Getting Off with the Luddites | Sarah Thankam Mathews
www.nplusonemag.com
They see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political project centered on three things: reclaiming collective agency away from Big Tech and its attention-fracking, data-capturing, social erosion project; re-enchanting public life through public events that help people experience connection; and fostering a world rooted in localism, public goods, care, fun, democracy, and what one Luddite I spoke to referred to as “collective effervescence.”

The Luddites see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political project centered on three things: reclaiming collective agency away from Big Tech and its attention-fracking, data-capturing, social erosion project; re-enchanting public life through public events that help people experience connection; and fostering a world rooted in localism, public goods, care, fun, democracy, and what one Luddite I spoke to referred to as “collective effervescence.” Collective effervescence, I suspect, was what I was surprised to encounter in myself that winter day by the Apple Cube. The phrase, first coined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, refers to the electric and exhilarating energy you might find at raves, protests, marathons, and houses of worship: the feeling you have when you’re connected to something larger than yourself.

The Luddites I met made few direct demands of institutional power. There was no lobbying for antitrust legislation, or for regulating addictive design features and removing ed tech from schools (though a couple of Luddites volunteered for Alex Bores, the New York congressional candidate, and some were tracking the writer Jonathan Haidt’s work around adolescent smartphone use). Unlike their forebears, these Luddites did not advocate for property destruction, save the symbolic iPad at S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E. Instead, their focus was on the prefigurative, revolutionary potential of events—specifically free, public, participatory, unpredictable events.

There was a theory of change behind this. Back at S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E, someone had handed me a zine titled The Event Is The Medium, a nod to Marshall McLuhan that doubled as a succinct description of the Luddites’ strategy. The event: no tickets, no invitation on social media, no closed guest list, and no promise that things would unfold according to plan. The Luddites ran these events and hoped other people would run their own events, and in doing so, change their own norms around sociality.

The aim was lofty: to undo decades of social conditioning by technology and reorient people toward unmediated, embodied connection. One in-person meet-up at a time, they would inspire people to make tech work for them instead of the other way around.

  • ShaggySnacksEnglish
    6·
    21 hours ago

    Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new.

    The Luddite disturbances started in circumstances at least superficially similar to our own. British working families at the start of the 19th century were enduring economic upheaval and widespread unemployment. A seemingly endless war against Napoleon’s France had brought “the hard pinch of poverty,” wrote Yorkshire historian Frank Peel, to homes “where it had hitherto been a stranger.” Food was scarce and rapidly becoming more costly. Then, on March 11, 1811, in Nottingham, a textile manufacturing center, British troops broke up a crowd of protesters demanding more work and better wages.

    As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”

    Luddites didn’t have issues with technology. The issue was how technology was being used to suppress wages and erode labor rights. A modern day Luddite would still have a phone and an email address they just wouldn’t use AI or social media.

    Edit: Forgot the source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/