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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Hakim Bey/Satanic Mills
  • Defense of the Luddites, citing that Kirkpatrick Sale book, Rebels Against the Future. They weren't anti-technology, just anti- having their livelihood destroyed and turned from a craft into factory enslavement.
from Below the API
  • I may be marinated in the values of MIT and Silicon Valley, but I still am 100% on the side of the real Luddites, who were not opposed to technology as such, but the use of technology to rob them of their livelihood and their agency. If I was an Amazon warehouse worker or Uber driver, I would be in rebellion against my masters and their machines and systems. I don't think I'd make a fine distinction between the digital technology, which is supposedly value-neutral, and the oppresive applications to which it is put.
from Rebels Against the Future
  • A sympathetic view of the Luddites as an essentially pre-Marxist form of rebellion, of a class of laborers (textile workers) against an encroaching industrial system which directly threatened their livelihoods. They were not against technology per se but only against the particular form of it that was encroaching on their way of life, not in some symbolic sense but in a very real economic sense.

Luddism

19 Mar 2023 - 22 May 2025
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    • There's an effort to rehabilitate the idea of Luddism, which is usually thought of a s dumb, reactionary movement against technological improvement. The real Luddites were not anti-technology in general, they were weavers opposed to the use of a specific technology that threatened their livelihoods. Their enemy was not technology as such, it was the deployment of technology by capital in a way that devalued the power of labor.
    • A modern Luddism might be expected to turn its targets towards AI, or the heavily monitored working conditions of people Below the API. Or of course to social media, whose harmful effects on the social fabric are now universally recognized.