Better to Be A Luddite?

KH teases me about being a Luddite. My sister complains about immigrants stealing jobs.

I think our cell phone culture sucks and I have far too much of the ugliness of the internet.

KH and I have seen the effects of automation. The kind of technological breakthroughs which were - are - to improve our lives.

But reading The Automation Myth makes me think there may be some good in being a Luddite. 

Ultimately, so much of the discourse around automation reveals what we currently lack. We do not possess the leisure hours we deserve. Our workplaces already treat us like the robots they threaten to replace us with. We have ridden out a pandemic ever more reliant upon our smartphones and computers while being reminded of how isolated so many of us already had been made by these very technologies. Capitalists themselves have no solution to offer, not even an appealing fantasy to sell. Even the ludicrous dreams of Bezos and Musk to use space as an escape hatch from a climate ravaged world expressly rely upon transporting the division of labor off-world fully intact. As Boggs told us in 1963, we desperately desire to lead lives with meaning that decouple our work and our worth. We need a life not beholden to the value form. We need a labor no longer doggedly paced by Frederick Taylor’s stopwatch. We need a planet that remains inhabitable and biodiverse. Machines are not coming to make a better world for us. Robots won’t build the classless society. That historical task, as always, remains solely our own.

And what has automation to do with immigration? More jobs have been lost through automation than to immigrants.

sch  4/8/22