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Interesting claims about both textiles and AI. I don't have the historical background to flesh out your textile claims and would appreciate references to good quality historical studies.

I also need more info about textile quality and cost across the transition (artisanal to industrial). I thought the cost difference was huge (maybe a factor of 100?) but I don't really know. I don't know anything about quality; I'd guess that both artisanal and industrial quality varied widely.

If you need more info, I encourage you to seek it out. I'm not a library. The best I can do is suggest you start here www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian...

oh! have you read "Pushing Professionalism (or: Programming the Programmer)"? it's from '74 and pretty interesting. archive.scienceforthepeople.org/vol-6/v6n4/p...

Luddites were skilled professional independent textile workers. Making clothing was very labor intensive, and the labor involved required a lot of training. Obviously, capital hated this. Or proto-capital. This was early in the rise of capitalism, so there's a lot of mercantile power structures here

Anyway, a variety of technological improvements made it possible to produce shitty textiles with big industrial machines and easily replaceable labor. This gives all the power to capital, and obviously capital loves that. So capital went all in on shitty textiles. Note the state of textiles today.

Did people want shitty textiles? No, not really. People did want cheap textiles, but that's not exactly the same thing. Which gets us closer to the point I'm working toward. It didn't matter that it's not really what people wanted. Capitalists forced it on them, anyway.