They may have been good people, and they still are, but a word means how it is used.

No, that is not a Luddite. A Luddite was a dupe of Jeremy Bentham’s satanic intelligence operations that redirected peasant sentiment against imperialism into an anti-republican anarchist controlled opposition that was easily discredited and allow the principled opposition to the British system of imperialist capitalism to be ignored and vilified as machine smashers and vandals.

Anyone with any knowledge of science knows that real technology doesn’t replace labor enhances it and it does not evict laborer in a properly organized economy. It human political decisions that evicted craftsmen and the farmers. No machine has or will ever evict any worker from his job because the organization of labor is a not subject of machines but human political economy.

Rather than practicing a form of idolatry by attacking perfectly useful machines people must attack the corruption of the oligarchs that takes the most human characteristic of creativity and turns it against the common good and making it a means of selfish gain at the cost of the good.

The power lies with man not with machines and any movement that denies this as Luddites do is Idolatry and Satanism.
Luddites are fundamentally anti-human as the claim the power of a machine can replace the world of the human being the creators of that machine which is not true. Ironically, the Post-Humanist promoting cybernetics and other pseudoscience and post-human futures are derived from Luddite philosophy that assumes that machines are of higher order human beings and thus have the power to replace human labor and reason Luddites believe this false doctrine is because it was synthetically created belief that reflected Bentham’s mechanistic view of man as a machine.

The Luddite reductionist view of labor as fixed in mode derives from the man is machine ideology thus to protect human culture as reduced to the efforts of the human machine it can be threaten a superior machine. But how can this view every defeat the any culture of de-humanization when it is already such a degraded view of man? After all if a man is merely a machine then why shouldn’t he replaced by a better one ala trans-humanism?

The rest of Jason Peters essay is pure confusion complaining about digital gadgets as high technology when it isn’t. Jason Peter quotes Wendel Berry are saying technology should be limited to “but to intensify production, improve maintenance, increase care and skill, and widen the margins of leisure, pleasure, and community life.”

Unfortunately, that isn’t Luddite at all but what American system economist from Franklin on defined as “technology.”

You have confused gadgetry with technology. Technology is a machine that is an application of a universal physical principle changes man’s capacity to work needed for increase potential population density. Gadget’s are devices use technology but may or may not increase potential population density because they are concern with the speed of human action not it’s mode or character. Technology is about changing in principle what can be done.

The reason you don’t get excited about this year’s newest gadgets is because they aren’t technology at all but rather repetition of tasks already being done by slightly slower machines.

I’ll now list some examples of real technology advances would look like and that probably won’t be built or developed precisely because our society is so dominated by Luddite/Malthusian ideas about man.

Imagine if you where a teacher of European history rather simply being able to talk to students about the City of Florence in Italy and show a few photographs that you could with for the cost of today’s usual field trip of about 3-4 hours of driving times that you could show them the actual city of Florence? Wouldn’t you be excited about a technology let’s just about anyone travel a 1000 miles in the time today’s primitive cave-man like vehicles limited to 100 miles?

How about a technology about the trailer of a tuck that can power about 25,000 homes and desalinate and cleans water? You could drive these into African village get these people hooked and keep them from dying water born diseases.

How about turn-key hospitals and schools?

How about a vertical farm that allows a city block to grow its organic food in the cleanest possible environment without regard to seasons?

How about a vertical city build of multiple platforms about a kilometer high providing housing for 100k people, jobs, and integrated community with gardens and parks on every platform. It would schools, shops, and everything you would need from cradle to grave in this Sky Village. Talk about close community.

How about a manmade Great Lake in the Sahara along aside manmade tropical forests?

How about Domed Cities on the Moon?

Those are example of what real technological progress would have looked like and it’s about increasing human capacity to live. We haven’t had any real technology improvements since the 1968ers.

You’ve never seen or lived in society that was producing new cities and doing these “impossible” projects because you are a boomer or worse. Earlier generation were more human and that is kind of future they planned but the Boomer decided sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, mother earth, easy money, free trade, cheap toys, self-righteous Luddite Malthusian romanticism and doing what “felt good” was more important building the future for their children and giving them culture that believed in the creative human spirit or the imago viva dei.

http://www.amishlawnmower.com

Now made by an Amish businessman, this mower – with some variations – has been made for about 50 years under a number of brand names – Yard Man, Scotts, Sears, Agri-Fab. It’s excellent. Enough iron to hold an edge.

