculture, making and working machinery for the common benefit of the whole, these islands in the course of a few years would present an entirely different aspect, and poverty and starvation become utterly unknown.” It was a radical solution to what Owen saw as rapidly escalating inequality and worker exploitation.
✏️ A dream by Booth, of how it could ideally be 📖 (Page 125)
Page 126
“If! If! If!” Mellor said, almost yelling now. “What’s the use of such sermons as this to starving men?” This was the unanswerable retort to the machinery question. Such questions come down to who has the power and luxury to answer them in the first place, and who those answers apply to. Does labor-saving machinery benefit society? If you’re a machine owner, or profiting from the success of the machine-owning class, it’s obviously a lot easier to say yes. But if those technologies or eliminating your livelihood, the long view is irrelevant. You’re worried about your next meal.
✏️ The response to booth’s dream. What good is the long term when people are dying now? 📖 (Page 126)
Page 126
“If men would only do as you say, it would be better, we all know,” George said. “But they won’t. It’s all for themselves with the masters. What do they care if a thousand or two of us are pined to death if they can make brass a bit faster?” This criticism of the promise of automation, articulated by one of its early victims, holds true today.
✏️ More on response to booth dream 📖 (Page 126)
Page 126
Advocates of automation technologies argue we should embrace them and their qualityof-life-improving capacities; critics counter that until there is a mechanism that allows workers to dependably share in the benefits of automation, it will only serve to displace them, make their work more precarious, be a threatened alternative to their services, and used as leverage against them.
✏️ Simple breakdown of why it has to serve all, or nothing at all 📖 (Page 126)
Page 138
“Surely, my Lord, however we may rejoice in any improvement in the arts which may be beneficial to mankind, we must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism. The maintenance and welldoing of the industrious poor is an object of greater consequence to the community than the enrichment of a few monopolists by any improvement in the implements of trade, which deprives the workman of his bread, and renders the laborer “unworthy of his hire.”
✏️ Words by Lord Byron that are as relevant today as they were then about where our priorities should be… With the greater good for all, not the greater profit for the few.. And especially not at the expense of the all. 📖 (Page 138)
Page 143
The message did not just appeal to weavers and cloth dressers and knitters, which perhaps worried the magistrates and the Home Office most. Artisans, hatmakers, shoemakers, bricklayers, small shop owners, and farmers joined the cause. So did coal miners and railroad workers, whose industries were on the rise due in part to the technology and automation - because the Luddite movement was not about technology; it was about workers’ rights. Luddism started as a tactical strike against the technologies of control, but had exploded into a greater expression of the rage against a system where the privileged few with access to the right levers could lift themselves up at the expense of the many.
✏️ Such a key point. It is not about tech.. It’s about workers’ rights. Propaganda muddies the issue to make it sound primitive and backwards, but the truth is, people of all walks and industries joined because they saw the issue for what it was.. Systematic oppression of the many by exploiting them to feed the few. 📖 (Page 143)
Page 166
They believed that by working in good faith and by frankly presenting the ample evidence of their economic plight, they could persuade their government to prevent its skilled and industrious workers from falling into poverty. So, starting in 1802, representatives from the cloth trade began to petition Parliament. Thousands of signatures were collected, a well-written petition was submitted, and representatives were sent to London. But year after year, they were denied hearings. In both 1803 and 1806, cloth workers made big, full-hearted appeals to Parliament. They presented data about their productivity, economic importance, and falling wages. Frustrations soon began to boil over. Their earnings were declining, and they knew that the factory system and machinery were making matters worse. Parliament remained unmoved.
✏️ The people try to engage with the system as they’d been taught and shown. They expect it to work on their behalf. 📖 (Page 166)
Page 166
“The debate over the old laws was not simply a question of removing obsolete impediments to economic growth,” the historian Adrian Randall wrote. “It revealed a powerful ideological struggle between an old political economy based on order, stability, regulation, and control supplemented by custom and the new political economy based on a faith in free-market forces and the power of capital.” He continues: “Here we can see the real issues which the Industrial Revolution raised. It was not just a question of more and more machines. It involved a complete reorientation of perceptions of economic and social relationships.”
