Two hundred years ago this month, groups of artisan cloth workers began to assemble at night on the moors around towns in Nottinghamshire. Proclaiming allegiance to the mythical King Ludd of Sherwood Forest, and sometimes subversively cross-dressed in frocks and bonnets, the Luddites organised machine-wrecking raids on textile factories that quickly spread across the north of England. The government mobilised the army and made frame breaking a capital offence: the uprisings were subdued by the summer of 1812.
Contrary to modern assumptions, the Luddites were not opposed to technology itself. They were opposed to the particular way it was being applied. After all, stocking frames had been around for 200 years by the time the Luddites came along, and they weren't the first to smash them up. Their protest was specifically aimed at a new class of manufacturers who were aggressively undermining wages, dismantling workers' rights and imposing a corrosive early form of free trade. To prove it, they selectively destroyed the machines owned by factory managers who were undercutting prices, leaving the other machines intact.
The original Luddites enjoyed strong local backing as well as high-profile support from Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein alludes to the industrial revolution's dark side. But IIn the digital age, Luddism as a position is barely tenable. Just as we assume that the original Luddites were simply technophobes, it's become unthinkable to countenance any broader political objections to contemporary technology's direction of travel.
The promoters of internet technology combine visionary enthusiasm and like-it-or-not realism. So dissent is dismissed as either an irrational rejection of progress or a refusal to face the inevitable. It's the realism that's particularly hard to counter; the notion that technology is an unstoppable and non-negotiable force entirely separate from human agency. There's not much time for political critique if you're constantly being told that "the world is changing fast and you have to keep up". Which is a bit rich given that politics infuses the arguments of even technology's purest advocates.
As Slavoj Žižek has noted, the language of internet advocacy – phrases like "the unlimited flow of information" and "the marketplace of ideas" – mirrors the language of free-market economics. But techno-prophets also use the lingo of leftwing revolution. It's there in books such as James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds and Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, and in Vodafone's slogan, "Power to You"; in the notion that blogs, Twitter and newspaper comment threads create a level playing field in the public debate; and it's there in the countless magazine features about how the internet fosters grassroots protest, places the tools of cultural production in amateurs' hands, and allows the little guy immediate access to information that keeps political leaders on their toes. This is not Adam Smith, it's Marx and Mao.
In fact, both rhetorics – of the free market and of bottom-up emancipation – serve to conceal the rise of crony capitalism and the concentration of power and money at the top. Google is busily acquiring "all the world's information". Facebook is gathering our personal data for the coming world of personalised advertising. Amazon is monopolising the book trade. The abandonment of net neutrality means corporate control of the web. Once all our books, music, pictures and information are stored in the cloud, it will be owned by a handful of conglomerates. While ethics committees debate the risks and merits of genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, nothing is done to regulate the commodification of human beings online that's described so chillingly by Jennifer Egan in her dystopian novels A Visit From the Goon Squad and Look at Me.
Technological change does not automatically equate with progress. If it did, we'd be prioritising renewable energy research and the hunt for new antibiotics. Instead, the newspaper, publishing and music industries are in terminal decline and a million "outdoor" advertising screens are blinking into life. It looks as if we're heading for a world in which journalists can't afford to hold power to account, authors to write books, and musicians to produce anything other than nostalgic mash-ups. But it will be a world in which certain players – new media companies and their advertisers – stand to benefit handsomely. Technological change isthe product neither of natural evolution nor spontaneous revolution. It's driven by corporate elites who have the power to arrange things according to their interests.
There will be some who argue that technology inevitably creates winners and losers; that the march towards efficiency means cutting prices and jobs. That progress, in other words, ain't always pretty.
But if efficiency were our only goal, we wouldn't be talking about job creation as an end in itself. We wouldn't be fretting about stagnating wages and the consequent slump in consumer spending. We wouldn't be watching Kirstie Allsop make wirework daffodil corsages with the Welsh WI And since jobs are no longer just about earning money, but fulfilment and community as well, the early 20th-century dream of technology liberating us from labour has turned into a nightmare of technology depriving people not just of their livelihoods but of their entire raison d'êetre. Not to mention the fact that the smartphone has made our leisure time into labour.
We seem to have forgotten that technology is a tool we can deploy to achieve democratically agreed ideals. Revisiting the motives of those loom-breakers reminds us that technology is not just about machines. It's about human choices and priorities and what progress really means.
