I, Jethro Towne, leader of the reborn Neo-Luddite Movement put Omni-Tek Rubi-Ka and all inhabitants of this planet under notice: the aberration that is the robot must be removed from Rubi-Ka entirely or you shall suffer the most severe of consequences and the hands of your very own creations. Our movement will no longer sit idle in the face of systematic industrial dehumanisation of mankind. We now have the means and moral resolve to face this outrage head on. Smash the machine now, or be smashed by it.
I invite our brothers and sisters in the Unity of the Rose and Desert Winds to join our crusade against those machines that rob us of our very humanity. Join us and you will be spared.
Hence follows the full text of the Neo-Luddite Movement's manifesto. This is so the People can understand the moral imperative that drives us during the days of blood that are to follow.
The Neo-Luddite Manifesto
The original Luddite revolt occurred on Earth in 1811, an action against the English Textile factories that displaced craftsmen in favour of machines. Today's Luddites continue to raise moral and ethical arguments against the excesses of modern technology to the extent that our inventions and our technical systems have evolved to control us rather than to serve us and to the extent that such leviathans can threaten our essential humanity.
There is much in the experience of the original Luddites that can be important for the neo-Luddites today to understand, as distant and as different as their times were from ours. Because we are victims of an ongoing Industrial Revolution which has its roots quite specifically in the first -the machines may change, but their machineness does not- so those today who are moved in some measure to resist (or who even hope to reverse) the tide of industrialism might find their most useful analogues, if not their models exactly, in those Luddites of the nineteenth century.
There are five lessons that one might, with the focused lens of history, take from the Luddite past.
1. Technologies are never neutral, and some are hurtful. It was not all machinery that we Luddites are opposed to, but "all Machinery hurtful to Commonality". And above all this include the 'thinking' machines and most specifically, the robot.
What was true of the technology of industrialism at the beginning, when the apologist Andrew Ure praised a new machine that replaced high-paid workmen -"This invention confirms the great doctrine already propounded, that when capital enlists science in her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility"- is as true today, when a reporter for Automation could praise a computer system because it assures that "decision-making" is "removed from the operator ... [and] gives maximum control of the machine to management." These are not accidental, ancillary attributes of the machines that are chosen; they are intrinsic and ineluctable.
2. Industrialism is always a cataclysmic process, destroying the past, roiling the present, making the future uncertain. It is in the nature of the industrial ethos to value growth and production, speed and novelty, power and manipulation, all of which are bound to cause continuing, rapid, and disruptive changes at all levels to society, and with some regularity, whatever benefits they may bring to a few. And because its criteria are essentially economic rather than, say, social or civic, those changes come about without much regard for any but purely materialist consequences and primarily for the aggrandizement of those few.
Whatever material benefits industrialism may introduce, the familiar evils--incoherent metropolises, spreading slums, crime and prostitution, inflation, corruption, pollution, cancer and heart disease, stress, anomie, alcoholism--almost always follow. And the consequences may be quite profound indeed as the industrial ethos supplants the customs and habits of the past.
3. Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines." This wise maxim of Herbert Read's is what Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets of the Luddite era expressed in their own way as they saw the Satanic mills and Stygian forges both imprisoning and impoverishing textile families and usurping and befouling natural landscapes [...] "such outrage done to nature as compels the indignant power...to avenge her violated rights," as Wordsworth said.
What happens when an economy is not embedded in a due regard for the natural world, understanding and coping with the full range of its consequences to species and their ecosystems, is not only that it wreaks its harm throughout the biosphere in indiscriminate and ultimately unsustainable ways, though that is bad enough. I
4 The corporate-state, synergistically intertwined with industrialism, will always come to its aid and defence, making revolt futile and reform ineffectual. And it was not above cementing that alliance, despite all its talk of the rights of free citizen, with spies and informers, midnight raids, illegal arrests, overzealous magistrates, and rigged trials, in aid of making the populace into a docile workforce. That more than anything else established what a "laissez-faire" economy would mean--repression would be used by the state to insure that manufacturers would be free to do what they wished, especially with labour.
5. Resistance to the industrial system, based on some grasp of moral principles and rooted in some sense of moral revulsion, is not only possible but necessary. It is true that in a general sense the Luddites were not successful either in the short-run aim of halting the detestable machinery or in the long-run task of stopping the Industrial Revolution and its multiple miseries; but that hardly matters in the retrospect of history, for what they are remembered for is that they resisted, not that they won. Some may call it foolish resistance ("blind" and "senseless" are the usual adjectives), but it was dramatic, forceful, honourable, and authentic enough to have put the Luddites' issues forever on record. Such a challenge is mounted against large enemies and powerful forces not because there is any certainty of triumph but because somewhere in the blood, in the place inside where pain and fear and anger intersect, one is finally moved to refusal and defiance: "No more."
/ooc There is more on the NLM in the "Bot Smashers" thread
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Re: Darn Ya Beat Me to the Punch
Smash the incompetant programmers?
