The Return Of The Luddites

The Luddites have returned, dominating the presidential campaign, attacking technology and culture on many fronts, from ruining work to despoiling the environment to endangering children. Although the term "Luddite" gets kicked around a lot, few people understand who the first Luddites really were. Compared to the current crop of moral poseurs and wannabe anti-technology intellectuals, the originals were genuine heroes. They were fighting for a way of life, not for moral control or cultural power.

Members of a radical agrarian movement in early l9th-century England, the Luddites surfaced in Robin Hood country -- Sherwood Forest, near Nottinghamshire -- and for 15 bloody months took on the Industrial Revolution's first factories and entrepreneurs, until the British army suppressed them for good. The term has come to mean something else, though -- an attitude of fear and resentment toward technology. The Luddites never really left us completely, but the rise of the Net, the Web and the screen-driven culture they're helping to push along are bringing Luddites, or at least modern pretenders, back in force.

The historical Luddites drew their ranks from farmers and artisans whose families had lived for centuries in small villages, using simple machines that could be operated by individuals or small groups. The big mills and factories of the Industrial Revolution meant an end to social customs and community, to personal status and individual freedom. Having worked independently on their own farms, they grasped that they would be forced to use complex, dangerous machines in noisy, smelly factories, enduring long hours for slave wages, and that the trade was not in their favor.

Contemporary Luddites are fighting technology to keep power rather than livelihood, though they have as much chance of succeeding as their predecessors did.

These self-appointed watchmen are opportunists and cultural reactionaries led by people like Joseph Lieberman, former Education Secretary William Bennett, (one of Washington's leading moral gasbags, and one of Lieberman's closest friends), and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, who bemoan the lack of "morality" in popular culture, entertainment, and of course, most of all, the Mother of All Demons, the Net.

In fact, plenty of people call themselves Luddites today; they're popping up all over in media and Academe. The writer and social critic Kirkpatrick Sale, best known for his prescient book on the rise of the Sunbelt and his portrayal of Christopher Columbus as a raving imperialist scumbag (he's most recently the author of Rebels Against the Future: the Luddites and Their War on The Industrial Revolution), routinely attracts college audiences who cheer while he figuratively or literally smashes computers and denounces technology for ruining the world.

Unlike the first time 'round, this time corporations have joined the Luddite movement with a fury, hiring platoons of lawyers and lobbyists to fence off the Net and beat back the menace of free information online. Congress has passed a number of anti-democratic and unconstitutional laws designed to curb the free speech spawned by new technologies. Every season brings more books, articles, news stories warning that technology is driving us crazy, making us stupid, turning out kids into murderers, endangering out families. And how many articles and TV news stories have you seen on dangerous "hackers," online predators, Net addicts?

The neo-Luddites have attacked on a broad range of fronts blaming technology for everything from copyright theft to addiction to the oft-invoked menace of hacking and cracking. But no assault has been more relentless than the idea that technology and culture endanger the moral and literal lives of children. For years Bennett and Lieberman have led a wildly successful campaign (now joined both by Al Gore and George W. Bush), thumping the entertainment industry for allegedly contributing to violent behavior. Columbine advanced the hysterical ideal that computer games were not only unhealthy, but mortally dangerous. This idea has become the central rallying cry of the neo-Luddites.

It's interesting how modern-day Luddites invoke morality as a shield to mask zealotry and ignorance. Basically, they're doing what fanatics have done for centuries: try to force everyone to accept their own personal ideas of right and wrong. We are constantly being told this cultural piety and conformity is really for our own good -- and that of our children. This despite evidence that young people are safer than they've ever been, according to every recent statistical survey, from the FBI Uniform Crime Report to the Center for Juvenile Justice in New York. There are virtually no credible connections between technology use, media and violence.

Author Richard Rhodes, a scholar both of technology and violence, pointed out in The New York Times last week that violent behavior isn't learned from mock struggles on a screen. Violence is learned in personal encounters, beginning with the epidemic brutalization of children by their parents and peers. "Violence is on the decline in America," wrote Rhodes, "but if we want to reduce it even further, protecting children from real violence in their real lives -- not the pale shadow of mock violence -- is the place to begin."

But that isn't likely to happen. Exploiting the idea that technology as a menace to children is a lot easier and cheaper than confronting more complex social problems like child abuse or guns. Rhodes and others have pointed out that as media use has increased in the western world, violence has generally declined. Private violence (as opposed to the military or nation-state kind) has been dropping in the West since the Middle Ages, when homicide rates are estimated to have been 10 times those of Western nations today. Historians attribute the drop to improved social controls -- police forces and common access to courts of law -- and to a shift away from brutal physical punishment in child-rearing, a practice that shows up again and again as a common factor in the background of violent criminals.

Yet most Americans believe violence among the young is skyrocketing, and more than 80% told the Gallup poll last year that they believe the Internet is at least partly responsible. that's how good a propaganda job the neo-Luddites and their media have done.

"This time around the technology is even more complex and extensive," warns Sale, "and its impact even more pervasive and dislocating, touching greater populations with greater speed and at greater scales." In a way, Sale has a point. The neo-Luddities do have a whole new crop of legitimate issues with which to rouse an already alarmed populace: nano-technology, artificial intelligence, the open source challenge to proprietary businesses, and the growing access to information by younger Americans who could previously be easily censored and influenced.

Little organized political or other opposition counters the neo-Luddites. Few people are using mainstream media to argue that digital technology actually is creating many new kinds of jobs, sparking new kinds of communities and liberating information for millions in ways never before possible. Some should. For all its many flaws, the digital culture fosters freedom and opportunity and information everywhere it goes. The irony is that the neo-Luddites, like their predecessors, are fighting forces beyond anybody's control. They can't win either. The only issue is how ugly the brawl will get.

And wouldn't you do the same in their shoes?

Imagine this: one day in the near future, Congress and the FBI finally get their way and install Carnivore boxes not only at the ISP level, but at your local computers also. If Richard Stallman urged a call to arms and geeks everywhere organized massive protests where they liberally shattered the Carnivore boxes into little bits, would you not join? You too, Mr Slashbot, are a Luddite, by that standard, make no mistake about it. When someone shatters your own world-view, it is your right and duty to shatter his means, at whatever cost and to whatever ends.

I call myself a Luddite

And yet I am a software developer. A contradiction? I don't believe so. My fear is loss of control over my own life and my own destiny. I don't have to wonder how many ways that technology can fail us, I know how many ways technology and the dependence of society upon it can fail us. I develop software in order to continue to be sure that I remain "in the loop" on technology, and the changes that are comming in the future. I try to keep as much technology out of my home, so that I am not dependent on it. I don't have a cellular phone, I don't have a color television. When I consider adding some new technology to my life I try to evaluate the impact. Will I become dependent on it? Will I control it? Or will it control me?

Hal Duston
[e-mail]

Luddites were right

The real Luddites were opposed to technology being used to suppress people. They all lost their jobs or were put in to dangerous jobs interacting with some scary automated weaving machinery when the industrial revolution occured in England. Like the citizens in "Metropolis", they smashed the machines that were supplanting people and leaving large numbers of the poor unemployed or facing lousy jobs.

I think they were right. When new technology is introduced, it should be used to make life better for all of society, not to make the rich richer and eliminate the need for other economic classes. Mechanization and new technology have always promised that the work day would get shorter, safer, and easier. So why are so many people working 12 hour days at multiple jobs?

Most of us are lucky; we are the technological elite and we like our jobs. But too frequently, people (like us) have introduced new technologies without thinking about the social impact. In the case of the Luddites, clever engineers figured out how to make an electric loom. But noone figured out how the textile producing population of England was supposed to support itself. I think the whole point of being 'human' is in looking to higher goals than feeding yourself for one day. Introducing technology that is more efficient and makes you money and more secure is a good thing-- but if the cost is destroying the livelyhood of large parts of your society, it's time to figure out a plan for them to succeed as well.

Now, the modern "Luddites" tend to be the exact opposite of this. They are protecting large, abusive corporations from technologies that would liberate many people both intellectually and financially. I think it is insulting to the original Luddites to call these new folks "Luddites."

-m

How can you say...

Alright, Jon, I normally like/tolerate your stuff...but HOW do you get off saying that the current "Luddites" are (insert negatives here) while the "original Luddites" were the ones who were "heros" and "fighting to preserve a way of life" or somesuch?

The modern Luddites are trying to protect a way of life also...as they always have...they want to keep information that THEY don't like out of the hands of everyone. Whether it's sex ed/AIDS ed for kids, substance abuse information, etc etc etc...the modern Luddites are trying to force their view of the world on everyone NOT by proclaiming their own position but by censoring others'.

Agrarian romanticism...

I think that this argument contains a false appeal to romanticism.

Workers were being offered heavy, regulated, industrial work in exchange to a farming lifestyle. But to characterise the exchange as uniformly bad is probably unfair.

Farming is hard. It involves long hours, in all weathers. The results are far less predictable than factory work - bad conditions can mean famine. Many farmers lived in poverty. The plight of the Irish was particularly desparate.

Some people were being offered worse jobs in exchange for better ones. But I think that many of the Luddites were, as commonly characterised, afraid of change.

