Still Educating Sam Hasler: Big Tech Blues

My friend KH has called me a Luddite because I am not in love with my phone and am rather inept with its use. So be it. My Po did not want to monitor both a smartphone and a computer, so he decreed a Gabb phone. This was not a decree peculiar to me, from what I have learned he is the only one who limits his supervisees in this manner. I can see his reasons for this limitation every time I see the man. Whatever impingement he thinks this causes me, whatever limitation KH thinks I suffer, I think of as a benefit.

Riding the bus, I see people of all ages buried in their phones. Some play games, some listen to music, and some I have no clue as to what they do. When I did have a smartphone, I did check my email on the bus. Not being attached to my phone is a good thing.

The Cleveland Review of Books has an essay that makes me feel in the mainstream of virtue: A Real and Un-Automated Horse: On Brian Merchant’s “Blood in the Machine” by Patrick McGinty.

While it’s easy and at times fun to chide the ever-growing, ever-failing, ever-funded tech sector for churning out objects rife with ideological and computational illnesses and betraying a total disregard for history or even reality, it’s hard to ignore that we, the laypeople and critics, in our ever-dwindling number of publications and outlets, are diagnosing their shortcomings at a rate that suggests we’re getting paid by the diagnosis. For many years, I wrote, taught, and spoke about the worrisome follies of autonomous vehicle (AV) companies, integrating commentary and work by other writers and thinkers whose AV skepticism matched and often exceeded my own; this past summer, California regulators authorized vehicles from the General Motors-backed Cruise and Google-funded Waymo to roam San Francisco. I have begun to feel there’s nothing more to learn from critiquing tech: embarrassing as their indiscretions may be, these companies just keep scaling, both in the reach of their operations and in the number of producers angling for broader reach. It has felt more productive instead to start grappling with our responses to this relentless expansion.

As I reflected on my campaign’s shortcomings, one particular book appeared to me like a weathered knight on a real and un-automated horse: Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Merchant’s mission is both to reconsider the Luddites as members of a specific historical movement and to reclaim the twenty-first-century slang term that misunderstands them. Per Merchant, the Luddites were workers in nineteenth-century rural England who, rather than starve as automated machines wiped away their jobs, waged a class conflict against factory owners. Some of this conflict took the form of impassioned letters and pamphlets. More often, it manifested in the organized destruction of machines. Because on-the-record accounts of the Luddites are rare due to such consequent British policies as “anyone convicted of dismantling a machine [can] now be put to death,” Merchant—a noted fan and anthologizer of speculative fiction—brings alive the evolving politics of the Luddites by adapting contemporaneous oral histories into more readable, contemporary prose. Knowing that the Great Comet of 1811 passed over the town of young Luddite George Mellor, for instance, Merchant imagines Mellor’s interpretation: “he knew as well as anyone that the working people of England had plenty of reasons to see bad omens in the night sky.” This is not to say that Merchant adds unnecessary gloss. He takes care to show how grueling the era was, physically, mentally, and economically. (In 1811, “the weekly pay of a Lancashire weaver declined from 25 shillings in 1800 to 14 shillings”; at one harrowing moment in the book, an eight-year-old worker contemplates suicide).

I learned we have been misusing the word Luddite:

It is telling that, in contemporary usage, “Luddite” almost always appears in the singular. Even for those who do not intend the word to mean “reactionary” or “unenlightened,” the Luddite is nonetheless a loner, an oddball, one whose sense of reality fails to conform to some perceived norm. Even when used in a positive sense, “Luddite” signals something like stubbornness: the Luddite is one who stands inertly as history marches at and past them.
This diminution of “Luddites” from a collective to a singular entity works to trick opponents of our world’s tech saturation into believing that their values are really an individual pathology. Understanding this helped me realize that it’s not the repetition of tech jokes on Twitter per se that I find sad: it’s their isolation from one another, their inability to make any kind of collective movement out of the personal discontent they express. Merchant notes the emerging trend of social media users adding “Luddite” to their profiles, and though I confess I found this example ironic at the back-end of a book in which workers destroyed machines, it nonetheless marks a crucial shift from isolation toward cooperation, one informed by history. Merchant clearly approves. By historicizing responses to technology, he demonstrates that to act as a Luddite is to be anything but out-of-touch: to act as a Luddite means to mobilize a plentiful if obscured common sentiment that marches toward us from the past, and to stride as part of a collective toward a more equitable future.

And I found my vague thoughts and misgivings crystallized in one paragraph:

In this year’s many union victories, workers—not shareholders, not executives—are making winning arguments about company investment, ones rooted in the idea that a thriving technological future cannot exist without an equitable integration of technology in the present. As political chair in my own teacher’s union, I cringe at the thought of beginning a Zoom meeting with, “Hey, so I think we should be more vocal about our tacit Luddism,” but the potential applications of their historical example are many and worthwhile. Perhaps hidden Luddites in various organizations and companies will begin demanding more say in how their technologies affect the environment. Perhaps autoworkers will demand that the machines they construct operate on more safely designed streets, as advocated for by Jessie Singer in There are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price.

Tech pushes profits and market share by emphasizing the new. Engineers aid and abet this - naturally, they want to design the cool stuff first. Whether it actually helps people get pushed to the wayside. People are blamed for not keeping up with tech.

Decades ago I used a DOS database called Q & A. It was great. I never tapped all of its assets before Windows came along, and Symantec discarded the program. Money was to be made elsewhere, not in exploiting the current system.

And this week was the week that Big Tech went to Washington to testify about the damage social media is doing to people: