Everything is futile, resist the machines

In early industrialization, workers' sabotage of machines was treated as a serious crime.

"On March 5, [1812,] two days after Childe Harold was published, the Frame Work Bill passed both hosues of Parliament.
Anyone convicted of dismantling a machine could now be put to death."
— Brian Merchant. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Little Brown and Company, 2023.

It maks me think that, if you were to ask a political scientist today: Terrorism is ideologically motivated violence against what or whom? they'd likely answer: Civilians. But 200 years ago, there was a different prevailing view: Terrorism was workers' intentional destruction of a rich man's property.

The Luddites weren’t necessarily protesting machines, Merchant explains, but “the social costs of technological ‘progress’” forced upon them, according to Ruha Benjamin in Race after Technology. Imani Perry says that they were resisting “the conversion of oneself into a machine,” especially for the purpose of making someone else rich.

“It is deemed only rational to surrender and rejoice in new conveniences and harmonies, to wrap ourselves in the first text and embrace a violent ignorance of its shadow.”<
— Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.

"The thin line between flourishing and failure is also a theme of the [Sukkot] holiday’s scripture. In synagogue, Jews traditionally read the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, a ponderous and often pessimistic tract that opens with the famous words: 'Futility of futilities, everything is futile.' But the original Hebrew holds a secret that is not readily apparent in translation. The Hebrew word for 'futility' is havel or הבל. The word for 'everything' is hakol or הכל. As you can see from the lettering, the difference between the two words is a single stroke of the scribe’s pen. That’s all it takes to turn 'everything' into nothing, utility into futility. Observing this point, the Oxford scholar John Jarick wrote, 'we might say that [Ecclesiastes] has crafted the most compact form of parallelism to be found in the Hebrew Bible.' It is as though the biblical author wanted to illustrate how the slightest shift in a life story can completely change its contents."
— Yair Rosenberg. When You’re Not in Control of Your Life This week’s Jewish holiday reminds us that the line between our success and failure is thinner and more fragile than we like to think. The Atlantic, Oct 4, 2023.