✏️ A rise of capitalism and power of the few that the citizens didn’t expect or truly fathom how it upended the political structure and relationship with the people. 📖 (Page 166)
Page 167
But prime minister Spencer Perceval, most of the influential Tories, and a number of Whigs opposed any regulations that would impede the free market, and they easily won the day. In the 1800s and 1810s, as in Silicon Valley today, entrepreneurs could generally count on the national government - which above all saw the tech-driven industry as a powerful boon to its economic interests — to side with their cause.
✏️ It didn’t matter how many lower class and middle class people support the worker rights movements. The leadership saw economic prosperity, and ignored all else. 📖 (Page 167)
Page 167
They recognized technology was improving-cloth workers themselves were often the ones that improved itand were on the lookout for ideas as to how machines might be more harmoniously introduced into workplaces to benefit them all. Take, for instance, this idea for blunting the pain of automation by taxing technology: “Proposals were in the air for gradual introduction of the machinery, with alternative employment found for displaced men, or for a tax of 6d. [sixpence] per yard upon cloth dressed by machinery, to be used as fund for the unemployed seeking work.” They suggested placement and retraining programs. They also proposed phase-in periods, or waiting for economic conditions to improve, so that automated machinery could be introduced less disruptively.
✏️ Clear attempts by the movement then to find ways to allow tech to come in without disrupting the people it’s replacing. 📖 (Page 167)
Page 168
The Culinary Union in Las Vegas represents sixty thousand casino and restaurant workers; it’s the most powerful union in Nevada. When it was fighting for a new contract in 2018, one of its chief objectives was to win protections against automation. The major casino companies like MGM were beginning to roll out automated serving kiosks that threatened thousands of servers and bartenders. “We were researching a lot about how technology comes in other countries,” Geoconda Argüello-Kline, the secretary-treasurer for the union, explained. We look at countries that are very advanced, with technologies like Japan, where you have robotic servers bringing food to the table that costs $900- and we see how it’s going to be implemented. So many restaurants will have that technology - so if you’re implementing the bartender machine, how will the workers get affected? This is going to happen here. It may be faster than we think. We see it moving little by little now, but… what we want is to protect the jobs. Their solution was a raft of mandatory checks on automation, stipulating that the union must be notified 180 days before a new technology will be adopted, and informed of “who’s going to be affected,” Argüello-Kline says. Companies must provide a retraining option for employees who risk redundancy from those technologies, as well as six months’ severance if they choose to let the robot take their job. Those automated out of work get priority in rehiring. The negotiations in 2018 were intense- the union voted to approve a Las Vegas-wide strike of service workers before the casinos acquiesced, and the automation-resilient contract was ultimately ratified. “We know nobody’s going to stop automation,” Argüello-Kline says, “but how can this be an opportunity for the members, so they can make choices-maybe I’m close to retiring, and I want severance and health care. And the retraining part is so important- if you having a salad-making robot, someone has to prepare the salad, maintain the machine.” And that’s a job a worker could be trained to do; one that would minimally disrupt their way of life. “We are not opposed to technology,” Argüello-Kline says, but “the machines can replace our jobs if we don’t work to protect them.”
✏️ Successful implementation of worker protections against automation. It had to be done collectively, with a ton of people, through a powerful union. 📖 (Page 168)
Page 206
Some of the largest bands were led by men in drag who called themselves “General Ludd’s wives.” This was a radical gender inversion for the time, but not uncommon among Luddite parties
✏️ Amazing snippet of gender inversion. Men did this in solidarity with the women that lost their spinning and textile jobs to automation as well… in fact, women lost their jobs decades earlier. 📖 (Page 206)
Page 223
So it was that a terrible confluence of historical events, guided by racism and the emergent forces of global capital, by plantation owners, traders, and the cotton barons of Manchester, drove the repeated enslavement of Charles, the blood in its machine. For workers like him, it led to punishing extremes and suffering. For the elites, it solidified their power. Nowhere was all of this more evident than in the American South, where slavery was joined with automation to produce the raw material for factories in Manchester to spin into cloth.
