Luddite Links

Kirkpatrick Sale is a leader of the Neo-Luddites. Interview by Kevin Kelly, WIRED.

Kelly: Other than arson and a lot of vandalism, what did the Luddites accomplish in the long run?

Sale: The Luddites raised what was called at the time "the machinery question," and they raised it in such a forceful way that it could not ever go away: Whether machinery was simply to be for greater production by the industrialists, regardless of its consequences, or whether the people who were affected by these machines had some say in the matter of how they were to be used. The Luddites also established themselves as the symbol of those who resist the new technologies and demand a voice in how they are to be used.

Kelly: Were they able in any way to alter the course of the Industrial Revolution?

Sale: To some extent they were able to delay the adoption of machines in some of the textile branches. Although there were some regional effects of the Luddites, in general they failed to make any real impact on the rush of technology and industrialism.

Kelly: Do you consider yourself a modern-day Luddite?
Sale: I do, in the sense that we modern-day Luddites are not, or at least not yet, taking up the sledgehammer and the torch and gun to resist the new machinery, but rather taking up the book and the lecture and organising people to raise these issues. Most of the people who would today call themselves Luddites confine their resistance, so far at any rate, to a kind of intellectual and political resistance.

Kelly: I find it instructive that most Neo-Luddite sentiment is arising not from people who are out of jobs because of computers, but from over-educated academic or author types. I don't detect much dissatisfaction among the unemployed regarding computers, per se.

Sale: You're quite right that in these last 20 or 25 years, the immense effects of automation on the labor force have not been met by resistance other than the most trivial kind. What happened was that unions caved in and accepted strategies of the corporations to give workers lifetime pay in return for having their jobs automated. However, that luxury of lifetime pay is now no longer being offered, so we have an estimated 6 million people who have lost their jobs to automation, or to overseas shops, since 1988. These 6 million people have not ventured forth with sledgehammers, but some of them are turning to crime, for sure, and some of them are part of that dissatisfied, white male constituency that voted for the Republicans last fall. So, instead of going to the sledgehammer, they've gone to the ballot box, though I don't think that's going to achieve what they think it will.

Kelly: But it's also leading them to study computers and to learn how to get a job with computers. You mentioned 6 million jobs lost to computers, but the number of jobs created by computers and technology is really more sizable. Where, for instance, do you think the hundreds of millions of jobs in America in the last 100 years have come from? They certainly didn't come from farming or handicrafts. These jobs were made by industry.

Sale: There is no question that jobs are created, so long as an economy can keep growing. But it's not the technology, or it's only indirectly and accidentally the technology, that creates them. It's warfare, empire, government expansion, resources exploitation, ecological exhaustion, consumption, and the manufacture of needs. Today, in the second Industrial Revolution, it's just as it was back in the first. The technology itself simply does put people out of jobs. And anyway, the idea that the whole end of life is jobs and job creation is just pathological. The question is, What do those jobs achieve and at what expense? A job in itself is not a virtue.

If you would like to be mailed a full copy of this interview please write to Sean Hawkey at the WACC address.

Or, visit:(!):
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/saleskelly_pr.html

Social Criticism Review, a great collection of provocative articles, links to many articles on luddism:
http://www.socialcritic.org/

Digital Divide issues are dealt with effectively at the Benton Foundation’s
http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org

and by oneworld’s:
http://www.oneworld.net/campaigns/digitaldivide/