Jim Baen's Universe

NonFiction articles

The Coming Popularity and Power of Luddism

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Once upon a time a man got laid off from his job. So did most of his neighbors. They had all worked for a factory in their town but the factory upgraded the old machines for more efficient machines which needed fewer operators. The man who was laid off was very angry. He ranted and raved and whipped his neighbors into an angry mob and together they trashed the factory.

This is a story we've all heard before. It's been on the news many times. But this one is different for several reasons: (a) it happened almost two centuries ago; (b) it is partly accurate and partly legend; (c) it produced a new word in the English language: Luddite; but most importantly (d) it's an early example of how improvements in technology disrupt people's lives.

The now legendary actions attributed to the textile worker Ned Ludd were condensed from real and imaginary events which occurred over a period of decades. The growth and condensation of his legend was motivated by the frustration and anger of thousands of similarly laid off workers.

Granted, Ned was neither the first nor last to lose his job because of improvements in technology, but because of his violent reaction he has come to personify all those who are against the march of technological progress. Today, two centuries later, his last name is often used as an insult against those who are seen as anti-technology or anti-science.

Insults are powerful tools for manipulating which attitudes are accepted by a group. This is why they are popular today, and have been throughout history. There has never been a time when humans did not use the power of insults to manipulate populations both small and large. If you can make the people reject whatever you wish, you can make them do whatever you wish. The power of insults is based on their ability to produce emotion. And since a human being is capable of logical thought at any particular moment in exact inverse proportion to their emotional state, the more emotional they are, the less capable they are of examining the insult for any actual merit it may or may not possess.

But back to Ned.

Ned's layoff exemplifies what has become known as a "disruptive technology." A disruptive technology is one that somehow makes worse many people's lives by changing an old way of doing things so drastically that it eliminates jobs and sometimes entire companies, and does this as a direct byproduct of making other peoples lives better.

History text books are filled with examples of disruptive technologies. At one time there were dozens of buggy whip manufacturers and hundreds of workers. Today there are none. Some dead industries are long forgotten such as the harvesting of baleen; some have become clichés like button hooks; and some have become part of our romanticized past. The mail delivery service known as the Pony Express has been glorified in movies, songs and books yet it was eliminated after less than two years of operation by the First Transcontinental Telegraph.

Not every company collapses when faced with technological disruption. Some manage to use these disruptions to grow.

In 1911 a company named CTR was formed by the merger of three existing companies, one of which dated back to the late eighteen hundreds. This new company manufactured a wide range of products including employee time-keeping systems, automatic meat slicers, weighing scales, and (long before the invention of the electronic computer) equipment for the rapid reading, sorting and punching of punch cards. That company has survived and grown through the decades by transforming itself in accordance with each new disruptive technology. (Though to be fair, they were almost destroyed by one in the 1990s when they were slow to identify the trend to smaller computers and set a new world record for corporate losses in a single year.) You've probably heard of them. In 1924 CTR changed its name to IBM.

As a means of storing information, punch cards not only predate electronic computers they are another example of disruptive technology. Tabulating the results of the 1880 census took eight years because it was done by hand. The same process was done for the 1890 census with mechanical punch card machines invented by Herman Hollerith and took only one year. This saved the US Census Bureau a huge amount of money because it put a huge number of people out of work.

Disruptions like these often provoke Luddite feelings in those who find themselves laid off. But since even a huge layoff involves only a small percentage of the population, and since those who are laid off generally find work again, this feelings of Luddism never develop into any kind of large scale movement.

And so Luddism has come to be thought of as a response: a knee-jerk reaction which has not been pondered at length and examined for its merits. Sometimes that's all it is. But for some people it is a philosophy.

To be sure, it’s never been a very popular philosophy. Most people love clever new things. They loved those newfangled air machines in the twenties and those noisy iron horses in the eighteen hundreds. Today they love their computers and cell phones and blue tooth and wi-fi. Sometimes there seems no end to this love of all that is new and clever. And the desire seems strong to forever pull and squeeze and twist materials to see what new thing we can get them to do.

But sometimes the new thing they do is scary. Alfred Nobel got a good fright, although not from the many wartime deaths caused by the dynamite he invented, as I have heard some people say. No, he owned a large munitions factory and made a lot of money selling weapons. His fright came when a French newspaper accidentally published his obituary in 1888 while he was still very much alive. The obituary opened with, The merchant of death is dead, and followed that with, Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday. Fearing he would be remembered through all future history as a bad person, the doctor changed his will to devote a large chunk of his fortune to promote peaceful uses of science. He called his promotion the Nobel Prize.

Nobel was of course no Luddite. And most people who worry about the dangers of science or technology are concerned with only a single invention or