Is it time for a Luddite Renaissance? | Hacker News Reader

Is it time for a Luddite Renaissance?

npr.org

60 pointsmooreds47 comments

In the true sense where you're militarizing and committing acts of sabotage on others' property (so-called "monkeywrenching")? And then, getting suppressed and eradicated/killed by the government?

No.

I prefer the "Calm Technology"[1] approach as espoused by Amber Case[2]. I think this is the saner path forward.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology

2. https://a.co/d/02kdlV3p

What are some of your favorite devices/software that follow this idea? I can list mine:

- Supernote by Ratta https://supernote.com

- Air Lab by Networked Artifacts https://networkedartifacts.com

- Xteink X4 (or equivalent) https://www.xteink.com

- Zeroink Writer - my kids use it to practice typing and write letters I can print out. Essentially digital typewriter. https://www.crowdsupply.com/zerowriter/zerowriter-ink

- Readwise - enables me to review highlighted passages and ideas from things I read

- Obsidian - I dump text files into it, it syncs it around for me to review or edit.

I love and use a few of those products and would agree, but I think a bigger component is our relationship to technology.

IMHO, calm technology is both a property of a product and a way of relating to a product. And I think it's quite personal. For example, digital note-taking tablets are anything but calm for me (but I recognize they may be for others!). OTOH, I practically live in Obsidian.

I ask myself:

- Can I have a calm relationship with this product?

- Does the product respect my agency? Can I decide when and how this technology enters my attention?

- Is it configurable? Can I turn off notifications, feeds, recommendations, badges, autoplay, algorithmic prompts, and so one, without crippling the useful parts?

- Is it intentional? Can I open it to get something done and then leave, rather than being pulled into continued use?

- Does it improve my well-being? Am I generally better off? Am I more informed, capable, connected, productive, or am I merely more stimulated (eg. dopamine)?

Some other perhaps non-sexy products: Amazon Echo Dot, my various air sensors, my more reliable home automation components that are already setup and just work, my Kindle and Xteink.

Yeah, calm home automation stuff is the best.

Water main valve robot, Flume water usage sensor, and Eve water sensors near supply lines is super reassuring when traveling or out of the house. So is having a electrical panel that I can check if the oven really was off.

My favorite is a notebook and pen. I tried all ways to write notes digitally and it only adds stress and friction for me. No batteries to charge, no files to backup, no bluetooth to sync.

Same. While recognizing this doesn’t necessarily hold true for others.

Ugh. Writing with pens has always been so uncomfortable for me. (Yes, I've tried good quality pens and different writing techniques.) Typing on a keyboard is so much faster and easier.

Same. I usually sketch diagrams and jot down quick pieces of info. Everything else goes into Obsidian normally.

Though its kind of funny, with my frequent use of agents, my communication skills and ability to articulate ideas has improved quite a bit, so now I use voice dictation a lot more and it's beginning to be faster than keyboard.

To add to this:

- Playdate (https://play.date) - fun little portable console with an rLCD screen

- Daylight (https://daylight.computer) rLCD paper-like tablet

- Envy (https://envynote.app) - Obsidian without the plugins, local only

- dumb phone (https://dumbphone.so) - make your iPhone dumber, on purpose

- xteink x4 pro (https://www.xteink.com/products/xteink-x4-pro-pocket-ereader) - great, small reader

hope people enjoy!

My kind of Renaissance. Sign me up!

What I find interesting is how the tone seems to have changed in swathes of tech industry. Until LLMs were a thing, techno-optimism and sola technologia fundamentalism seems to have been a more prominent fetish. When LLMs began having a practical and tangible effect, much of the same cohort seems to have pivoted toward aversion. If this is true—and this perception could be an artifact of selection bias driven by those with the loudest voices, though I strongly suspect it is not that entirely—then it cannot be denied how self-serving it is. Sure, we can automate away all sorts of jobs, confident that our own is the only constant and the one thing that would survive automation. But then, the cunning of reality cut down that hubris.

Of course, I do think technology ought to be adopted with prudence and wisdom. We must always remember the purpose of technology which is serving the objective human good, but to be able to do that requires more than narrow technical savvy. You need a wise and substantive grasp of the broader context within which technology is located.

I would argue the decline of techno-optimism started long before LLMs became widespread. If you think back to the late 2010s, the first bricks were starting to fall already (Cambridge analytica, Google’s 2018 … thing). Crypto, NFTs, Web3, etc were held with general negative regard in the beginning of the 2020s, and the tech CEOs like Musk/Zuckerberg/Bezos had all accumulated negative image by then.

The term luddite is like the term pharisee. It's a pejorative removed from it's historical context. Actual Luddites and Pharisees would have not agreed that they were against technology or legalistic hypocrites, even though their critics tried to paint them with that brush.

> It's a pejorative removed from it's historical context.

It utterly depends on historical context. Intelligent people understand antonomasia and eponymy.

> Actual Luddites and Pharisees would have not agreed that they were against technology or legalistic hypocrites

That's neither here nor there.

