Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job

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Sometimes this really frustrates me because I can't yet answer the question "Who am I" now that I'm no longer that Coloradan? I'm mostly nonplussed, although every so often I keep finding myself trying to stuff myself back into the lifestyle I had in Col0rado. During the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the dominant view among economists has been that belief in long-term technological unemployment was indeed a fallacy. And I love this example that you’ve shared with me, because I think there’s a truism that opposing “progress” never works. Zuckerberg intended for this to inform internal design and management processes, but it aptly captures how entrepreneurs regard disruption: more is always better.

I think when it comes to more practical matters, when you’re thinking about ecological limits to the future, we are going to have to seriously evaluate how growth and accumulation can happen on the current scale. In North West England, textile workers lacked these long-standing trade institutions and their letters composed an attempt to achieve recognition as a united body of tradespeople. Then, as we stand stunned in the wreckage, only then can we also begin to see what aspects of our normal were wrecking us. When it comes to newer things, there are some really interesting techniques that people have found for hacking apps or using misusing them in various ways.The function of the “improper name” of Ned Ludd is, according to Deseriis, “precisely to eschew fixation by incorporating a plurality of usages that cannot easily be reduced to one.

Reading its pages will leave you feeling vindicated in your sneaking suspicion that more technology doesn’t actually help.This is addressing what can happen if and when we see what is being forced to crack open, and what we can make of the sacred mess that our lives always are (it's life, after all). There are other ways that workers enact forms of practical technological criticism beside sabotage, including developing alternative technologies at work.

Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst argues that the era of “move fast and break things” is over; that in the wake of the Facebook scandal, the public is less tolerant of tech startups that ignore the societal ramifications of their innovations; and that VCs should analyze not only for market size and product viability, but for whether founders show sufficient foresight and concern about the unintended consequences of the ideas they are pursuing.

I teach university students, and they’re all young people, and no one listens to newly released music. These new inventions produced textiles faster and cheaper because they could be operated by less-skilled, low-wage labourers. Breaking Things at Work is for anyone who has breathed a sigh of relief when their computer froze, resulting in their inability to work for the afternoon. The Luddites weren’t primitive and they are still a force, however unconsciously, in the workplaces of the twenty-first-century world.

Critics of technology find themselves either performatively disclaiming the Luddite legacy or professing their unbecoming sympathies. Even all these dystopian fictions that are so popular now have the underlying assumption that we’re on the trolley path that runs over a lot of people, and there’s nothing we can do. After the brief flourishing of the Luddite rebellions, destruction of machines and factories continued in France, in the United States (where a number of textile factories went up in flames, likely from arson), and throughout Silesia and Bavaria. Benjamin was critiquing the German Social Democratic Party of his day, the Second International that was led by theorists like Karl Kautsky, who is a major inspiration to Marxists today, including in the Democratic Socialists of America.

In terms of that politics, I wanted to ask you how the book is connected to Viewpoint Magazine and a project around working class experience? Breaking Things at Work shows that work-based activism has never been the labor of a few union reps; rather, many groundbreaking actions began with rank-and-file acts of sabotage fueled by contempt for their working conditions. A lot of people have argued that new digital technologies and technologies of automation that we keep reading about, open up new potentials for a society that is post-work or post-capitalist to varying degrees. G Gavin Mueller is a lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine. Mueller’s approach is perhaps more reminiscent of anarchist writings than what one might think of as the Marxist tradition.