Fear of technology today is real

I'm not surprised we're seeing a resurrection of Luddite ideals. There are real fears in the general population concerning technologies and unfortunately, the technologists in their zeal to push further/faster are not taking enough time to assuage those fears or listen intently to what the general population is saying. For example:

• Biotechnology - we see great promise from this technology for medical purposes, but there is great fear about biotech's impact of the environment and our food supply. As seen with the recent Taco Bell gene-altered corn incident, errors can and will be made. Food is so basic to our well being that I wouldn't be surprised by a backlash/revolution against biotech.
• Nanotechnology - Again, great hopes such as nanotech medical devices to clean clogged arteries. But the visions of nanotech weaponry, unbridled nanotech reproduction, and nanotech self-evolution that permeate nanotech discussions is generating fear in the general population.
• Net technology - Want the laundry list? Carnivore, Amazon-style different pricing, tracking of financial transactions across websites when you purchase merchandise, name lists being sold when privacy was promised, etc.
  
  These are just few examples but here's the point. The fear is justified because people are rightfully discerning that technologies are being developed/used that directly (and increasingly adversely) impact their lives and this application of technology to (or against) their lives is out of their own personal control. People are beginning to feel victimized by technology, and not empowered by it. Victimization on a mass basis (and technology is giving us the ability to victimize people in numbers never seen before) is the stuff from which revolutions are wraught, even Luddite revolutions.

EMUSE.NET [emuse.net]

Actually, it was a change of fashion.

Actually, the original Luddites weren't quite so philosophically minded, and weren't really being put of their job by machines so much as by a change of fashion. They were mostly stocking makers, and the stockings they made were of far far superior quality to what machines at the time could produce. They started losing their jobs not because machines were out competing them, but because stockings went out of fashion in America. Once you weren't showing off your stockings as a fashion statement, it made sense to buy the cheaper, but much poorer quality, machine made stockings.

I think a lot of neo-Luddites are rather the same. They don't have any well thought out objections to technology per-se, they're just people who are losing out to the rapid pace of change in the world, driven by human nature as much as by computers, and they lash out at having to change or having their profit stream threatened.

Look at how hard the MPAA fought against VCRs. The movie industry isn't anti-technology, they're about as high-tech as you can get, innovating constantly throughout this entire century. They just had a good profit scheme going and they'd rather try to keep the status quo they've been winning at than work to sieze the new opportunities present.

Maybe;

It really depends on how you define a Luddite. If a Luddite is a person who values his life, his culture, his identity over that of pop-mash-culture, over technology and gadgets and constraints, over someone else's fairy tales, then a cyber-column on the internet in a public forum is one of the better places to do this sort of discussion.

If you define a Luddite as a technology fearing/hating/avoiding individual, against change, against growth, against 'progress', then yes, you're quite funny.

The nick is a joke! Really!

A little hostorical background ...

Most interesting. Firstly, a point of fact. Sherwood Forest is in Nottinghamshire, not near.

I don't think is fair (as some posters suggest) that the original Luddites were entirely selfish. The move from an agrarian to an industrial economy caused an immense amount of social upheaval. Cities like Nottingham experienced huge population increases, but often without a corresponding increase in their boundaries or facilities, leading to terrible housing, poor health, food shortages, etc. In this sense the Luddites were justified in their actions. However, over time, industry has on balance improved things!

It is interesting to compare these changes to those occuring in England over the last 20 years, as we have moved from an industrial to a service economy. Whole industries (e.g. mining, textiles) have been wiped out in Nottinghamshire, with consequential poverty. Try talking to some of those people about the information revolution ...

Don't Know Nothing About History

The big mills and factories of the Industrial Revolution meant an end to social customs and community, to personal status and individual freedom.

Sure, that's why the Industrial Revolution led to the repeal of the anti-poor Corn Laws, the inclusion of non-landowners in the House of Lords, and the first time in history people could have some freedom over where they lived. What if the "social customs" entail burning the houses of Catholics or Jews? Before the IR, you couldn't move away -- you grin and bear it. And the idea that the IR killed individual freedom is ridiculous. The House of Commons gained its first real powers during the IR. Coincidence?

It's chic to bash the IR. But without it, >50% of jobs today would be agricultural (compared to around 2% now). On the other hand, Katz does seem to have a talent for laying down fertilizer, so perhaps that explains his enthusiasm.

Having worked independently on their own farms, they grasped that they would be forced to use complex, dangerous machines in noisy, smelly factories, enduring long hours for slave wages, and that the trade was not in their favor.

