author Angelo Gladding
category Luddism
embed https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/wJzHmw3Ei-g?si=7V4KrUl02-Sqz2z-
published 2024-03-08T19:42:45.260609-08:00
type entry
updated 2024-03-14T10:55:04.064644-07:00
url /2024/03/09/9r
visibility public
watch-of {'name': ['Why Big Tech is Ruining Our Lives with Brian Merchant - Factually! - 250'], 'author': [{'name': ['Adam Conover'], 'url': ['https://youtube.com/@TheAdamConover']}], 'url': ['https://youtu.be/wJzHmw3Ei-g']}
Content
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 | 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 ## `30:00` ## `40:00` ## `50:00` |