Against the Machine, or Humanities rehabilitated

The philosophers of advancement were delighted with all button that put into motion any kind of mechanics that supposedly spared human work. [...] The trivial dream of “achievements of humanity” enters, which only understood the advancement of a method that saves work and provides entertainment. There was no soul.
Oswald Spengler

In the current period, technological control appears to embody the Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interes, in specified a way that any objection seems irrational, and any countermeasure is impossible..
Herbert Marcuse

It's a communicative of a brave rebellion. opposition from average people who threw the glove to elites and trends. They were able to defend a good and dignified life against the greed of the mighty and the cult of “progress.” Now this story, repeatedly presented in a caricature way, has been told again and honestly. After 2 100 years, that rebellion continues to give thought to “progress” and “the needs of history”.

This was a challenging and challenging task. As always, erstwhile you effort to break the myths of years and decades. Myths created, supported and propagated by powerful and influential elites. Brian Merchant did this task successfully, although not without any discussional results.

If we know at least the minimum of history, we are curious in social affairs, we are following the public debate, then by heart we know the image drawn by the caricature hand pretending to be a portraitist-realist. Humanities, Luddism – associations are clear. Backward, dark, stupid device wreckers. Scared, hysterical troglodytes, not knowing the benefits of progress. Demagogue rages who in the name of their narrow interests wanted to harm everyone else. Naïve, childish mitomani, reasoning they would halt the natural, obvious, unquestionable course of history.

→ Against technological inevitability. Review of “Artificial Intelligence Atlas” by Kate Crawford •David Kuyawa

In this imagination there is an ever-raising curve depicting the growth of prosperity, all benefits, and constant development. The old is always worse in this imagination than the new, and they wanted to cultivate the old and counteract the new.

At best, we get a softened version: perhaps, incidentally, advancement has side effects, any tiny group loses periodically, but we all gain from it all in the long term.

Against caricature

A U.S. writer takes specified a communicative under scrutiny, and 1 step at a time shows 2 thesis. The first says that the Luddists were not as they were portrayed for decades until today. Two: that it is very doubtful that we have all gained and gained and that only a tiny group has lost.

About this is the book “Blood in a Machine” – well written and addictively written, dense from unknown facts and interpretations, an almost 600-page dissertation that successfully tells about “people's history”, about social past seen from the position of “down” and masses, alternatively than an elite “mountain”.

The author met the hard task not only on ideological-propagand grounds, having to face many years of subsequent nonsense about the Luddists. He besides had to tell an interesting communicative that is not obvious. It's rather a forgotten event from a distant past. Local-regional revolt without wider coverage. Set firmly in the contexts of technology, manufacture and epoch, which are alien to people of our time. Reminiscent in rule of backwardness and blindness.

But he made it. He did it with 2 treatments. Firstly, he showed how old inventions – and above all their inclusion in the factory-capitalist strategy – are akin in their social impact to the realities of today: Ubera, AI, work through applications, garbage contracts, etc. Secondly, he told this communicative not with an excess of dates, numbers and generalizations, although all of this is here, but through the prisms of circumstantial people who are only a dozen.

Evil roots

This communicative starts much earlier than we think.

In the penultimate decade of the 16th century, William Lee of Calverton developed a prototype of a fresh knitting machine. More comfortable than the method of working weavers. The device not only required little effort, but it was besides much more efficient than erstwhile manual work utilizing only tiny technological improvements. erstwhile the designer applied to the Queen to patent the device, he heard in reply: “You are measuring high, Mr. Lee. Think about how much harm your invention could do to my mediocre subjects. Without work, they would fall into poorness and begging without a shadow of a shadow."

Only the 18th century brought a change. More people, motivated by whether they wanted to relieve themselves in hard work, or increase productivity, or imagination of profits, improved the spinning and weaving processes. It was what is not apparent today, a key manufacture of that time – all tenth resident of the British Isles worked in the textile industry.

Technological advancement has, however, begun social regression.

New devices, including the “spinning Joasia”, Arkwright’s spinning device powered by a water wheel, the usage of Watt’s steam device in the textile manufacture – have undermined the position, importance, prosperity and numbers of people surviving from specified work.