Oh PLEASE. "Their own farms", no doubt, were wondrously safe, quiet, fragrant places to work. If Katz seriously believes this then I don't think he has a clue what farming entails. And as for "the trade not being in their favor," yeah, it was undoubtedly much easier to deal with a landlord who took half your harvest but shouldered little of the risk -- and who dictated to you to whom and for how much you could sell your crops.

The fact of the matter is that the IR enormously improved the lives of almost everyone in Britain (and everywhere else it was adopted), and the Luddites were a middle class interest group who supported laws that kept the price of food and wool high (thus enriching themselves at the expense of people who had to buy those necessities). They also objected to the idea that one could become wealthy without owning land. They were not "heroes" in any sense of the word, unless one is a columnist who has built his reputation on bashing free enterprise, and who is willing to pay any price in bad arguments and inept rhetorical flourishes ("slave wages" is a contradiction) to further that end.

-BBB

Damn you, Katz

I vowed not to respond... but I have to. You haven't read Kurzwiel's Age of Spiritual Machines yet, have you? You really ought to.

Kurzwiel uses an excellent quote from a well-known manifesto to illustrate his main point: that technology enthusiasts (like us) are Luddites as well. Being a Luddite is not about fearing technology - it's fearing the application of technology. I, then, am a Luddite, along with Bill Joy.

These other people are, as you said, opportunists, and those who fear any organization of people. They fear communication among people. They don't fear the application of technology.

Indeed, the Luddites are returning, but in the guise of you and me - those who love technology but fear what people will do with it. I, for one, hate most of the 'net. It's a stinking pile of capatalist dung. Does that make me a Luddite? Yes. Do the people you named like the 'net as a stkinking pile of capatalist dung? Yes. They hate the aspects of the 'net that I like. They hate communication. That's not being a Luddite - just a power-hungry politician.

Jon, do yourself a favor, and pick up a copy of Kurzwiel's Age of Spiritual Machines. You won't regret it. Maybe you might even change your message to be a bit more positive.

Here are some scary facts

About 7% of the population at any given time believes in UFO abductions and Elvis is still alive.

54% of people polled recently by US News and World Report and MSNBC belive in the actual real existance of angels, ghosts & demons. That is, they are really here and excert a real influence on people.

The most banned books from US schools over the whole of the 1990's to present are the Harry Potter series because it is believed they promote Satanism, Devil Worship and general un Christian unacceptable thinking.

Today it was reported on national US news that one of the outcomes being seriously considered by the US Congress in response to the reports that movie companies market to children is that there should be only 2 movie ratings: G and NC-17. That is, there are either cartoon movies with talking animals or everything else that is absolutely forbidden to children even if their parents are present.

In a recent poll by CNN, ~27% of those polled would accept a fascist dictatorship if it meant that crime would be reduced and/or undesireable people (undefined) were removed from the United States.

In a recent poll by USAToday 45% of those polled would support the elimination of the separation of church and state as long as the church was Protestant/Fundamentalist.

In a recent poll by the NY Times 59% of those polled support religious education in public schools.

So it's not really a matter of technology or Luddism. It's a matter of slowly but surely sliding towards a dark dark ignorant world.

I think Jon wouldn't know a Luddite if he saw one

What Jon is talking about is the efforts of people to squash technology in order to maintain power. What he doesn't include is that the same people would use the very latest technology without binking an eye if it would help their situation. If they could, the MPAA would use 512-bit encryption on DVDs. That's no Luddite. From the dawn of humanity, people have been using technology to assert power over others. Guess what? The internet has brought in a whole bunch of new technologies in a short time. So we're seeing a frantic rush to embrace some technology, and stop others. Most people will use whatever technology they can to gain/keep power, and try to stop technology that gives power to others. Again, that's not Luddite behavior -- it doesn't stem from a pathological/philosophical problem with technology, it stems from fear and greed. You could possibly paint the slashdot crowd as Luddite if you only read articles about DoubleClick or RealNetworks. That's what Jon is doing. Ho-hum.

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Luddite is an oft misused term

The term "Luddite" gets thrown around whenever someone isn't all gung-ho about the latest technology. That's a warping of the term. The key is that progress for the sake of progress isn't always a good thing. For example, a lot of people like to play the upgrade game. They buy new CPUs, they buy new video cards, they recompile new kernels, they upgrade their applications and utilities whenever a new X.0Y verion is released.

For the most part, I don't get involved in this sort of thing. I keep puttering away, working on projects and code. There are excellent computer science books that could keep you busy for decades, yet they're not based around DirectX 8 or the capabilities of the GeForce 2. By general web-oriented terminology, I'm a Luddite, because I'm not obsessed with the latest and greatest. Perhaps a new term is needed here, something that means "is not interested in constant faux-improvements driven by people who have made a hobby of buying the fanciest consumer tech."