✏️ This section is important. followup Linking automation and industrial revolution to racism and slavery.
- the shift from wool to cotton
- invention (cotton gin) made cotton picking better gave slavery a lifeline and supercharged it
- inventions that made cotton processing easier put people out of business, caused starvation, birthed the Luddites, etc. 📖 (Page 223)
Page 224
Whitney even suggested that his device could help end slavery, since laborers would no longer have to do the unpleasant work of picking the seeds out by hand. That is not what happened. Instead, the cotton gin is one of the original sins of automated technology, and the most disastrous case of unintended consequences unleashed upon the world this side of the nuclear bomb. Whitney’s machine was widely pirated, modded, and adopted by plantation owners, who saw little need to compensate the inventor. The cotton gin worked so well that it wildly increased the demand for workers to do every other part of the cotton production process, especially the hoeing and the picking. Slavery, an institution whose future was at the time in question - Northerners wanted it abolished, and were drawing close to legislating restrictions - received a lifeline, then an economic raison d’être. The export of cotton became the biggest industry in the United States, so economically powerful, generating so much wealth for plantation owners, that it helped sustain the institution of slavery for another seventy years.
✏️ This effect comes up a lot with innovation. People claim a certain innovation will reduce the bad effects of the original problem, but instead it becomes so popular that it exacerbates and increases the rate of the original problem tenfold. #xref automated cars argument about lowering emissions.. Which also relates to arguments in past about coal use. Jevons paradox describes a situation where greater efficiency in deploying a resource (such as water, gasoline, or electricity) causes demand for that resource to skyrocket — negating an expected decline in total usage. 📖 (Page 224)
Page 225
Slavery provided the raw material for industrial change and growth,” according to a BBC survey of period historians. “The growth of the Atlantic economy was an integral part of the growth of exports—for example manufactured cotton cloth was exported to Africa. The Atlantic economy can be seen as the spark for the biggest change in modern economic history.” The automated cotton gin and the labor of enslaved workers on one side of the Atlantic met the booming demand of the automated factories churning out the woven cloth on the other.
✏️ Slaves were the blood in the machine of the industrial revolution. British cotton imports rose from £11 million in 1784 to £283 million in 1832. In 1785, the exports of British cotton manufactures exceeded £1 million in value; they were £31 million in 1830. The cloth printed in Great Britain increased from 20 million yards in 1796 to 347 million in 1830. The population employed by the industry rose from three hundred and fifty thousand in 1788 to eight hundred thousand in 1806. There were sixty-six cotton mills in Manchester and Salford in 1820, ninety-six in 1832. The first federal census of 1790 counted 697,897 slaves; by 1810, there were 1.2 million slaves, a 70 percent increase. 📖 (Page 225)
Page 228
America’s “enclosures were conquest of Indian lands and its Luddites were insurrectionary slaves,” the historian Peter Linebaugh wrote. “The destruction of farm implements by those working them on American plantations belongs to the story of Luddism, not just because they too were tool-breakers, but they were part of the Atlantic recomposition of textile laborpower. They grew the cotton that was spun and woven in Lancashire.”
✏️ American Luddites.. The enslaved. 📖 (Page 228)
Page 237
With the prime minister dead, it was, some have argued, among the ripest moments for a full-scale popular revolution that England has known. “If there was ever going to be a revolution in Britain,” the neo-Luddite historian Kirkpatrick Sale wrote, “it would have been at that moment.”
✏️ As a note, a random dude assassinated the PM, ostensibly for a reason unrelated to the Luddites.. But was still heralded as a folk hero (and still considered an agent of revolution by the govt) That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Why didn’t a revolution happen? What circumstances lead to one thing happening vs another? 📖 (Page 237)
Page 283
Owen’s factories had made him rich, but he’d become famous as a crusading reformer. At New Lanark, he offered better conditions, education, and pay to his workers, who were seen as much more content than in rival factories. In 1810, he’d started lobbying for an eight-hour workday at a time when twelve-hour shifts were common; he’d instituted the policy at his own factory first. Politicians and industrialists, among them figures like the future tsar of Russia, toured New Lanark for ideas on how to build model factories and working communities. Now Owen’s ideas were evolving and growing more expansive in scope. He was thinking about how to both perfect and export the principles undergirding New Lanark, and he was formulating his utopian, communitarian designs, in which groups of 500 to 3,000 workers would live together in ideal selfsufficient societies.
