“They were more anti-poverty than they were anti-technology.” He thinks their rebellion, which came after more peaceful attempts to save their jobs failed, was “morally justified.” “It wasn’t so much resisting any kind of change-it was resisting getting steamrolled, getting crushed and thrown into poverty,” Merchant said. In Merchant’s view, the Luddites saw the future all too clearly: new machinery meant that the work they had previously done in their own homes would now be done in factories, as mass production, destroying the workers’ way of life. Modern people tend to see them as fools who didn’t appreciate the benefits of technology. Merchant feels that the original Luddites, early-nineteenth-century cloth-makers who raided British factories and destroyed the new machines that were replacing them, have been getting a bad rap lately. He has long, brown hair and a goatee, and was wearing a plaid shirt over a T-shirt that read “The Luddites Were Right.” On the chair next to him sat an HP printer. “I’m absolutely a Luddite,” the author and columnist Brian Merchant said the other day at an outdoor café in Brooklyn.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |