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Comment by ozlikethewizard | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure the luddites got all their ideas from TikTok aye?

At least were not at this point yet:

"Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the Luddites were suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites

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"The luddites were right" seems like an odd position to have on HN.

The vast majority of people who think the Luddites were wrong have no idea what they actually stood for

Why? The hacker ethos is all about understanding systems as they actually are; not as the people at the top want them to be. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty clear that the Luddites were right; the industrialization of weaving did destroy their profession, and, contrary to the opinions of the political leaders, this had a direct, negative impact on society for many decades. The curious-minded hacker should not ignore that reality, even if they think the circumstances are different this time.

"The tech bros were right" doesnt exactly have a great track record.

HN isn’t a monoculture. And the Luddites weren’t against tech. They were against the avoidable harm by thoughtless adoption of automated looms. Their argument was distorted and smeared much like is happening here.

Hackers used to be counter culture and want to push power down to individuals. If anything this techno fascist push to merge big tech with government while steamrolling humans is not hacker culture.

We should home brew data centers for open weight models and open labelled datasets.

Only if you don't know what the Luddites were concerned about. HN users tend to be better educated, and understand that the Luddites probably were right -- they weren't anti technology at all. They just wanted the benefits of the technology to be split between the factory owners and the workers. Instead, the factory owners wanted to keep all the benefits and fire all the workers.

Luddites wanted a rising tide to raise all ships.

IMO an understanding of modern technology and historical abuse of such makes neo-luddism the only logical end point. If you, like I, am thouroughly excited by the power of modern systems, I feel a cursory glance in the past compared to what is currently occuring should be enough to make one want to resist, whether it feels futile or not.

EDIT: Does anyone have good modern literature recommedations (blog / pamphlet / book) to support this view. Luddism is not the cause i am going to die for, but I do broadly support the views and ideas so would be interested to have a stronger base. Even the wikipedia prose feels dammning:

" The term "Luddite fallacy" is used by economists to refer to the fear that technological unemployment inevitably generates structural unemployment and is consequently macroeconomically injurious. If a technological innovation reduces necessary labour inputs in a given sector, then the industry-wide cost of production falls, which lowers the competitive price and increases the equilibrium supply point that, theoretically, will require an increase in aggregate labour inputs.[47] During the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the dominant view among economists has been that belief in long-term technological unemployment was indeed a fallacy. More recently, there has been increased support for the view that the benefits of automation are not equally distributed."

People have often resisted progress of all sorts, particularly if they feel it threatens their position or erodes their sense of superiority.

I was told NFTs were 'progress' merely a few years ago. Now all of my randomly generated portraits of monkeys are worthless!

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