Today’s counter-intuitive notion is from novelist and long-time Locus columnist Cory Doctorow. This essay is in the January 2022 issue, and posted (for free) online, here:
Locus, Cory Doctorow, posted 3 Jan 2022: Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature
From 1811-1816, a secret society styling themselves “the Luddites” smashed textile machinery in the mills of England. Today, we use “Luddite” as a pejorative referring to backwards, anti-technology reactionaries.
This proves that history really is written by the winners.
In truth, the Luddites’ cause wasn’t the destruction of technology – no more than the Boston Tea Party’s cause was the elimination of tea, or Al Qaeda’s cause was the end of civilian aviation. Smashing looms and stocking frames was the Luddites’ tactic, not their goal.
In truth, their goal was something closely related to science fiction: to challenge not the technology itself, but rather the social relations that governed its use.
He fills in the history of textile workers who responded to the implementation of textile automation. Textiles became cheaper, and demand increased, but the workers didn’t benefit.
The Luddites weren’t exercised about automation. They didn’t mind the proliferation of cheap textiles. History is mostly silent on whether they gave thought to the plight of tenant farmers at home or enslaved people abroad.
What were they fighting about? The social relations governing the use of the new machines. These new machines could have allowed the existing workforce to produce far more cloth, in far fewer hours, at a much lower price, while still paying these workers well (the lower per-unit cost of finished cloth would be offset by the higher sales volume, and that volume could be produced in fewer hours).
Instead, the owners of the factories – whose fortunes had been built on the labor of textile workers – chose to employ fewer workers, working the same long hours as before, at a lower rate than before, and pocketed the substantial savings.
How is this like science fiction?
The history of science fiction is rife with stories of people who seize the means of production. The classical “problem story” – in which an engineer has to figure out how to repurpose some machine or system to make it work in ways its creator never intended – is, at root, a story about technological self-determination. It’s a story that says that the person who uses the machine matters more than the person who designed it or bought it.
You don’t have to go turn to cyberpunk to find this ethic: when a Heinlein character like Kip Russell uses duct-tape and ingenuity to save his friend’s life on the lunar surface in [Robert A. Heinlein’s novel] Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, he’s unilaterally remapping the social relations of the technology he depends on, as a matter of life and death. Kip Russell is a Luddite, convinced that his own welfare is more important than the intentions and choices of the company that made his spacesuit.
Endpiece
Quiet day at home. Most significant event is that I began cleaning my two library rooms on the ground floor by the garage. My computer desk, the center of operations throughout the day, was moved up onto the main floor of the house in the weeks following my return from the hospital last June. Mainly so that Y could keep an eye on me, especially if I had another attack like I did last April. But there were other benefits: the ground floor is chilly, most of the year, and the main floor has a much better view of the street, and the bay in the distance.
And I had not let the housecleaners (which we resumed a couple months ago) into those rooms. I’ve never wanted them spraying Pledge, or whatever, onto the book cases and contaminating the books. Thus it’s grown very dusty down there. I have cleaned those rooms periodically, of course, but not for at least the past two years. So today I began the careful process of wiping down the dusty shelves (with very very slightly damp paper towels) and the tops of books (with a brush attachment from the small vacuum cleaner I’ve had for 40 years), and then arranging books that have become disordered back into findable positions. This will take another couple days to finish.
And then, as I’ve said, we will move that exercycle from the garage into that room, for my future exercise.
