Hello! Are you a technologist/software person that lives in the #Seattle area? Are you also an AI skeptic ? Would you like to give a talk on the subject at a local meetup? If so I can get you in front of an audience at the meetup I help run, Puget Sound Programming Python, aka PuPPy. Please reach out. Boosts welcome.
#neoluddite
this one resonated so much! ive quite proudly calling myself a #NeoLuddite and this nay be one of the few cases of 'good ol days' #privacy #luddism #criticaltech
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/im-tired-of-pretending-tech-is-making-the-world-better/
Now in College, #LudditeTeens Still Don’t Want Your Likes
Three years after starting a club meant to fight #SocialMedia’s grip on young people, many original members are holding firm and gaining new converts.
By Alex Vadukul
Jan. 30, 2025
"Biruk Watling, a college sophomore wearing a baggy coat and purple fingerless gloves, walked the chilly campus of Temple University in #Philadelphia on a recent afternoon to recruit new members to her club.
She taped a flier to a pole: '#JoinTheLudditeClub For #MeaningfulConnections.' Down the block, she posted another one: 'Do You Desire a Healthier Relationship With Technology, Especially Social Media? The Luddite Club Welcomes You and Your Ideas.'
"When a student approached, Ms. Watling dove into her pitch.
"'Our club promotes #ConsciousConsumption of #technology,' she said. 'We’re for #HumanConnection. I’m one of the first members of the original Luddite Club in #Brooklyn. Now I’m trying to start it in #Philly.
"She pulled out a #FlipPhone, mystifying her recruit.
"'We use these,' she said. 'This has been the most freeing experience of my life.'
If Ms. Watling had a missionary’s zeal, it was because she wasn’t just promoting a student club, but an approach to modern life that profoundly changed her two years ago, when she helped form the Luddite Club as a high school student in New York.
"But that was then, back when things were simpler, before she had embarked on the more independent life of a college student and found herself having to navigate QR codes, two-factor-identification logins, dating apps and other digital staples of campus life.
"The #LudditeClub was the subject of an article I wrote in 2022 — a story that, ironically, went viral. It told of how a group of teenage tech skeptics from Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn and a few other schools in the city gathered on weekends in Prospect Park to enjoy some time together away from the machine.
"They #sketched and #painted side by side. They read quietly, favoring works by #Dostoyevsky, #Kerouac and #Vonnegut. They sat on logs and groused about how #TikTok was dumbing down their generation. Their flip phones were decorated with stickers and nail polish.
"Readers inspired by their message responded in hundreds of emails and comments. Reporters from Germany, Brazil, Japan and elsewhere flooded my inbox, asking me how to reach these students who were so hard to track down online. Snarky Reddit threads and think pieces sprouted. #RalphNader endorsed the club in an opinion essay, writing: 'This is a rebellion that needs support and diffusion.'"
Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/style/luddite-teens-reunion.html
Archived version:
https://archive.ph/
#SolarPunkSunday #Nature #NeoLuddite #Luddites #LessScreenTime #MoreBoardGames #MoreGreenTime #MoreOutdoorTime #FlipPhones #MoreBooks #ResistTheMachine
When I see "AI" and "revenue" in close proximity, I reach for Enoch's Hammer. #NeoLuddite
https://flipboard.com/@semafor/semafor-qhf227ugz/-/a-HJkv2d6WQjW2C1dX5UaMvQ%3Aa%3A3943444710-%2F0
How Luddite am I? In the realm of kitchen countertop appliances, I used the General Electric toaster given to my parents as a wedding present in 1956 until it died after 60+ years of service. Now I make toast under the broiler in the oven. I like dumb toast, not #smartappliances. #luddite #neoluddite
Some combination of stuff in this old-ass building I live in (older than Marx) buzzes at regular intervals the exact same way an old phone I had did and I constantly feel as if I'm hearing a notification come through. This will either fix or break me. Stay tuned, folks!
#Abortion #handmaids_tale #ThirdWorld #NeoLuddite
#Amarillo, #Texas wants to know if its citizens want to take that next step of going full Handmaids Tale by actively preventing citizens of the United States of America from helping other US citizens get the medical care they want and in many case the care they need.
Living in Texas must be a fucking maddening thing ... And #idaho is quickly catching up with the shittiness of the Lone Star State.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/19/texas-abortion-travel-ban
If you'd like one of the (100% analog chemistry ⚗️, zero computers involved) #neoluddite prints: I've now put them up on Ko-Fi, in 10x15cm & 16x24cm sizes. https://ko-fi.com/s/adca81c7b0
Minimum prices are set to cover the expenses/materials, but hit me up via DM if that's a barrier. 😊
Looking forward to make some darkroom prints/postcards of Enoch's Hammer #NeoLuddite #luddite https://www.flickr.com/photos/gedankenstuecke/53709195737/
#Neoluddite LARPers pretend that they will commit eco-terrorist attacks against industrialized society but they won't do shit. The industrial revolution was one of the best things to happen to society and if you disagree you smell like shit.
