Rerooting the History of Future
Exploring the Roots of S.L.O.W. Tech™
I’ve been called a Luddite on more than one occasion, merely because I question the need for technology that seems to speed the journey without any thought of where it’s going or the cost of getting there.
I’m not just speaking of the economic cost. It’s the cost to our society as a whole and our personal humanity in particular. What is the price of always rising higher without tending the roots?
Who are the Luddites?
The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and what being a modern one actually means.
Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it.
The Luddite disturbances started in circumstances at least superficially similar to our own. British working families at the start of the 19th century were enduring economic upheaval and widespread unemployment. A seemingly endless war against Napoleon’s France had brought “the hard pinch of poverty,” wrote Yorkshire historian Frank Peel, to homes “where it had hitherto been a stranger.” Food was scarce and rapidly becoming more costly. Then, on March 11, 1811, in Nottingham, a textile manufacturing center, British troops broke up a crowd of protesters demanding more work and better wages.
That night, angry workers smashed textile machinery in a nearby village. Similar attacks occurred nightly at first, then sporadically, and then in waves, eventually spreading across a 70-mile swath of northern England from Loughborough in the south to Wakefield in the north. Fearing a national movement, the government soon positioned thousands of soldiers to defend factories. Parliament passed a measure to make machine-breaking a capital offense.
But the Luddites were neither as organized nor as dangerous as authorities believed. They set some factories on fire, but mainly they confined themselves to breaking machines. In truth, they inflicted less violence than they encountered.
One technology the Luddites commonly attacked was the stocking frame, a knitting machine first developed more than 200 years earlier by an Englishman named William Lee. Right from the start, concern that it would displace traditional hand-knitters had led Queen Elizabeth I to deny Lee a patent. Lee’s invention, with gradual improvements, helped the textile industry grow — and created many new jobs. But labor disputes caused sporadic outbreaks of violent resistance. Episodes of machine-breaking occurred in Britain from the 1760s onward, and in France during the 1789 revolution.
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.” ~ What the Luddites Really Fought Against, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011
And the pattern continues today…
The reason that there are so many similarities between today and the time of the Luddites is that little has fundamentally changed about our attitudes toward entrepreneurs and innovation, how our economies are organized, or the means through which technologies are introduced into our lives and societies. A constant tension exists between employers with access to productive technologies, and the workers at their whims. Clearly such tension does not always lead to violent insurrection. But then there are people like George Mellor.
So, how do uprisings against Big Tech and the machine owners begin?
When entrepreneurs and executives deploy new technologies intended to replace skilled work, confound or elude regulations, or degrade traditional jobs en masse — especially in difficult economic circumstances. It’s worse if those workers have no recourse.
When technology has eliminated or degraded a worker’s job, status, or identity; when it is hard or impossible to organize to negotiate outcomes; and when support is inaccessible — well, we might expect just about anyone to feel cornered, angry, and more apt to turn to desperate measures. Obvious? Perhaps! But you wouldn’t know it from how U.S. policymakers have approached gig work, automation, and workplace surveillance in the twenty‐first century. As in the Luddites’ day, policymakers happen to be actively benefiting from the largesse of today’s technological elite — the deep‐pocketed Silicon Valley campaign donors and “job creators.” Too many leaders have turned a blind eye to the outcome; they, too, it seems, would sooner send in the National Guard than intervene in a meaningful way to stanch the bleeding.
If ordinary humans and working people are not involved in determining how these technologies reshape our lives, and especially if those outcomes wind up degrading their livelihoods, time and again the anger will be acute and far‐reaching. And if workers cannot even legally organize with one another to cushion the blow, there is liable to be nowhere to turn at all, no option but to dismantle that technology. The same rage fueled (and may have helped inspire) a fictional contemporary of the Luddites too. When Mary Shelley dreamed up Dr. Frankenstein’s monster in 1816, she imagined him not as a simp, the way he would be portrayed in the movies, but as a thoughtful and articulate creature who ends up chafing, violently, against his impoverished, man-made existence.
The Luddite rebellion came at a time when the working class was beset by a confluence of crises that today seem all too familiar: economic depression and stagnant trade, rising inflation and high prices, excessive taxes for an unpopular war, and a government that strands unions, rules out serious relief for the poor, and declines to uphold industry regulations. And amid it all, entrepreneurs and industrialists pushing for new, dubiously legal, highly automated and labor‐saving modes of production. ~ A New Tech Rebellion is Taking Place: We Can Learn A Lot from the Luddites, Brian Merchant, Fast Company September 2023
…just moving faster, and breaking more things.