✏️ Utopian socialist Robert Owen, radical business man. Good example here of a socialist minded community 📖 (Page 283)
Page 284
… he believed that collective action, coordinated by a governing body, was the most effective means of shaping the circumstances of a community for the benefit of all.” (He also needed his workers to continue to follow his rules, so his production would not suffer.) Both men “condemned political agitation,” and “favored instead a voluntary redistribution of wealth, which Owen later hoped would be achieved through cooperation,” one historian wrote. “Their ultimate social ideal was that of a decentralized society of small self-governing communities of the kind that Owen was to propose in his village scheme. Since Godwin had fallen out of fashion Owen could be seen as his replacement for the new century.”
✏️ More on Owen’s community ideas 📖 (Page 284)
Page 288
If the first half of 1812 was spent lobbying for worker protections and decent wages, the second was spent mobilizing an organization that would fight for those things itself. Henson and the United Framework Knitters set about building an alliance of workers that would not just petition for new laws, but pool its resources to gain real leverage against factory owners across England, one capable of enforcing minimum wages itself. The alliance was given the innocuous, if cheeky, title of the Society for Obtaining Parliamentary Relief and the Encour agement of Mechanics in the Improvement of Mechanism. It would be “a closer and more efficient combination than any they had yet achieved.” Its rules and operating procedures were carefully constructed, and its charter was vetted by lawyers to ensure they wouldn’t run afoul of the antiunionization Combination Acts. The Society was really a federation of smaller societies, each consisting of between thirty and a hundred members, with an executive committee headquartered in Nottingham. Members paid a small subscription, and with thousands of participants it added up to decent sum. With that, it launched “a striking and novel plan of action”: “The Societies hire all the unemployed frames and engage all the work they can which they let out to their numbers but no other person, if a member has employment elsewhere with which he is dissatisfied, the Society make him a weekly allowance until he finds better Employment.” Renting out idle frames kept the labor market tight, forcing hosiers to pay decent wages and offer decent working conditions or face the prospect of members working the Society’s machines instead. The Society would then sell its hose direct to London, generating revenue to keep the operation in action.
✏️ Incredible effort by Gravener Henson, switching from failed lobbying to successful mobilizing and setting up an alliance that’s effectively a union in all but name (to circumvent the laws). What a great example of collective action. Its motto was “Taisez-vous”, which roughly translates to “shut up”. I wonder why. 📖 (Page 288)
Page 295
If a person must work to survive, and their job becomes automated, you would have to be either deluded or willfully disingenuous to be surprised when they fight to keep it. As the historian Frank Peel quipped, these workers “did not understand it was their duty to lay down and die” because they were no longer useful to industry and the state. The caricature of Luddites as chiefly technophobic, born in the minds of entrepreneurs and elites, was elevated to prominence in this courtroom. It has endured for centuries.
✏️ The crux of the propaganda that Luddites fear tech emerged here, at the trial of George Mellor. The state utilized this murder trial to nail the Luddite movement as well. 📖 (Page 295)
Page 295
This depiction of the Luddites, as brutes who cannot help committing more crimes once they’d done one, is reflected again in the official account left by William Leman Rede, the historian of York Castle. The Luddite mobs were made up of men generally unaffected by the evil they complained of-Machinery; men who, being idle and dissolute, uneducated and brutal, had a love of brutality and excess, who found it more pleasant to seize by violence, than to gain by industry; and who, looking on the thing at first as a frolic, got excited by drink and the presence of a number of coadjutors to perpetrate the most dreadful crimes.