This company also makes a decent push mower:

http://www.mclanemower.com/reelmowers.asp

You can also get mowers like this at eBay and yard sales.

The root problem though is, when a new technology emerges, it benefits a small portion of the community at the expense of everyone else, and it empowers a small number over everyone else. Life doesn’t slow down so each of us may philosophically consider what that means for me and us, and do I or we really want it at all? Now all we have to do is figure out, how do we establish some sort of communitarian framework that also respects individual liberty? I need to know which machines I may smash with impunity. Or, I think Jason is a bit of a rational anarchist, along the lines of Professor Bernardo De La Paz in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Fifth International anyone?

Excellent essay! This morning, having just read the most recent cheerful installment at The Automatic Earth, my mind began running in a groove similar to yours. Here is what I wrote before I read your piece:

Willful Ignorance
—————–
Ask yourself why so many of us expect “the government” to compensate for jobs lost to increases in labor productivity (i.e. output of a good or service per unit input of labor.) Ask yourself how it is possible we CELEBRATE increases in labor productivity even as we cringe at rising unemployment. Just how stupid are we?

And what about those of us who believe the biophysical limitations of Earth all but guarantee that Mankind’s consumption of resources will soon shrink, and shrink dramatically? Who have concluded from the recent financial crisis that we have substantially exceeded our powers to vacuum ever-more credit from the future in order to stimulate ever-higher consumption in the present? Who recognize that marginal increases in material consumption throughout much of the industrialized world often have a NEGATIVE correlation with human well-being?

Is there any chance that we-the-consumers and we-the-investors will be willing to shift our fidelities from the lowest prices and highest rates of return to intentional, meaningful, fulfilling employment for one-another…and for ourselves? Doesn’t our love affair with the automobile prove that we don’t even want to employ our own legs?

What shall become of human employment in a future of limits? If the means of production are not widely held, what will be the fate of those who own little or none of it? Is a Darwinian economic religion compatible with love for one another? And even if all these other factors could be overcome, are our human natures suited for life without needful labor?

Hans Noeldner

Before the modern period, the idea that individuals have power of their own was unheard of. Power flowed from the sovereign to the people, not the people to the sovereign. Kings had power not because it was ceded to them by the people, but because they were ordained by God, the source of all authority. Today, the presumption is that anything not prohibited by the government is permitted. Then, the presumption was that anything not permitted by the crown remained the prerogative of the crown. The Tenth Amendment is actually a pretty radical concept, historically speaking.

Disputable. A point made by those who defend the continued existence of industrial agriculture.

Besides, the death of three-quarters of the population isn’t exactly the kind of dislocation you can adequately plan for. It’s the end of the f*cking world.

But barring utter catastrophe, I think we can do better than we’ve done. I think it’s possible to have vibrant communities. But I don’t think we need to turn our backs on three centuries of history to do so, and on the contrary, that not dealing with the history is an active obstacle to any such pursuits because it fails to take into account the physical and logistical realities of our time.

rex, ironically, you’re still operating from a rights-based framework. You’re still treating people as atomistic, as essentially unconnected, as not being subject to any obligations imposed on them involuntarily. You view the state as a creation of the people, who collectively cede their rights to create Leviathan. Expressing it in terms of power clarifies things a bit–Nietzsche being the ultimate expression of modernism, after a fashion–but doesn’t change the underlying ontology.

This is a source of confusion for me around here, because while so many people bag on modernity as bad for individual liberty, the very idea of individual liberty is a decidedly modern trope.

The state has a fundamental obligation to the common good due to citizens ceding power to the state as protection of the common good. (Ryan, avoiding seeing rights and obligations as a duality is actually quite robust – Thank you.) In the case of the industrial age, I believe the state has failed in many obligations.

Reducing (or enhancing?) this to the cowboy poet level: When otherwise good citizens take up arms against those protected by the state during a time of war, clearly something is amiss (AKA FUBAR). I am a geologist by trade, so I cannot speak to human history other than what I read as recreation, but dang it, something was terribly wrong during the Luddite’s run. These were tradesman and family men willing to pick-up PMDs (Pitchforks of Minor Destruction) to risk their lives for something greater that than themselves. I cannot relegate them to a dustbin without further study.