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Inside the Luddite festival harnessing Gen Z’s rage against Big Tech (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@hexbear.net
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[–] 13 points 2 months ago (1 child)

Nah it'd be more like Amazon workers burning down the robots because they make their job worse. Most of the Luddites were factory workers who weren't opposed to automation in general, they were opposed to machinery that increased the speed and rote-ness of their work that made the working day significantly worse. They weren't revolting against machines taking their jobs so much as machines making the nature of their jobs more terrible.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago*

    ??? they absolutely were revolting against automation obviating their skill sets, they were skilled artisans (not proletarian factory workers, with whom they were competing) who knew that they literally could not compete with machinery allowing 100x the work to be done at a tenth of the cost. They saw the writing on the wall for them and smashed machinery to protect their own economic survival

    If only they had the foresight to understand that proletarianization was coming whether they smashed machines or not, maybe they could have, i dunno, seized them instead. But they didn't, and couldn't have even thought to do so, because the theory that would have allowed them to understand present conditions hadn't even been begun to be considered

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