The Luddites as shock troops for modern industrial capitalism.
## `00:00`
- clothworkers: weavers, stocking frame knitters, finishers, croppers, ..
- largest industrial workforce
- late 1700s, early 1800s
- was a "cottage industry", literally working in their own cottages
- technologists/craftspeople/mastery
- fix/mod their tools to be more productive/efficient
- factory, powerloom/wideframe appears
- cheaper, poorer quality
- drives down sale price of everything
- no apprentices
- people in the trade begin to see the trends intersecting, industrializing taking shape
## `10:00`
- they start protesting
- first to parliament
- shoddy is fraudulent
- let's get some regulations on the books
- entrepreneurs oppose
- no unions, no democracy
- post revolutionary France
- 1811 clothworkers organize in solidarity under ficticious "Ned Ludd"
- would seek out and smash new machines, leaving old machines
- state sees it as a threat
- martials troops, thousands
- largest domestic occupation in English history
- at height 30,000 troops ready to fight Luddites
- more than had fighting Napoleon
- make it capital offense (hung for smashing a machine)
- Lord Byron defends Luddites
- still passes
- propaganda campaign
- "they know not what they do"
- to smash machines, to protest technology, is to be a dummy, to be backwards-looking, to be a Luddite
- it's worse for every segment of society except for the one's who own the machines
## `20:00`
- biggest misconception: "they were against technology" NO!
- they were against the profits being only beneficial to the few of society
- if someone had invented a technology to dramatically improve personal productivity, together it would have been a different story
- proto-capitalism was entering
- Luddites fighting against the shock troops of industrial capitalism
- setting up factories at edge of town and employing orphans
- when you hear automation ... it's never a clean automation
- there's always an invisible supply chain of usually exploited labor hiding behind it
- these machines are more efficient, it's the future
- keep shipping us orphans
- deskilling
- labor is more precarious, more vulnerable
- today's AI systems has precarious labor doing quality assurance
- pennies payed in Kenya to review training data
- not just jobs being automated
- good jobs being replaced by bad jobs
- who benefits from improvement of technology
- industrial/entrepreneurial class was capturing all of the gains
- Luddites were starving as "productivity" was shooting through the roof
- Luddism is one of the early efforts to get those two trajectories to align
- if you have technology that makes productivity to skyrocket it's trying to get people a seat at the table so that they can benefit too
- it's possible there could have been some kind of new loom technology that actually benefitted everybody
- it's not necessarily the new invention, it's how it was put to use, and to what end
- it's the social context
- studios want to use AI to write scripts
- not as a tool to contribute to writer's creativity
- instead to degrade the writer's ability to contribute
- AI will do things better and replace jobs
- actually, technology that has been invented, cannot replace a human writer, all it can do is make the product worse
- worried not of writer's job being replaced, worried about studio using [LLM] to barf out draft then assign to someone to rewrite, talk to director, talk to post
- you're not the writer, you're the associate producer
- it was allowable in writer's contracts, got protections put in place with solidarity of strike
- not worried about technology, worried about what companies are going to do with it
- never seen before blunt force apocalyptic hyping of what AI is
- still haven't figured out a good way to make money off it
- fight was in hollywood with writers
- will happen to copywriters, illustrators, coders, graphic designers
- photoshop generative fill is fine
- being deployed by management
- put into opposition of workers
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