Unfortunately I imagine your modern AI data centre has better security than a 19th century textile mill.

Unfortunately? Are we really at the point of supporting terrorism of the “correct” political persuasion?

Are we at the point where we allow companies to just hack other companies and do nothing about it?

Yes, money is God and companies are his saints. Keep your head down and surrender everything to them

We're way past it, sadly. Luigi was insanely popular for the cold blooded murder of a CEO. Hundreds of thousands of people celebrated Charlie Kirk's murder within minutes of it happening, let alone the discourse you see now, a year later. Plenty of people, even on this forum, openly advocate for "the funniest thing" happening to Elon.

Terrorism and murder are in vogue.

There's a lot of folks out there with champagne bottles and party poppers earmarked for when it happens.

No mention of a certain president and his cultists coup-ing the government to steal an election? Definitely sounded like terrorism at the time, with clear call to eliminating a vice president and other representatives

Sounds like a great reason to oppose violent rhetoric and action before it becomes normalized.

It has been normalized over the past 10y by the sitting president

The president that has faced three distinct assassination attempts in the past two years?

Yes. If you're exposed to one entrenched end of the spectrum or another, you might notice the rhetoric and threats have picked up quite a bit on both sides. Language and actions are becoming more divisive and more violent.

I increasingly hear insane not-in-passing phrases like "Someone should just [commit some violent act to further the speaker's political beliefs]." Lately, it's about sabotaging data centers and killing CEOs.

And it's not just talk, this stuff starts by motivating the loonier members of a group to commit acts like mass shootings, the Charlie Kirk assassination, violence against LGBTQ people and other targeted groups, and so on.

I feel like some weird outsider, sitting in center-left.

We have an 8 hour workday, and women's suffrage, thanks to "terrorism", as you call it.

What social good do you intend to secure by attacking data centers?

How exactly do you propose going about that?

Uh, no, those things did not arise out of terrorism.

Read your history mate.

https://eghammuseum.org/terrorists-the-suffragette-arson-and...

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

Yes

So it's fine for corporations to buy politicians, force data centers on communities that do not want them, impoverish those communities with higher energy and water prices, and poison their water supply with discharge? But when those communities fight back it's terrorism?

Violence works, and it's increasingly coming to be understood that voting no longer does...

For rethinking the Luddite movement I recommend the book Blood in the Machine (I think I learned about it here on HN)

This word has lost any meaning, if anything the current anti-tech wave is far closer to Amish views (subjective vetoing of new tech to avoid centralization and preserve the way of life) than to historical Luddism.

I remember reading about how the Amish operate. We treat them as a quaint, anti-progress cult of sorts, but they have a process where they consider new technologies and determine if they are worth adopting or not. Obviously the answer is "no" most of the time, but the pattern of considering and embracing new technologies through a communal, forward-thinking process seems like a reasonable way to counter the velocity and unintended consequences of rapid progress.

Of course, for this to make any sense it would need to be a global process, which seems entirely unfeasible until we've already badly burnt our hand on the stove. That seems to be precisely where we are in the process.

The best path forward may be cataclysmic societal collapse that leaves just enough knowledge to rebuild carefully with newfound wisdom. But wisdom is a rare and unlikely commodity. More probable is a dark age where technology is akin to witchcraft.

We've had our chances to stop burning coal and save the Earth, and we don't seem to be capable of that right now as a species. Maybe the better path is if we acknowledge our lack and "vibe submit" to our AI overlords, since we can't overcome ourselves in any direct way.

Actual luddite: prevent capitalists from using technology to destroy society.

Meme luddite: hate technology

Amish luddite. Technology is vetted by a central committee before the public is allowed to use it.

Cyberpunk Luddite - carries an illegal military-grade EMP grenade strictly for when the smart fridge tries to make small talk.

I was in Amish country last week, watching in bemusement as elderly women zoomed down the street in e-bikes. I thought to myself that it was understandable given that they lived on uneven terrain. But then, I wondered, why did they choose such a place to live if they were not willing to use technology, and why did e-bikes get a pass while cars didn't?

it's literally whatever is approved by the central committee. which is actually pretty smart when you think about it

To use a car, you need to sign a contract with an insurance company. Amish don't like contracts. That's why they couldn't have cellphones until the prepaid ones came out. That's why they are mostly not on the electric grid, but can have their own generators or solar panels.

> Amish don't like contracts.

So they may be the last of us not to have to deal with the obnoxious plague of forced binding arbitration agreements...

normie: Loves to walk on technologically advanced crutches when they have perfectly working legs...

An obligatory Deus Ex cinematic trailer: https://youtu.be/4-MU5MgRV6U

Your “actual Luddite” characterisation is just as much a meme.

Both are stupid misrepresentations of the movement.

Actual Luddite: your employees who are going through layoffs while your profits are rising.

Luddite according to the boss: somebody who is trying to prevent me from doing what I want to do when I want to do it just because there's 100 of them and one of me.

The boss owns the printing press.

They didn't prevent a damn thing though and neither will this new crop of people.

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