✏️ Along with fear of machinery, they added that it was because they were poor, unthinking, criminal brutes that only wanted to do crime for crime’s sake. They were lazy and drunk and didn’t want to work. History is written by the victors, as always. 📖 (Page 295)
Page 308
But it is much more absurd to pretend there are no possible alternative arrangementsto think that technology, the product of concerted human invention and innovation, can only be introduced to society through reckless disruption, or that it’s unthinkable that advancements in technology might be integrated into our lives democratically and with care. If we are ingenious enough to automate large-scale production, build spacecraft, and invent artificial intelligences, are we not ingenious enough to ensure that advancing technology benefits all, and not just a few?
✏️ We always have a choice. 📖 (Page 308)
Page 309
True Luddism was about locating exactly where elites were using technologies to the disadvantage of the human being, and organizing to fight back. This is an important point: Luddism can and certainly did coexist with technology, and even a love of technology. … It is a matter, of course, of how technology is deployed.
📖 (Page 309)
Page 309
Before we find ourselves entirely backed into a corner by today’s tech titans, we should ask these questions: Does their technology serve to funnel profits while degrading a livelihood or destabilizing a community? Are those upstream who rely on the disrupted systems given a democratic say in how innovation will affect their lives? The history of the Luddites - the real ones, not the pejorative figment of the entrepreneurial imagination- gives us a framework to evaluate the utility of technologies and their social impacts. Erasing that history collapses our thinking about how tech and automation affect our working lives - and the choices we have to address the disruption they bring.
✏️ It is on us to always question.. To see the agenda.. To follow the money. They want us to seem like dumb idiots that are afraid, but they’re the ones that are afraid. 📖 (Page 309)
Page 312
A soul is of more value than work or gold.
✏️ Simple but powerful quote by George Mellor, one of the General Ludds of the movement and his death making the peak of it passing. Deserves to be captured. 👓 quote 📖 (Page 312)
Page 313
In a sense, it was not the machinery they were defending - it was the factory owner’s prerogative to employ boys like Robert for next to nothing, instead of skilled men like George Mellor for a full wage.
✏️ True. They distract us by focusing on the economic growth and the”awesome” tech, but really what the titans are actually defending is their ability to exploit workers (like boys) at criminally lower wages. 👓 propaganda 📖 (Page 313)
Page 314
In 1822, the journalist and labor reform advocate John Brown was investigating the conditions in cotton factories when he heard Blincoe’s story, and was so taken that he decided to write Blincoe’s memoirs in full. When the book was published, nearly a decade later, it became a phenomenon.* The story was a scandal, a blight on the industrialists who claimed they were building the future. Historians believe that it inspired the tale of the most famous orphan of all, Oliver Twist, conjured by Charles Dickens, who published his novel five years after Blincoe rose to national attention. The book helped finally drive reforms through Parliament that did have at least some teeth - enforceable limits on the length of the workday, an end to the parish-to-factory pipeline practice, an end to indentured servitude
✏️ What drives public opinion? What also drives government intervention? When does public affect govt? questions The public were in support of Luddites for most of the movement, but govt didn’t intervene. Luddites kill a tech titan, and everything falls apart. People less supportive, govt says the Luddites are just brutes, and everything shifts. A book is written about the horrible conditions in a factory, and it moves everyone, and drives reforms with some teeth. I don’t see what causes things to happen. 📖 (Page 314)
Page 315
We might marvel at the progress of, say, the self-driving car, but its autonomous navigation requires the labor of numerous invisible workers who do the thankless, drudgery-filled toil, often for very low wages, of labeling image after image to make the datasets the algorithm needs in order to operate. From Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to refugee camps in Europe, workers are paid pennies to sort endless reams of data, the raw materials for computer vision programs and self-driving vehicles. The researchers Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri call this “ghost work”-and it’s still ascendent today. The autonomous delivery robots now common on American college campuses and downtown areas may replace delivery people—but they are digitally overseen by other workers who can control them remotely, from places like Colombia, for $2 an hour. It’s the same story, time and again: a new technology that promises to alleviate work degrades it instead. Or take automated self-checkout, which we might not think about much, apart from being annoyed by the added hassle it gives us at the supermarket: not only did that device cost a cashier or checkout person their job, but it forced the remaining workers to learn new skills to help customers navigate it when they inevitably need help.
📖 (Page 315)
Page 315
Automation and workplace technology often don’t result in less work, but more diffuse, precarious, and lower-paying or less-protected work.
