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i think a core beef that i have with a lot of this "automation is bad" sentiment lately is that there is no inherent moral good in laboring the story of humanity is one of invention, where we improve our conditions by building things that help us do more things more easily

sort of along my recent repost, the issue at hand has been the same since the dawn of capitalism: when automation increases productivity, who gets to capture the value of that productivity increase? the beef is not with the productivity. it's with the value capture

gonna just fully lean into being a stereotypical leftist here: yinz claim to have read marx yet clearly haven't read marx or internalized the ideas within bsky.app/profile/segy...

Also the luddite movement smashed the machines in factories because they hated the *concept* of the factory and the exploitation factory labor inherently represented. They didn't _want_ to control the factories; they wanted to own their own labor and direct it as they pleased. Distributed capital.

I have seen some comparisons with luddites and people that have an extreme take on generative AI, but I'm interested where this comparison stops. Like the scale of how certain internet things impact people is not something that I've read about before, like social media and LLMs.

I think that most people have an outdated understanding of the Luddite movement in general, since the history was written by the capital-owning class after violently suppressing them. The factory-owners focused the narrative on "they're backwards-looking anti-technology freaks", but that's not true.