The cotton gin: 'The most disastrous case of unintended consequences'

"The African slave trade is the most dramatic chapter in the story of human existence."
— Deborah G. Plant, introduction to Zora Neale Hurston. Barracoon. Amistad, 2018.

"[In 1793, Eli] Whitney's machine separated those [sticky green] seeds from the white cotton balls with a hand crank or a horse pull. ... Whitney even suggested that his device could help end slavery, since laborers would no longer have to do the unpleasant work of picking the seeds out by hand.
That is not what happened. Instead, the cotton gin is one of the original sins of automated technology, and the most disastrous case of unintended consequences unleashed upon the world this side of the nuclear bomb. Whitney's machine was widely pirated, modded, and adopted by plantation owners, who saw little need to compensate the inventor. 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. ...it helped sustain the institution of slavery for another seventy years."
— Brian Merchant. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Little Brown and Company, 2023.

(Later in the book, Merchant says that so-called "automation," when used as a pretext to "hide and degrade" human labor, is — as Astra Taylor calls it — "fauxtomation.")

"...the United States does not have a legitimate history of integrity and fairness. It’s been run by villains that make Disney’s look like saints. Racism is not a byproduct as much as it’s the foundational stock in the American soup. This is why Black people are still fighting to be recognized in our full humanity."
— Luvvie Ajayi. I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual. New York: Henry Holt, 2016. p. 72.

“..a majority of white voters backed a candidate who assured them that they will never have to share this country with people of color as equals. That is the reality that all Americans will have to deal with and one that most of the country has yet to confront.”
— Adam Serwer. The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America. New York: One World, 2021. Chapter: “The Nationalist’s Delusion.”

Image by Josch13 from Pixabay

If you'd like to learn more about this period in history (the early 1800s) elsewhere, I wrote about the Jena collective in Germany during the end of Immanuel Kant's life. It's paywalled. Readers with a paid membership to Medium can read it.