Why You Should Be a Luddite (opens in new tab)

> a small subset of workers needs to be subsidized indefinitely.

In the context of 1800s industrial revolution, this means employing child labour, hugely unsafe machines that cause amputations and death, draconian death penalties against the Luddites, long working hours, and things like that. All for a small pitiful wage.

THAT is what this is about: outright exploitation that would be spectacularly illegal in well-organized countries today, and is called things like "de-facto slavery" in places where it still happens. If not having these things is "subsidizing" people then one of us doesn't know what that word means.

That is a misrepresentation of the argument. The point is not that 90 workers are outraged, the point is that the business owner will spend 90% less and keep the difference for him, accumlating wealth. The "wealth pie" is now more concentrated in only a few hands, and in the next technological evolution, the same process occurs, which leads to an always increasing concentration of the wealth available with less and less people. The Luddites did not say to keep the 90 people subsidized (that again is a rhetorical misrepresentation and very dismissive of the work force). They said that the wealth available had to be distributed more evenly between the people who created this wealth and who are impacted by the change. As the capitalists of the time refused, they smashed the machines and the other side said they were against progress. The fact is that we do not put the same meaning in the word progress: if a society becomes more and more a society of masters and servants with less and less possibilities for the lower class to better their condition, is that progress? There is a convergence at play here : real life communism and extreme capitalism are the same thing, the monopolization of wealth by a small class of people by every mean possible and then, making this admissible through communication to the masses.

I think a portion of people would say yes, it's better to keep the status quo. Imo progress always wins because eventually someone somewhere will break the taboo. Technology even gets lost and rediscovered, which means even if you supress the knowledge someone will still eventually do it. So it's pretty pointless to fight, I'd rather try to benefit from it.

Concise yet complete. Well done.

>I find this argument stupid and disingenuous. Technology exists to reduce or eliminate labor. If you're pro technology only until it makes you, the human, redundant, you're anti-technology.

This smells like the "Yet you participate in society, curious!" comic. Is this just for upvotes' sake? "Job market relevancy" during George IV meant returning to the coal mines at best.

Trying to make a point about a supposed Historical fact (Luddites were anti technology?) without any historical context is disingenuous.

Do you know about actual Luddite activity and what sources do you have and how do you interpret them? Or are you just making a point in a vacuum about your opinion on semantics?

I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who isn't anti-technology per your definition.

Are you sure you're not an AI advocating for a world ruled by AI capitalists where us primitive humans have no role whatsoever? :P

Despite sounding like it's zero-sum, fighting for the consumer is actually the only way to lift everybody up. Fighting for workers specifically is playing favorites. Fighting for the ownership class is also playing favorites. Focusing on consumers makes everybody a winner over time.

> Because it's all about, and only about, you. Yes?

Yes, it is about the collective "you," and always has been.

To suggest otherwise is preposterous.

Everyone is a consumer, it’s all of us.

It’s not just that you’re artificially keeping prices high, in a globalist world, someone else would do it and all the workers would lose their jobs.

If weavers are allowed to charge whatever they want for clothes, farmers must be allowed to charge whatever they want for food (no tractors allowed), etc. We would still have switch-board operators, and everything would be more expensive for everyone and half the people would be stuck doing busy work they don't actually need to do because their job could be automated.

It's not about convenience vs compassion. Luddism is not convenient nor compassionate for anybody

It was a joke: technology has collapsed the attention span, therefore Luddites would have long attention spans; only someone with a long attention span would be able to read a long-form article like this one.