✏️ The cost of automation. Another Blood in the Machine. 📖 (Page 315)
Page 338
The protagonist of the ghost story that Mary conjured in Geneva that summer is Dr. Victor Frankenstein, a twenty-something genius just out of college, who, looking to make a name for himself by doing something great, recklessly tampers with technologies he does not understand. In the process, he gives rise to an entity that repulses him; and he casts off, neglects, and abandons his creation. This desperate entity, out of options, becomes ferociously violent. It’s easy to see the Luddites as a driving inspiration, and scholars of the period have argued that Dr. Frankenstein’s monster is a symbolic standin for the machine breakers.
✏️ What Frankenstein is about 📖 (Page 338)
Page 339
Frankenstein was clearly an allegorical work, composed against the backdrop of an uprising in the waning years of the Enlightenment, to the soundtrack of the machinery question that the Luddites beat onto the national stage. The mad doctor may as well be an entrepreneur who uses cutting-edge technology to force someone into a particular way of life-an automated factory, say—and then is surprised when that individual grows angry at his barren, rudderless existence. Victor engineered the monster’s life and the conditions it was to live by, and then left it on its own, after all.
✏️ Frankenstein as allegory 📖 (Page 339)
Page 339
Frankenstein’s monster shares many characteristics of the Luddite movement: his demands are articulate, well-reasoned, and founded in natural justice; as he himself says: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.” So too, he only turns to violence when his legitimate pleas are ignored, and his violence is not indiscriminate, but very specifically targeted. Note the echoes of Brontë’s “misery generates hate” - another direct literary comment on Luddism. The Monster is strategic in his efforts to pressure Frankenstein to soothe his suffering-first by making a rational case, then pleading with him for a companion, for improved social conditions, then, finally, by terrorizing him. “For nineteenth-century readers,” Smith continues, Frankenstein was self-evidently a political allegory, the monster an ambiguous figure, both articulate and horrifying, for oppressed populations - whether workers, slaves, or colonized peoples - whose claims for justice, if unheeded, could lead to vengeful violence.
✏️ More allegory of Frankenstein and Luddites. 📖 (Page 339)
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The figure the monster appeals to is an entrepreneurial-minded creator who unleashes technology without considering the consequences—and refuses to address those consequences when they arrive. This is Mary Shelley’s critique, which, like the Luddites’, is often misconstrued: a broadside not against technology or science, but against self-interested and irresponsible engagements with them. Victor Frankenstein’s sin is not merely creating the monster in the first place, but shunning and neglecting it once he does. “Frankenstein, like the Luddism with which it is in dialogue, is strictly agnostic concerning science, technology, innovation, or progress,” Smith notes. “Luddism opposed not machinery per se, but the aggressive deployment of ‘machinery hurtful to com monality.” This also gets at why Frankenstein has become one of the most influential works of fiction of all time.
✏️ Again, making the point that it’s not about science, it’s about the irresponsible use of science and its use against the common people. Technology is used irresponsibly, and creates a being that needs support and food and shelter and employment. This being is abandoned and neglected, and thus has to revert to violence to be heard and get what it needs. 📖 (Page 340)
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Dr. Victor Frankenstein is the uber-tech titan: he recklessly dedicates himself to a world-changing technology, without weighing the ethics or consequences. He espouses dubious philosophies from discredited predecessors (in his case, alchemists). And he does it all for self-glorification. He wants to put a dent in the universe; and it’s the size of the dent that matters, not its contours. When he realizes what he’s done, instead of confronting the problem, he pretends it doesn’t exist.
✏️ Dr Frankenstein’s motivations.. Just like any tech titans 📖 (Page 343)
Page 347
The Swing Riots in 1830 replicated some of the Luddite movement’s strongest tactics, even more forcefully. Agricultural workers, impoverished by enclosure, bad trade, and the introduction of automated threshing machinery, took to organizing themselves under the mythical moniker of Captain Swing- they sent threatening letters, practiced drills, and struck the machines when their demands were unheeded. Landowning farmers reduced rents and fees, and the movement helped pave the way for political reform in 1832 that expanded voting rights to include small landowners, shopkeepers, tenant farmers, and other middle-class workingmen. And they banished the threshing machine at scale for at least a generation. The historian George Rudé wrote that “of all the machine-breaking movements of the nineteenth century, that of the helpless and unorganized farmlaborers proved to be by far the most effective. The real name of King Ludd was Swing.”
