The Luddite movement emerged during the harsh economic climate of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw a rise in difficult working conditions in the new textile factories. If you look at a successful movement, it takes a lot of different ingredients and people who are well positioned within certain kinds of firms, who have a lot of information about how processes run, how the companies are organized. When one encounters Luddism in the world today it still tends to be as either a term of self-deprecation used to describe why someone has an old smartphone, or as an insult that is hurled at anyone who dares question “the good news” presented by the high priests of technology.

For years 'the Luddites' roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and maneuvers that they would later deploy on unassuming machines. 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. Both work and technology have undergone seismic shifts since then, the magnitude of which we have not seen for generations.

With Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job, Gavin Mueller challenges those prevailing attitudes and ideas about Luddism, instead articulating a perspective on Luddism that finds in it a vital analysis with which to respond to techno-capitalism. Reading its pages will leave you feeling vindicated in your sneaking suspicion that more technology doesn’t actually help. Once you have all the steps broken out, think about how much time you’ll need to get each step done. One letter sent to the Home Office in 1812, signed “Ned Lud’s Office, Sherwood Forest,” stated that “all frames of whatsoever discription the worckmen of which Are not paid in the current Coin of the realm will Invarioably be distroy’d,” while vowing to protect the frames of compliant owners. There’s a lot of talk about whether we’ll develop the technologies that will solve our problems by capturing carbon or blocking the sun’s rays.

In terms of that politics, I wanted to ask you how the book is connected to Viewpoint Magazine and a project around working class experience? Odd tics, such as an identification with Unabomber Ted Kaczynski 8 and the subsequent flirtations of leading figure (and author of an evocative history of the Luddites) Kirkpatrick Sale with secession movements, 9 give off a distinct odor of crankishness. Yet eventually the spies and crackdowns had their effect, and in January 1813 authorities identified, arrested, and executed several suspected Luddite higher-ups. Without the successes of free and open source software, you might have had a situation where, rather than everyone learning a few universal programming languages that apply to lots of different kinds of software, it might have all been propriety.JSo cyberpunk is very much in my mind at the moment with the latest scandals of overwork coming out. Many Luddite groups were highly organized and pursued machine-breaking as one of several tools for achieving specific political ends. P. Thompson has sought to rescue the Luddites from “the enormous condescension of posterity” through an act of radical sympathy, he still acknowledged that militant reactions against industrialism “may have been foolhardy. What's more important is that it's time to stop trying to fix the discomfort by trying to exert control over what cannot be controlled.

Struggles over technology can be a means for people to forge practices of social solidarity and militancy, ingredients necessary for effective class struggle. I think many of them already are, and recognizing that and recognizing their power, and their connection to larger struggles, is going to be vital to the future. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. That allows me to be present as I fill my day with to-do lists, knowing at some very deep level that has nothing "to-do" with anything. Especially in a world so focused on youth and beauty, the process of watching the outer skin change to reflect our age can be disconcerting even as we let go of so many of the anchors and angst of our youth and middle years.

In North West England, textile workers lacked these long-standing trade institutions and their letters composed an attempt to achieve recognition as a united body of tradespeople. JThere has been a renewed interest in that kind of strain of Marxism, that starts from looking at workers experience. Luddites objected primarily to the rising popularity of automated textile equipment, threatening the jobs and livelihoods of skilled workers as this technology allowed them to be replaced by cheaper and less skilled workers. Where you see those kinds of struggles like tech won’t build it, or some of the organizing with Tech Workers Coalition, fitting into the argument? That kind of activity and those conversations are essential, and I’m eager to engage in them with others.

And I love this example that you’ve shared with me, because I think there’s a truism that opposing “progress” never works. Instead, the shape of history, as Marx argued, is wrought by the struggles of those who participated in it. What I particularly liked about reading the book is those moments where people do find an alternative, find a way to resist, find different ways to do things with technology. There were a lot of kind of mods and add-ons that you could use in the apps so that you could, for instance, get alternative routes and things like that. Mueller's work is a counter-history of automation, attending to all those who have fought back at every turn, acting out of a desire to maintain as much collective autonomy over what it means to work as possible.Our quaint notions of technological progress are no match for a machine that programmes the relentless imperatives of capital at our expense. The problem with spectral Luddism is that one can feel its presence without necessarily understanding what it means.