Not sure what to take away from this. Is the Guardian now stooping to the low of mass hysteria to get clicks or is this genuine? Not once is ethics or sustainability mentioned. The tech isn't going anywhere so if people really care then they need to make to effort to work more sustainably and put pressure on big whoever tech companies to act appropriately. But yet no sensible possible answer is on display here and all the contacts are made on major platforms #neoluddite
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/17/humanitys-remaining-timeline-it-looks-more-like-five-years-than-50-meet-the-neo-luddites-warning-of-an-ai-apocalypse
How to become ungovernable in the age of digital twins?
https://petroskowo.pl/display/810fc51c-1565-756f-e1b8-d77092801486
Luddism was a working-class movement opposed to the political consequences of industrial capitalism. The Luddites wanted technology to be deployed in ways that made work more humane and gave workers more autonomy. The bosses, on the other hand, wanted to drive down costs and increase productivity.
#History #Work # Technology #GigEconomy #Neo-Luddite #SurveillanceCapitalism
i
I am looking for a nice #luddite or #neoluddite #glyph, #clipart or #drawing, suitable to make it a #sticker, #patch or #mug with "Homo Ludditens" inscription.
This is NOT a commercial venture.
#ArtelTech
This is NOT a commercial venture.
#ArtelTech
Luddites were people who were very skilled with machines but disagreed that those machines were used to lower working conditions under which they and their offspring would have to work.
This insightful comic shows how AI and regulations are now placing workers in the same situation.
It shows how more and more people say:
I AM A LUDDITE
"I am good with new technology and I want it to be used to benefit individual people."
https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/
@GeePawHill #luddite #neoluddite
@tess @kornel Little enforces my identification as a neo-Luddite more than the wild ramblings of techno-fascist billionaires like Marc Andreesen.
https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/
#Luddite #NeoLuddite #NeoLuddism #TechnoFascist #Fascist #Fascism #Manifest #Manifesto
"How to smash the looms today", a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article by Brian Merchant.
I'm a Luddite. That's not the contradiction that it might sound like. The original Luddites did not hate technology. Most were skilled machine operators. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, what they objected to were the specific ways that tech was being used to undermine their status, upend their communities and destroy their livelihoods. So they took sledgehammers to the mechanized looms used to exploit them.
The same way as the #Luddites of today. We aren't tech illiterate. Hell some of us are even #Unix #sysadmins!
The Luddites were not idiots who broke machines because they didn't understand them. They were cloth workers who once led comfortable lives, working at home or in small shops, on their own terms and schedules, with freedom and dignity.
When entrepreneurs tried to move their jobs into factories by using power looms and wide frames that did similar work faster, more cheaply and much more shoddily, the Luddites protested. These workers first sought compromise, dialogue and a democratic way to integrate new tech into their communities — to share in the gains. They were ignored. So they rebelled.
Just as people back then had their own personal websites, gopherholes, IRC and XMPP channels, Usenet newsgroups, and mailing lists, writing with passion and optimism in the early days of the internet... And some of them still exist! The optimism and excitedness for a future where everyone has the power to carve their own spaces.. Maybe not. Perhaps a few still do. And I say, more power to them!!
“In the era of #AI, 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.”
#neoluddite #luddite #fuckAI #teamhumanity
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/rethinking-the-luddites-in-the-age-of-ai
#Luddites #Neoluddite #Automation #BigTech: "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."
https://www.fastcompany.com/90949827/what-the-luddites-can-teach-us-about-standing-up-to-big-tech
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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…
The Twilight Zone: The Brain Center at Whipple's (1964)
Several Twilight Zone episodes dealt with machines coming to life or taking over or messing things up. In this one the protagonist is a heartless company president who lays off a bunch of workers at his factory and replaces them with computers.
During the late 50s and early 60s there was a Liddite surge in response to computers that had begun to replace mechanical and electromechanical tabulating machines. The old tabulating machines required a lot of manual labor to operate and maintain them. The new computers were replacing a lot of workers, so some people were upset about it. (Of course all those jobs working with the tabulating machines would never have existed if those machines hadn't replaced the human computers and tabulators who did the calculating in the 19th century.)
Computers began to ship in larger quantities in the early 60s because they started to use transistors which reduced the costs significantly compared to the vacuum tube models.
If it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, I highly recommend a revisit of this episode with its timely narrative.
Accessible video description:
A man is watching a film with a company president talking about how a new computer is going to save the company a lot of money, the company president is a bald-headed guy with glasses wearing a suit, he is writing on a chalkboard, the man watching the film is sitting near the projector; then the guy who was in the film is now talking to the man who was viewing the film and asking him for his critique; cut to a guy who picks up a metal bar and starts hitting a computer causing sparks to fly and the bald-headed man grabs a gun and shoots at the guy hitting the computer; then a guy in a lab coat talks to the president about how bad it is now that nobody is working at the company and how empty it is and then the guy in the lab coat walks out; cut to the end title Twilight Zone.
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#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #management #labor #strike #computer #IBM #IBM1401 #severance #RobbyRobot #robot #luddite #neoluddite
(fair use clips from the episode)
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