There was erstwhile a good world

Brian Merchant step by step, based on many discoveries by historians and the testimonies of the era, defuses powerfully intertwined myths, crucial to the communicative showing Luddists as backward, mad and stupid maniacs who did not want a better, more comfortable, prosperous world, etc. It shows them as people who, contrary to today's communicative of linear progress, defended a planet rather good for the peoples of the time, and the changes that have taken place did not bring any overall improvement and prosperity.

→ Brian Merchant: Blood in the Machine. Humanities and the First Rebellion Against Technological Giants

The first of these myths is the belief that the erstwhile planet was full of poorness and depravity, and fresh solutions brought salvation from the ocean of misery. Who, as such, knows political thought, may associate the reflections of Gilbert Keith Chesterton and left -wing anarchist Peter Kropotkin. They both wrote about the same thing about the pre-industrial era, or actually its endings. They argued that these were times of comparatively good material conditions. The working times of millions of people “on their own” and in household or neighbouring communities. A occupation governed by morals as by law. Work giving not only decent earnings, but besides dignity and a sense of performance, and hence social-political awareness and local self-government. The author of “Blood in a Machine” says the same thing, only on the basis of analyses of socio-economic historians, memories and accounts from the era.

The life of order and weavers in the depths of this manufacture was rather good on the eve of the industrial revolution. They worked rather hard, but at the same time, which surprises today's reader, rather briefly – about 30 hours a week, and they earned decently. They lived rather long and in good health. Their professional activity passed out in the family-neighborhood group, giving the unit support. They were mostly independent of the whims of the mighty. Gradually, they developed better material conditions. full communities prospered. It took years to learn the profession, but it resulted in a serious social position, while doing solid products and having a sense of professional dignity.

Hard and without anesthesia

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The Merchant concludes: “Nineteenth - century craftsmen may not have been cresus, but they ran their own bets and did their work together with their household on their own terms. They enjoyed real freedom, could negociate rates, work agenda and the future. And that is what the people were fighting for in principle." specified a possible is completely absent in narratives worshiping alleged material and social advancement and convincing that only mass industrialization began to snatch people out of the burgeoning destitute, and even gave individuals freedom beyond the "trails of old customs."

Hardworking machinery

The second story says that technology, and above all the mill system, liberated people from hard, laborious work. In this respect, the dominant communicative has any gaps and contradictions. For everyone has heard about the terrible conditions of employment, about the labour of most days, about the large exploitation in 19th-century factories. At the same time, this communicative is accompanied by a gradual but constant improvement of the situation (it is sometimes added that, although all specified catch of workers had to fight, frequently risking their lives), and, above all, silently assumed that it was even worse before. The second subject is common to almost all ideological-political options – from free marketers and supporters of capitalism to Marxian left.

Meanwhile, Merchant shows that the industrial revolution, the dissemination of fresh technologies and production organization systems were not advancement at all, but a regression.

At least from the point of view of the industry. Let me remind you: the dominant in the then economy and employing all tenth individual in the country. The machines either deprived many people of their earnings, either importantly reduced it, or destabilized the employment marketplace and offered jobs (and income) only occasionally, from a bump, in a model, as we would say present – precarat.

Neither have the employment conditions improved. The story of hard work in crafts, manufactures, etc., which has been replaced after all with better mill realities, Merchant opposes the realistic picture. Weavers who lost their basics of existence could be virtually starving to work in a factory, performed under terrible conditions – hours of labor, in dangerous and primitive realities, full of dangers, including the hazard of death and serious mutilation. In addition, device handling did not require professional skills, so 19th-century “visionaries” of capital and manufacture were eager to employment literal children and minors. For example, in Arkwright’s factories, as many as 2 thirds of the full workforce were underage, including only six-year-olds, and in addition, many of them were recruited from orphanages and in a complex strategy of dependency meant de facto slave labour until they reached adulthood and were redeemed from mastership. This is the “progress” that Smith and Marx’s lovers worship together!

Poor and Rich

In the wake of all this, widespread poorness followed. Well, after the increase in production – the durability of device products has decreased drastically towards the standards of manufacturers – erstwhile they lose their jobs, their salaries decrease considerably, and their own in the production process replace children, etc.

The image that Merchant draws, among others, on the basis of the information from the mainstream press at the time, is simply a evidence of poverty, poverty, unemployment, fast decline in purchasing power, the collapse of full towns and surrounding areas, mass collapse.

Of course, where the losers are, there were winners. Here it is evident that in the fresh strategy of poorness any were accompanied by the fortunes of others, there is simply a designation of the fast concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and the expropriation of others. Especially since the early industrialisation was marked by the beginning of the absurd "private property right" – known in past as the accumulation of goods/terrestrials erstwhile common, municipal, etc.

The earlier realities, though far from ideal, can be described as “equality in dignity”. There was almost no fortune, fewer were poor, but quite a few people lived in the textile industries at rather good and akin levels.

→ AI and automation: safe employees' interests •Roman Rostek

Organisational and technological change and the combined change in the sphere of capital and the arrangement of socio-class forces had another aspects. People lost not only the basics of material existence, but besides – not least in the strategy of many years of professional learning and lifelong pursuit – the basics of dignity and social standing. They stopped having food and became symbolically almost nobody.

Against the cult of novelty

And all of this at a time erstwhile they didn't see change by definition positive. It is only our time that the blind cult of advancement has brought about, and it is only now that we have printed reasoning that can be summarized more or little like this: "Maybe change has any side effects, but change is by definition good, it leads in the right direction, even if there are dangerous corners along the way." For people of that era, specified perception of the planet was neither apparent nor logical.

According to Merchant, on the basis of the planet view at the time, specified a change that undermines the foundations of the lives of many individuals and full communities was immoral. The beliefs of pre-industrial people inactive echoed moral sense from the Queen's previously quoted statement, which drove distant inventor William Lee. If the change brings here and now the deterioration for many or for most, it is bad and you should just reject it.

Destruction action

For specified reasons, since the 1960 ’ s, there have been acts that any would call vandalism, breaking laws, or destroying private property. In contrast, members of endangered communities treated them in terms of social and moral opposition against what hit their standard of living, the basis of existence and social position, bringing profits to a fewer and having at most vague promises of universal improvement erstwhile there, in the distant future.

So the first plants based on mechanical looms are destroyed, machines are destroyed, and threats and demolition of property affect both factories and local blacksmiths and metallic handicrafts, who accept orders from mill owners to manufacture devices replacing human work.

Against what?

This is where the basic subject appears, as well as the powerfully falsified one. Were the people who later became termed Luddists technological backwards and obscurant dimmers reluctant to anything new? Brian Merchant shows that specified a mouth was gradually seasoned to them, as the movement grew stronger – it was done by government media, elite authors of parliamentary speeches, propaganda of the bakers of the fresh economical order, i.e. factory-liberal order, i.e. the then supporters of Adam Smith. It besides shows that the core of the case was not “technology” in the issue of darkrooms.

The textile manufacture has spent their full lives surrounded by equipment. As if all hard and physically working man, they had nothing against improvements, inventions, innovations, etc., which would make this work lighter or more efficient. The author of “Blood in a Machine” besides shows that in addition to commercial, top-down inventiveness intended to benefit a few, there was a “people” trend. The weavers themselves improved their devices and shared specified cognition with colleagues in the trade, not skimming knowledge, not trying to patent it and profit from it.

The core of the device destroyer movement was not the fear of technology innovation itself. They feared unemployment, failure of income, undermining their social and professional standing, pauperization of the region and local communities, concentration of fortunes in the hands of few.

And besides a monotonous, barracks work, which, as I mentioned, did not affect the fact that the work of machines liberates people from dense manual labor, but, on the contrary, puts them to work much heavier, longer (the standard change in the mill lasted 12-14 hours a day), in terrible conditions and poorly paid.

This dispute was little about technology and much more about ownership and its concentration, the standard of living, prospects for the future, professional dignity, workers' rights. People in the textile depths felt they were expropriated from almost everything they had.

New Times, Bad Times

The first fresh technological solutions afraid the production of the least valuable, marginal products, which were not of the essence and importance of the erstwhile manufacturing and craft system. The usage of fresh technologies was besides comparatively tiny in scale. The arrangement of forces was specified that the pioneers of the device and mill strategy were initially able to talk besides much expansion – sometimes it was adequate to ask, sometimes a threat, sometimes the demolition of machines already at thesmiths-manufacturers, and sometimes in tiny factories buildings, sometimes a wage agreement was agreed in the region, etc. But over the years not only the machines were speeding up, but besides the device – the full capitalist-industrial-free-trade system.