✏️ Failure is never just the end. Failure doesn’t mean the effort was wasted, or that we shouldn’t try again in the future. Luddites lost in the end, but they still changed things. Sure, they only delayed machines a bit, but their efforts repealed the Combination Acts that had prevented unions. They influenced the Swing Riots that successfully helped farmers push back and get voting rights. 📖 (Page 347)
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the Luddites “discredited once and for all the notion that [industrial] society was a realm of shared values and human ends,” as Geoffrey Bernstein wrote. There was no natural, united drive toward progress; it was a forced march, with winners and losers.
✏️ Fighting back is about opening people’s eyes to things. Pushing back against any propaganda. 📖 (Page 348)
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The Luddites imparted tactics to future rebels, as well: operate within tightly knit, trusted groups or cells, and operate at scale. Exploit the authorities’ fears that industrial disturbances could lead to political disturbances. Build trust and solidarity. Know the threat of sabotage can be a potent force. Dramatize that threat, distribute your aims through media, and build a framework to excite and welcome future participants
✏️ Luddite tactics as advice for future rebels 📖 (Page 348)
Page 351
It is neither a simple manifestation of machine-hatred nor is it a new phenomenon that has appeared only with the introduction of computer technology. Its forms are largely shaped by the setting in which they take place. The sabotage of new office technology takes place within the larger context of the modern office, a context which includes working conditions, conflict between management and workers, dramatic changes in the work process itself and, finally, relationships between clerical workers themselves.
✏️ A reminder that even today, when we rebel against technology in the workplace, it’s not about tech or progress.. It’s about how it’s being used. About control and power dynamics and being made obsolete without caring about what happens to us. It’s about the corporate masters and their intent. 📖 (Page 351)
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It required the full power of a violent state - a tyrannical legal code, a massive occupying force, and dozens of public executions - to put the Luddites down, to safeguard the establishment of the factory system, to normalize top-down automation, and to entrench the technologies and the logic that governed them that came to dominate the Industrial Revolution and beyond.
📖 (Page 396)
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Today, when on-demand apps are degrading working conditions, AI services are deployed to erode wages, and industrial automation is pushed further into assembly lines and warehouse spaces, workers might remember how close the Luddites came to repelling the technologies of their oppression. They might remember what worked-tight-knit solidarity, distributed organizing models, shows of power and creativity capable of inspiring influential producers of culture, unrepentantly aggressive actions against those oppressive technologies specifically; and what did not-violence against individuals, a lack of coordination with an empowered political body, the absence of a sustained effort to grow one. They might recognize that the Luddites failed in the face of totalizing authoritarianism, and that such conditions are not static. We can still oppose the creep totalizing control into our lives. We can look at certain technologies, certain modes of domination, and say: No.
✏️ We have to think about what works and what doesn’t. Solidarity, targeted aggression.. Not human violence, etc. 📖 (Page 396)
Page 400
If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are. Robots are not sentient - they do not have the capacity to be coming for or stealing or killing or threatening to take away our jobs. Management does. Consulting firms and corporate leadership do. Gig company and tech executives do.
✏️ Words matter. Always. Always check for intent and agenda. Always check who’s the decision maker. 📖 (Page 400)
Page 407
“The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it,” the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote in 2021. “The barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.”
✏️ Hitting the foundations of maslov.. This is the standard tactic of capitalism. quote 📖 (Page 407)
Page 410
a profoundly undemocratic means of developing, introducing, and integrating technology into society. Individual entrepreneurs and large corporations and next-wave 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.
✏️ This gets to my inherent distrust of VC proliferation. It’s a narrow process of money and power dictating who gets to influence and shape society through these products and services that they alone decide which gets unleashed. Us, the people, get no say in the matter. 📖 (Page 410)