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We often can't see what's wrong with our normal until something takes a ball peen hammer and smashes our normal to smithereens.
People are already at work, in the home, and in everyday life, enacting all sorts of practical criticisms against technology. I started with the Luddites because they’re so often held up as history’s fools who misguidedly opposed technological progress. Mueller often places radical thinkers within the context of the workers’ movements that surrounded them, such as the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s Raya Dunayevskaya and the 1949-50 miners’ strikes in the US. The etymology of the word, as I am using it from the Greek, is to change into something higher or greater. Once you've evolved into something new, even if you have no clue what that something new is, you cannot, cannot force yourself back into your previous packaging.Yet eventually the spies and crackdowns had their effect, and in January 1813 authorities identified, arrested, and executed several suspected Luddite higher-ups. These new inventions produced textiles faster and cheaper because they could be operated by less-skilled, low-wage labourers. Both work and technology have undergone seismic shifts since then, the magnitude of which we have not seen for generations. In such a predicament, one option is not to attempt anything new per se, but rather to look to the past for inspiration.
When it comes to newer things, there are some really interesting techniques that people have found for hacking apps or using misusing them in various ways.Gavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. The combination of seasonal variations in wage rates and violent short-term fluctuations springing from harvests and war produced periodic outbreaks of violence. With cyberpunk there’s an overriding sense that we will end up with fingerprint scanners at work, because that’s just technological development. Breaking Things at Work draws these legacies into a cumulative strategy for how we might come together to combat the daily indignities and miseries of contemporary work. Historian Eric Hobsbawm, in a reevaluation of the Luddites’ motivations for machine breaking, describes them as “collective bargaining by riot.
Hemant Taneja is CEO and managing director of global VC firm General Catalyst, backers of legendary companies like Stripe, Snap, Samsara, Airbnb, Kayak and Gusto.Mueller reveals a history of sometimes spontaneous, mostly autonomous movements reacting to increasing mechanization and automation of workplaces—from factories and docks to the first computers and beyond. As we face a new, pandemic-induced cybernetic offensive in the workplace, Mueller digs deep into the history of workers struggles, recovering its traditions, making a persuasive case for Marxist neo-Luddism. On the night of April 9, 1812, the Luddites had launched a daring raid on the massive Horbury mill complex owned by Joseph Foster, assembling a force of hundreds to successfully wreck and burn the building, after detaining Foster’s sons without bloodshed.
I admire Thompson’s ability to comprehend the Luddites from within their specific conjuncture, rather than from a point of view that sees them as a mere speed bump on the road to our inevitable present. Luddites clashed with government troops at Burton's Mill in Middleton and at Westhoughton Mill, both in Lancashire. Like the Luddites, free software hackers were the skilled people of their trade, and in some ways they were more successful, because they actually created an entire ecosystem of software that was free and open source – meaning that anyone can look at the code and freely adapt it – that exists today. Then, as we stand stunned in the wreckage, only then can we also begin to see what aspects of our normal were wrecking us.
They’re not going to walk around, they’re not going to move, they’re going to stay in one space, they’re going to do the same repetitive job again and again. From all accounts I’ve read, there are extremely contentious internal meetings at these companies about how they are going to deal with the fact that a significant amount of politics of all flavors is happening on the systems they design.
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