•The panel debate Were the Luddites Right? will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday 22 November at 10pm
Eliane Glaser @'The Guardian'
Contrary to modern assumptions, the Luddites were not opposed to technology itself. They were opposed to the particular way it was being applied. After all, stocking frames had been around for 200 years by the time the Luddites came along, and they weren't the first to smash them up. Their protest was specifically aimed at a new class of manufacturers who were aggressively undermining wages, dismantling workers' rights and imposing a corrosive early form of free trade. To prove it, they selectively destroyed the machines owned by factory managers who were undercutting prices, leaving the other machines intact.
The original Luddites enjoyed strong local backing as well as high-profile support from Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein alludes to the industrial revolution's dark side. But IIn the digital age, Luddism as a position is barely tenable. Just as we assume that the original Luddites were simply technophobes, it's become unthinkable to countenance any broader political objections to contemporary technology's direction of travel.
The promoters of internet technology combine visionary enthusiasm and like-it-or-not realism. So dissent is dismissed as either an irrational rejection of progress or a refusal to face the inevitable. It's the realism that's particularly hard to counter; the notion that technology is an unstoppable and non-negotiable force entirely separate from human agency. There's not much time for political critique if you're constantly being told that "the world is changing fast and you have to keep up". Which is a bit rich given that politics infuses the arguments of even technology's purest advocates.
As Slavoj Žižek has noted, the language of internet advocacy – phrases like "the unlimited flow of information" and "the marketplace of ideas" – mirrors the language of free-market economics. But techno-prophets also use the lingo of leftwing revolution. It's there in books such as James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds and Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, and in Vodafone's slogan, "Power to You"; in the notion that blogs, Twitter and newspaper comment threads create a level playing field in the public debate; and it's there in the countless magazine features about how the internet fosters grassroots protest, places the tools of cultural production in amateurs' hands, and allows the little guy immediate access to information that keeps political leaders on their toes. This is not Adam Smith, it's Marx and Mao.
In fact, both rhetorics – of the free market and of bottom-up emancipation – serve to conceal the rise of crony capitalism and the concentration of power and money at the top. Google is busily acquiring "all the world's information". Facebook is gathering our personal data for the coming world of personalised advertising. Amazon is monopolising the book trade. The abandonment of net neutrality means corporate control of the web. Once all our books, music, pictures and information are stored in the cloud, it will be owned by a handful of conglomerates. While ethics committees debate the risks and merits of genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, nothing is done to regulate the commodification of human beings online that's described so chillingly by Jennifer Egan in her dystopian novels A Visit From the Goon Squad and Look at Me.
Technological change does not automatically equate with progress. If it did, we'd be prioritising renewable energy research and the hunt for new antibiotics. Instead, the newspaper, publishing and music industries are in terminal decline and a million "outdoor" advertising screens are blinking into life. It looks as if we're heading for a world in which journalists can't afford to hold power to account, authors to write books, and musicians to produce anything other than nostalgic mash-ups. But it will be a world in which certain players – new media companies and their advertisers – stand to benefit handsomely. Technological change isthe product neither of natural evolution nor spontaneous revolution. It's driven by corporate elites who have the power to arrange things according to their interests.
There will be some who argue that technology inevitably creates winners and losers; that the march towards efficiency means cutting prices and jobs. That progress, in other words, ain't always pretty.
But if efficiency were our only goal, we wouldn't be talking about job creation as an end in itself. We wouldn't be fretting about stagnating wages and the consequent slump in consumer spending. We wouldn't be watching Kirstie Allsop make wirework daffodil corsages with the Welsh WI And since jobs are no longer just about earning money, but fulfilment and community as well, the early 20th-century dream of technology liberating us from labour has turned into a nightmare of technology depriving people not just of their livelihoods but of their entire raison d'êetre. Not to mention the fact that the smartphone has made our leisure time into labour.
We seem to have forgotten that technology is a tool we can deploy to achieve democratically agreed ideals. Revisiting the motives of those loom-breakers reminds us that technology is not just about machines. It's about human choices and priorities and what progress really means.
•The panel debate Were the Luddites Right? will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday 22 November at 10pm
Eliane Glaser @'The Guardian'
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