→ Rafał Górski: Technological unemployment. Facts and myths •Rafał Górski

New (anti)morality was besides rampant. The old rules of the game, beneficial to the full collective and masses of average people, were displaced by individual greed, desire for profit, momentum for continuous expansion and multiplication of fortunes. All this according to the fresh ideology of the time: liberalism, from Smith's speeches. This ideology became a creed of the whole, new, expansional capitalist-industrial elite.

The Finality

As the textile manufacture grew, handicraft workers were surviving worse. They tried to fight for their own in different ways. Not only and not primarily by destroying machines. They petitioned the parliament, appealed to local authorities, supported their demands and convinced the government in London and organized the beginnings of social assistance. They tried to deal with the producers. They were besides tried, although they were on the border of legality, activities constituting the primaries of trade unions and authoritative self-organization of workers. Parliamentaries were persuaded to amend laws – protection of workers, control of employment and working conditions, establishment of wages and minimum rates, etc.

All of this did not have much to do with a imagination in which madmen and backwards rushed to destruct machines.

They only threw themselves on a larger scale erstwhile another methods did nothing.

Business and state authorities have completely ignored the problems of the textile-based communities. Further hopes proved to be burning. Subsequent initiatives were shattered by the indifference of classes having and ruling spheres.

Any concessions from mill owners were either short-lived or proved fraudulent shortly after their announcement. The crisis was besides aggravated by situation factors – the British-Napoleon War and its costs, customs-import conflicts with the United States, etc.

At the end of the first decade of the 19th century, the people of the work reached the wall. Within a 4th of a century, the number of people needed to produce a given measurement of cloth decreased by 75%! This looked even worse among the women's order - after the spread of automated devices over a decade and a half, the work lost the vast majority of them. This was not compensated by the expanding production and unit wages fell significantly. Surroundings until late flourishing – became areas of poorness and decline. It was bad and it was only expected to get worse.

The imaginary and actual leader

W Nottingham and another cities, towns and villages of central and central-north-north-English demolition of machines have intensified. This spontaneous folk opposition movement took on its banners and called its own leader a figure likely never to exist. Legend has been that Edward – or in short Ned – Ludd was a terminator with an antipathic master of knitting and as a young boy was forced to work long and monotonous. erstwhile he did not give in to rigor, he was sentenced to flogging by a local court. In retaliation, at the first opportunity, he smashed his boss's knitting device with a hammer and fled to where Robin Hood's merry squad camped centuries ago – into Sherwood Forest.

This story, set in 1779, was utilized 3 decades later as a banner and symbol of rebellion against the fresh system. King Ludd or General Ludd were to be the mysterious commander of the rebels. He was spoken of, songs were sung, his orders were invoked, and the chief's name was seen under threatening letters and public calls that device destroyers sent and hanged.

In fact, not so much the leader, but the spiritus movens of the movement was George Mellor – a young man who devoted years to learning the textile trade and erstwhile he was about to start life as a handiworker, the fresh strategy removed the ground from under his feet.

The Rebellion of average People

But it's not personality that's crucial. Although Merchant tells the communicative of the Luddists' uprising just utilizing the fates of respective characters, it was a spontaneous movement with leaders, but without leaders. A common decision without a permanent general staff. Real force hidden behind spectral impressions and symbols. A decentralised and bottom-up structure, which at the same time was perfectly organized, dedicated and constantly expanding the ellipse of its impact.

This made the movement hard to fight. Attacks on ready-made machines, arson of factories, acquisition of equipment transports, but besides public demonstrations, gatherings of angry citizens – all of this happened in many places simultaneously, without central coordination, and their participants dispersed, disappeared without trace, blended into the community where they lived. They were driven by a common spirit—moral outrage and material concern for their existence. The attacks were counted in tens, demolition of machines – in hundreds, and shortly in thousands.

Ordinary, simple people created effective, ingenious and advanced structures of resistance. No chiefs, no imaginary general/king, no intellectuals, no large resources and no outside inspiration. This movement was effective.

He made quite a few customs punches, for a long time he was incapable to infiltrate or catch participants in specified an initiative (at a time erstwhile the participation in the “collusion” was illegal), and many of the factories suffered a failure and collapsed business, giving the handicrafts periodic breath from poorness and failure of orders.

From Merchant's narrative, a image emerges truly awesome and going against the current of many elite ideas.

