I was listening to a recent episode of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast today, the one with Ben Tarnoff. He was leading with a historical point from his book on the Luddites that the famed workers weren’t anti-technology.
Contrary to the received knowledge that they’re anti-technology, which is often used as a proxy for anti-progress or a refutation of modernism, their protest was simply the destruction of property. Very much knowledgeable about tech, and future-thinking, destroying property, some of which happened to be the machines and materials of newly built partially-automated factories was a stand against devaluing human knowledge, effort, and ability. Knowing their livelihood was at stake and the only real value was to the owners of the factories, they fucked shit up.
What could be more familiar, after all, for rich men, than for people who have nothing to lose to destroy their property? Factory owners, surely friends with the people who own the printing presses and the paper mills that, via newspapers, are the only source of information to almost anyone who works. The people with the ability to control the public narrative, when there’s money at stake, do. Tarnoff comments on this, noting the parallels with the authoritarians today who would make anyone protesting police violence and demanding justice into mindless and violent thugs.
Trivializing the destruction of property and making it a moral failing never calls into account the source of what the law-and-order types are so pissed about: Fear. The folks whose fortunes and property are ill-got, and depend on structural inequality are scared that the jig is up, so they go on the offensive.
This is not news to most, I’m sure, but it just doesn’t fail to amaze me that power structures impose themselves in the same way over and over again. I just happen to have read Ellen Pao’s Reset and Chiamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists this week, but the core of both of these books is that people in a position of power, even seemingly friendly ones, will not hesitate to act out when their privilege is threatened.
What is surprising to me is that this story is just repeated again and again. We have a president who has innovated in the public discourse by using pure projection and constant chatter to avoid accountability. Why do we do the work of accounting for them while they move on to the next attack? By the time we’re exhausted, their children will just take their place.
We need to talk to each other, instead.