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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 narrow group of inventions. For example, In 1829 the Governor of New York, Martin Van Buren (who later became the eighth president) wrote a letter to Andrew Jackson: "Dear Mr. President: The canal system of this country is being threatened by a new form of transportation known as 'railroads' ... As you may well know, Mr. President, 'railroad' carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by 'engines' which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed."

One can argue that the difference between Martin Van Buren’s reaction and that of Alfred Nobel is not just in how they responded but in the ratio of danger they perceived to exist compared to the danger that existed in actually, but that only clouds the important point. The point is that both were based on negative emotions: fear, worry, annoyance, aggravation, etc.

Negative emotions are powerful motivators. When present in a population, they change how that population behaves; and it is upon the strength of these negative emotions within the general public that the strength of Luddism has always risen and fallen.

If today we were living in traditional times, all that you have read so far in this article could be treated as nothing more than interesting historical footnotes with no actual importance. But we are not.

During the coming years and decades our technology will continue to advance, but it will not do so at any pace we have seen in the past, nor at the pace we are seeing now. Instead it will accelerate. Advances will come faster and faster, year after year. If plotted on a graph, this exponential process would form a curved line of ever increasing steepness.

As these advanced technologies come into widespread use they will disrupt old technologies, and the disruptions will come at an ever increasing rate. The exponentially increasing rate of disruptions will produce exponentially increasing levels of fear and annoyance in the general public. Because of this, the popularity of Luddism will also increase exponentially. And this exponential increase in Luddism will be tied to, and operate in lockstep with, the rate of technological disruption. For the next few years this growth curve will be gentle, almost imperceptible. Ten years from now it will no longer be gentle, and will have become impossible to ignore.

Additional fuel for the Luddite growth curve will be provided by those who are not Luddites themselves, but study and analyze and then write and speak about existential risks: sometimes called X-Risks for short. An existential risk is one that endangers all or most of humanity. (Paradoxically, not only am I one of these writers, but this very article may contribute to the problem it anticipates.)

Descriptions of X-Risks during the next few decades will multiply exponentially. During the first few years these descriptions will appear mostly in obscure special-interest publications of a technical or scientific nature, with an occasional quote in the more mainstream media which will be made sensationalist by being plucked out of context. Within five or at most ten years the descriptions will be everywhere and multiplying. They will also become increasingly wild, weird, esoteric and speculative. Which is not the same as saying they will be wrong. Their accuracy can not be predicted at this point. This will, however, emphasize how wild, weird and esoteric our technology is becoming.

The year 2020 is only twelve years away. By 2020 there are likely to be many outspoken Luddite activists. Luddism, as a philosophy and political position, is likely to have grown strong in popularity. If so, many bestselling books, speaking careers and fortunes will be built upon this movement, and will in return cause the movement to grow even stronger.

If this happens, the two main political parties in The United States will undergo a dramatic transformation. As more and more voters become drawn to the two opposing positions of Luddite on the one side and pro-technology on the other, each party will have to take a position to attract one or the other. Which party goes Luddite is difficult to guess since both have traditionally been pro-science and pro-technology. If neither party takes up the popular cry for Luddism a third party will. And as the Luddite vote grows stronger, so too will this third party.

Where this will all lead is anybody’s guess. My money is on technology, but I know that I am biased in this because of my love for science.

History tells us that given enough patience, science seems to win in the end. But sometimes the Luddites win for a very long time. Sometimes a victory for science can take three hundred and fifty nine years. That’s how long it took the Vatican to cancel Galileo’s punishment after his trial for heresy and to finally admit that the earth really does travel around the sun.

Theodore Kaczynski’s essay “Industrial Society and Its Future” (more commonly known as the Unabomber Manifesto) is an intellectual explanation of why the former professor of mathematics and currently imprisoned-for-life murderer believes we need a global Luddite revolution. That 35,000 word treaties is proof enough that the desire to overturn our technological civilization and return to a simpler world is not limited to simpletons. I know; I’ve read it.

But we are long past the days in which we can give up technology. Six billion people is too many mouths to feed without the use of modern scientific methods of farming. To go back to the old ways would doom billions, not millions, to starvation.

The fight between those against and those in favor of technology is going to get ugly. And after that it’s going to get even uglier. And those who write and speak about the legitimate dangers of technology will have to pick their words with ever increasing care, both to safeguard their reputations and to prevent extremists on either side from misusing their words as a tool for their own agenda.

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Learn More

You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here or here.

Or learn more about his podcast The Future And You here, or here or even here.

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