“Blood in the Machine” suggests that although the forces of mechanization can feel beyond our control, the way society responds to such changes is not. Regulation of the textile industry could have protected the Luddite workers before they resorted to destruction. One proposal suggested a tax on every yard of cloth made by machine. After a pro-worker bill failed to pass in the House of Lords, Gravener Henson, a frame knitter turned advocate and historian, led an association of workers that demanded higher wages and labor protections, though such “combination” was outlawed at the time in the U.K. Eventually, Luddism faded into a more general political movement. By the late nineteenth century, the majority of Nottingham’s lace production had been mechanized.
In the era of A.I., we have another opportunity to decide whether automation will create advantages for all, or whether its benefits will flow only to the business owners and investors looking to reduce their payrolls. One 1812 letter from the Luddites described their mission as fighting against “all Machinery hurtful to Commonality.” That remains a strong standard by which to judge technological gains. ~ Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I., The New Yorker, September 2023
Some of those things go far beyond the material…
In the early days of tech, because the public faces of so many startups were young and idealistic, there was this sense that people would actually matter to this industry. We are constantly reminded how wrong we were, from the promise of social media to the promise to rid the world of tobacco. When corporate leaders come to a fork in the road in the Valley of Silicon, they take the path that makes the most money.
Just like everywhere else.
It’s a variation of the old parlor trick President Reagan used to convince the public that capital is more important to the economy than labor is. Before greed was deemed good in the 1980s, the bottom 90% of Americans divided approximately 65% of the nation’s income. Today that 90% is fighting over much less — around half of the nation’s income.
The promise of tech was supposed to spark a market correction. Instead, it’s escalating the problem. It seems just as plausible these days that Congress would hold a hearing over financial corruption in the tech sector as in any legacy industry. No matter how aspirational the beginning, when a startup succeeds, it eventually reaches a crossroads and inevitably errs on the side of profits.
Profits, not people.
Tech was supposed to change the world, and in countless ways it has. But it has consistently passed up opportunities to make the world a better place. That just doesn’t pay as well as exploitation. ~ How did Silicon Valley fall from idealism to ruthless exploitation?
But the human potential is not one of those broken things.
All we need is a new container.
As We Root, So We Rise
Why seek a new container?
A lesson from the world of plants:
It gives a growing plant’s roots more room. As your plant gets older and bigger its roots expand so it can suck up enough water and nutrients to feed itself. If its pot is too small, the roots can’t absorb what they need and your plant will suffer.
Repotting refreshes the nutrients in the soil. In the wild, plants will take nutrients from the ground. Indoor plants live in potting compost that is enriched with nutrients, but these only last so long. Fresh soil equals happier plants. ~ Why is Repotting Plants Necessary?
Without our roots, who are we?
In 1973, Russian author Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago:
“The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology — that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes…. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations… Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.”
And, here we are, disconnected from our roots, speeding to an unkown end, fueled by the desires of the few at the cost of the many.
SLOW Tech™: Offering an Alternative Perspective
The SLOW Tech™ concept came to me in May 2010 during the Community Renaissance Market prototype experience in South Austin and it was formalized in 2011. I detailed the elements in 2013, pitched it to a couple of local folks on May 11 2016 and I wrote about it in 2019:
“It takes the best parts of a local business and adds specific technology to no- or low-tech businesses to better position them for sustainable success. The mission of S.L.O.W. Tech™ is to support an expanded human experience, not distract us from it.” ~ It’s Time for the SLOW Tech™ Incubator
In May 2023, I filed for the wordmark for ‘Move Slow and Fix Things’ to create hyperlocal marketplaces to repair the local economies that have been decimated by the high tech motto of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’
“Under the predatory capital model, society has moved from the Hippocratic Oath of ‘First Do No Harm’ to the Zuckerberg ‘Hypocritical Oath’ of “move fast and break things” with no regard for who and what is left behind.” ~ 2021: Moving Slow and Fixing Things
On May 8 2024, I received the official workmark from the USPTO: Move SLOW and Fix Things™
On May 11 2024, I congratulated two friends on their relationship, and they said we should work on something meaningful together. The gentleman has the same health diagnosis as Keith (Spinal Muscular Atrophy) and the woman has a passion for human-centered economic solutions.
So, 14 years after the first inkling of the concept, and 8 years to the day of the first serious pitch, it may finally be the right time for the SLOW Tech™ economic engine.
Final Thought
By understanding our histories and respectfully listening to the those of others, we, as a global people, can not only withstand any disruption, but also grow stronger — together — into a shared future. ~ Rerooting Community & Rerouting the Future