Common resistance

What rapidly began to scare the authorities of the state and the elite of manufacture was the fact that the people not only enjoyed mass social sympathy, but in addition to their ranks began to join workers of another industries. Including those in which machines were not utilized at the time.

Quoted by the author “Blood in Machine”, historian Adrian Randall states that he united them not with fear of machines but with the Machine. Before the “production plant” – working in a great, inhuman, soulless, supervised and possessed by individual else a large antipathic structure. "The concept of the mill was an incredibly powerful message and raised widespread fear due to the fact that it symbolized a fresh centre of power, a centralised power of industry," Randall states.

The year 1811 is the time of the Luddist offensive. The attacks were increasingly frequent, and the demolition of machinery and factories was accompanied by traffic occurrences and riots. Weavers found allies among miners, masons, railroadmen, and even shopkeepers. The movement spread to fresh areas: Leicester, Manchester, Derby, Huddersfield and many more. Even the industrialists, especially the smaller ones, called on the government to make any lasting agreement with the workers to gain the peace needed to produce, even at the cost of reducing profits.

War on the People

But the elite chose differently. They chose to fight the people and the people. In March 1812 Parliament voted death punishment for destroying machinery.

In a akin period, draconian penalties were introduced for participation in the Luddist movement itself, including many years of imprisonment and deportation to Australia. Parliament even rejected the draft laws of minimally civilising working and pay conditions. The ranks of the Luddists began to introduce sharps, and advanced rewards were set for the denunciation of the participants of the movement.

They besides sent troops to the boiling regions. Lots of troops. It was another year of war with Napoleon, but little British soldiers then fought in battlefields than pacified the rebellious textile industries—the second were 35,000. Power, like many times in history, has sided with the possessing classes. economical liberalism and the invisible hand of the marketplace were supported by the large and visible fist of the state.

Blow Machine

The people understood that there is no turning back and there is no hope of remembering the elite. In April 1812, they launched an attack on the large plants of 1 of the most hated factories and promoters of the mill strategy – William Cartwright in West Riding in Yorkshire County. However, the attack commanded by Mellor was repulsed due to the fact that the plant was turned into a fortress and manned with an armed crew. Among the Luddists were injured and killed, their morale and public image were severely damaged.

The owner of the defending mill was almost killed in the bombing. specified luck was not another of the hated capitalists, acting in the vicinity William Horsfall, who was the leading promoter of the force-based trial with the Luddists and the expansion of the mill strategy regardless of the social costs of this proceeding. On 28 April 1812 he was killed by the Luddists during a carefully planned action re-in command of Mellor. Although it was a triumph of popular justice, it besides became the beginning of the end of the movement of the Luddists.

→ Okraska: Kingsnorth and Orwell point their eyes where others don't want, can't or are afraid to look •Rafał Górski, Remigius Okraska

For identifying the perpetrators, a generous reward was offered – and there was a traitor. The full process was conducted so that the defendants did not have a chance to defend themselves – and shortly lost their lives in public execution. Following this, more participants in the movement were hanged – at least 50 in total, and prison sentences and deportations to Australia included hundreds of people. All this after circumstantial, completely biased and show-like processes.

The rebellion was suppressed. For respective more years there have been cases of device destruction. There were street appearances or threats to the factory. However, humanity in its first form was defeated. What we know as chaotic 19th-century capitalism came to be: the triumph of capitalist-mercantile ideology, the humiliation and exploitation of millions of workers, the turning of many people into dreary factories.

Against the power and against the myths

Merchant perfectly describes the full story, which I powerfully summarize here. In the book there is much more, including the plasticized characters of the main characters, social and cultural realities, insight into the everyday activities of the Luddists, accompanying the revolt authoritative and legal improvement procedures, the link between the English industrial revolution and slavery in the US, the participation of women of the folk class in subsequent waves of rebellion, the influence of the pop culture (Byron, Shelley, and above all Mary Wollstonecraft and her communicative about Dr. Frankenstein) etc.

It reads at times like a good novel, another time like a good crime novel, and the full is, in my opinion, 1 of the better positions published in Poland about folk and rebellious history.

This is all the better due to the fact that it goes against the current of many myths not only mainstream-liberal. The problem with the pronunciation of the book will besides have the contemporary free marketplace of conservatives erstwhile they learn, for example, that entrepreneurs who professed Smith's ideas devastated conventional values, rules and customs, and "old good times", and were then seen as progressives. The problem will besides be for left-wing readers, for the well - described revolt of the Luddists goes against the current blind cult of advancement and modernity and false ideas about pre-industrial times.

