Automation presumes that some amount of work can carried out by fewer (or, hopefully or fearfully) no human hands at all. In this way, automation has long been held up as a gift of leisure, as the promised land of a world where people rest while the machines do all that is necessary. But as Astra Taylor has memorably noted, a great many examples of automation really turn out to be anything but: rather than reducing the need for human hands, they obscure and deskill the work that humans must do. So today we have tools to automatically identify dogs and cars in photos, but we don’t see the thousands of people paid miserly wages to perform the millions of tedious tasks necessary for the tool to do its purported magic.

In fact, “automation” is typically a driver not of less labor but of labor that is dehumanized and impoverished; rather than an engine of leisure, it’s a tool for immiseration. And this isn’t new.

Brian Merchant writes:

The cotton gin worked so well that it wildly increased the demand for workers to do every other part of the cotton production process, especially the hoeing and the picking. Slavery, an institution whose future was at the time in question—Northerners wanted it abolished, and were drawing close to legislating restrictions—received a lifeline, then an economic raison d’être. The export of cotton became the biggest industry in the United States, so economically powerful, generating so much wealth for plantation owners, that it helped sustain the institution of slavery for another seventy years.

Merchant, Blood in the Machine, page 224

Far from reducing the need for human labor, the cotton gin drastically increased the demand for the most violently coercive labor imaginable. The technology didn’t eliminate work; it made the work terrible. On the other side of the Atlantic, that cotton was turned into cloth in factories where the workers—many of them small children—were also subject to terrific abuse. One, a boy named Robert Blincoe, was recruited when he was only seven. He later reported on his experiences:

[Blincoe] worked as hard as he could, accepting the beatings when he couldn’t go fast enough. Aside from the threat of the managers, the machinery in cotton mills was extremely dangerous. By the time the first year was through at Lowdham, most of his cohort had been injured in one way or another. “Some had the skin scraped off the knuckles, clean to the bone, by the fliers; others a finger crushed, a joint or two nipped off in the cogs of the spinning-frame wheels,” he recalled. One day while Blincoe was tending the machinery, he got the forefinger on his left hand stuck in one of the gears, which tore the finger off at the joint. While he screamed in pain, desperately “clapping the mangled joint, streaming with blood, to the finger,” the overseers laughed in his face. Blincoe ran to the doctor, who dressed the wound and sent him back to work.

Merchant, Blood in the Machine, page 93

A lot of the coverage of the risks of present-day automation attends to the question of what happens when lots of people lose their jobs. But perhaps a more instructive question is, how will the work be degraded? What do those jobs become? Because absent active resistance and organizing, automation doesn’t herald leisure so much as it invites misery.

I was talking with someone recently, about some frustrations they had with the way a piece of technology was being used, when they added offhandedly, “But I’m not a Luddite.” And I’ve heard that so many times before, that little disclaimer that even though they might be annoyed or opposed to some technology in this particular instance, it isn’t a blanket objection; they aren’t unreasonable. But which Luddites are we referring to here?

True Luddism was about locating exactly where elites were using technologies to the disadvantage of the human being, and organizing to fight back. This is an important point: Luddism can and certainly did coexist with technology, and even a love of technology. The handloom, for example, made the Luddites’ way of life possible, long before they became Luddites—and they cherished that lifestyle enough to take up arms to defend it. It is a matter, of course, of how technology is deployed.

Before we find ourselves entirely backed into a corner by today’s tech titans, we should ask these questions: Does their technology serve to funnel profits upstream while degrading a livelihood or destabilizing a community? Are those who rely on the disrupted systems given a democratic say in how innovation will affect their lives?

The history of the Luddites—the real ones, not the pejorative figment of the entrepreneurial imagination—gives us a framework to evaluate the utility of technologies and their social impacts. Erasing that history collapses our thinking about how tech and automation affect working lives—and the choices we have to address the disruption they bring.

Merchant, Blood in the Machine, page 308

(Emphasis mine.) This brings to mind a passage from Ursula Franklin that I’ve returned to over and over:

We cannot be part of a discussion on what risks a certain technology has without asking whose risks. It makes an awful lot of difference. Assume you are talking about video display terminals, for example; the great discussion is “Are they or are they not putting the operator’s health or eyes at risk?” You don’t discuss whether there are risks; you discuss whose risks. Who is it that is at risk? It’s quite pointless to talk about risk-benefit without saying “Are those who are at risk also getting the benefits, or are those who are getting the benefits very far removed from the risk?”…The questions to ask are “Whose benefits? Whose risks?” rather than “What benefits? What risks?”

Franklin, Ursula Franklin Speaks, page 33

A lot of people have benefited from the association of Luddism with irrational technophobia. But maybe instead of avoiding the specter of Luddism we should reclaim it. Asking good questions about how a technology will impact people isn’t unreasonable and it isn’t irrational; it’s right and appropriate and necessary. And it is one of the legacies of Luddism that we have the ability to not only ask questions, but to organize a response to technology that does harm, to refuse to accept that the cold logic of the market matters more than blood and bones. Now, when someone says they aren’t a Luddite, I’m wont to respond with, “Well, I am.”