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Past Times, Present Times

The “blood in the machine” does not end with the fall of the Luddists. Brian Merchant shows that even though the movement itself lost, it besides gave emergence to further fights. The people became the nucleus of trade unions and organized labour movement. In parallel and in silent agreement with them, authoritative legislative efforts to improve the workforce's numbers have brought late but beneficial formal effects. Although the movement itself has been distasteful for years and decades, the opposition of manufacturers to subsequent waves of antisocial technological expansion has returned one more time – for example in the form of "Swing riots" erstwhile agricultural workers successfully resisted the machinery of work on large farms.

Until we scope our time. On the 1 hand, that's great. Merchant shows that humanism is inspiring, essential and up-to-date, as well, and possibly especially now, in the era of, among others, Uber, Glovo, junk contracts, work through applications, Amazon magazines and the absurd electronic control of human professional activity.

On the another hand – this part is very brief, focused on the US, and in addition, I have the impression that it was written somewhat on the strength under the force of editors/issuers. Above all, the book reveals itself in fact the only serious ideological weakness of the book. Merchant wanted so much not only to lie, but besides to warm the image of the Luddists that he someway castrated this movement from the component that would be the most subversive today.

Trouble Factory

Let us remind that the author of the “Blood in a Machine” put quite a few effort in showing the revolt of weavers as opposition not so much against machines, but against Machines – a centralised strategy that symbolized a large factory. This understood the strategy, allowing the full movement to remove the odium of agrarian fools who fear the fresh device and break the more efficient loom with a sledgehammer.

It is besides a reliable strategy – the people did not leave behind large theoretical considerations, they did not request them, and even they would be illegal. Hence, we should not attribute to them visions that we have no thought if they have always been created. However, specified a position reveals various weaknesses, peculiarly marked with respect to current technological realities.

→ AI take your job? How about he rise his salary? study of the Polish economical Institute on AI on the Polish labour marketplace •Michał Ziółkowski

Merchant points to a problem in which the concentration of innovative devices, the scale of their assembly and centralization of production, the fresh model of production, power and power of fresh owners of capital – make a strategy far more powerful and sinister than simply the existence of any technology. At the same time, it rubs itself at times with naivety in the perception of this phenomenon.

Who dropped the blood on the workers?

The author of “Blood in a Machine” frequently tells us something almost directly, in a way, the most elaborate message that it is not technology, but the way it is used.

We all know that pseudoargument that you can cut bread with a knife and kill it. The author of “Blood in a Machine” does not fall into specified a literal cliché, but sounds similar: it is not fresh technologies that are wrong, but their use, their owners, the model of work organisation, etc. Had it not been for the greedy capitalists, had it not been for Smith's ideology, if only the mechanical looms and factories were owned or under their control – it would have been much better. This is simply a imagination known, for example, from many left-wing considerations, but besides from various "humanities" of progress.

These are not entirely false reflections, due to course it besides matters how we implement inventions, technologies, in which conditions capital, property, under whose control, etc. But specified a imagination at least partially bypasses the totality of advanced technologies and the fact that in the real world, not in dreamy visions, they find how they are utilized and undermine the anticipation of alternate scenarios.

Why does the device work?

The simplest weakness of specified conviction is to show in mention to modern times. Why did the revolt of the Luddists include full regions, thousands of people, affect the large forces of the state essential to choke it down, and today, although we live in much little restrictive realities, nothing like this happens?

Because the scale of today's technology is enormous. due to the fact that we are active in the full technological system, and almost nothing in our lives happens without its participation. Since technological improvement is presently afraid not only with work and manufacturing, but besides with control, the origins of possible rebellion are inactive under the scrutiny of the defenders of this order, with no chance of the territorial, social and cultural autonomy of the people. due to the fact that we are intellectual hostages to a imagination in which the fresh is mostly good or even better than before. due to the fact that technologies separate people from each other, and the erstwhile cursed mill becomes at this phase of the expansion of nostalgic technology a memory in the planet of monad – both physically separated from each another and mentally hyperidentified – and effective and constructive monad rebellion is not possible. due to the fact that modern fresh inventions make so immense fortunes of their owners that the power of the second exceeds the assets of millions of rebels, even if specified a critical mass could even form against the tyranny of technocapitalism.

Totality

I have the impression that Merchant has done a large lesson in the past of Luddism, rather a lesson in social past and in the past of social revolts. For this – and it is not a charge, but a constatination, due to the fact that nobody can know everything – rather naively and briefly the last lesson: ideological “determination” of technological progress. There is almost no trace of findings about the circumstantial totality of advanced technological systems, their centralization not only in the sphere of production, capital, property, organization of work, but besides culture, mentality, actually all aspect of life. specified remarks were formulated a long time ago by Friedrich Georg Jünger in the “Perfection of Technology”, Henryk Skolimowski in “Technice and the intent of Man”, Neil Postman in “Technopol” or – this name must go against the egglessness and fearlessness of many of the contemporary “critical commentators of reality” – Theodore Kaczynski in his manifesto “Industrial society and its future”.

All of them – and many another authors – emphasized, coming out frequently from completely distant premises and ideological positions, that the modern technological strategy is total. It's like it's being reproduced in increasingly advanced forms. That this is not a substance of "good" or "bad" application of a peculiar technology. That our autonomy (from economic-political to cultural-mental) towards the technological strategy is constantly decreasing.

And that if something were to halt this unfavorable, sinister trend, it was any kind of "technological ascetic" formula.

Combating the decision-making of human political communities that would argue the fundamental establishment of a technological system. Namely the belief that if anything at all, especially in the marketplace or in utilitarianism, can be done, implemented, disseminated, etc., then it should be done – and that it is beyond discussion.

Hammer in hand

Paradoxically, it is the caricature imagination of the attitude and mentality of the Luddists that seems to be the most crucial in terms of the advanced and totality of modern technological systems. Only that this would require standing in fact and rejecting multi-story structures saying that, in fact, the problem is never “technology in itself” but only “the way it is applied”.

Well, certain machines, technologies and solutions request to be broken up if large and weaker groups are threatened and terrified. Even with a hammer. Do not produce, do not implement, prohibit. And it does not should be a manifestation of backwardness and ignorance, but, on the contrary, of enlightenment, foresight, and insight in the work of saving human souls.

That's not something to talk about.

Such a constitution would be 1 of the most revolutionary thoughts of our time. but there's barely anyone who can afford it.

The Levites of our time, usually not having much in common with the planet of work, drank peanas in honor of technological advancement and only late shyly changed the front. Mainly due to the fact that the fresh solutions began to endanger the professional "creational", "artistic" and "intellectual", i.e. themselves. But there are inactive visions of "automated luxury communism", and technoscepticism is described as dark.

They disagree from liberal hyperality by completely infertile mantrading spells that "if only" change ownership relationships, taxation business and technology, or restrain the power of billionaire techbros, everything will be fine. But they say the same thing as that hyperelita about technology itself, its dominance, its saturation of life. What more than a century and a half ago has been noticed by 2 bearded classics in their celebrated manifesto: “Ideas ruling in society were in all age ideas of a class in society." As is happening present with the cult of technology – no substance who expresses it: billionaires or their useful idiots, besides those dressed in red-radical robes.

The same is actual of the right-wing today. They usually worship the market, globalism, large corporations (unless they put up a rainbow flag), and all regulations and restrictions are an assassination on freedom for them. The worship of Elon Musk as a “visionary” in these circles is no different from the worship of hypertechnology by liberals and left-wingers. They are referred to as the No. 50 of the Unabomber manifesto: “[Contemporary] Conservatives are fools: they complain about the demolition of conventional values, at the same time they enthusiastically support technological advancement and economical development. They clearly cannot accept that fast and drastic changes in technology and social organisation cannot be made without prompt changes in all another aspects of life, which inevitably leads to demolition of conventional values."

Perhaps the Luddists differed from the people of our time not only due to the fact that they took the hammer in their hand and crashed the machines. But besides that their thoughts, consciousness, and the value strategy were besides like a hammer.

Smashing blind cult of technological progress, the primacy of inventiveness over morality and utilitarianism so flat and primitive that ready to sacrifice the material and ethical prosperity of human masses in the name of ideological frosts and the benefits of the elite.

Brian Merchant, Blood in the machine. Humanities and the First Rebellion Against Technological Giants, Jagiellonian University Publishing House, Krakow 2025, translated by Grzegorz Ciecieląg.