Why people HATE automation — Transcript

The night the frames broke. Nottinghamshire, 1811, and the first [music] great fight over automation. On a cold night in November, 1811, in the villages north of Nottingham, a group of men moved quietly through the dark. Some had blackened their faces with soot. Some carried hammers. They knew which houses they were looking for and which machines. They were framework knitters, skilled workers [music] who made stockings and lace on hand-operated machines called stocking frames.

Many of them rented those frames and worked [music] at home, paid by the piece. And that winter, they were [music] hungry. Britain was at war with Napoleon. Trade routes to Europe and America had been choked off. Bread was expensive, orders [music] were scarce, and wages were falling. Into this squeeze came a change in how the trade worked. Some hosiers, the merchants who sold the finished goods, [music] had begun using wide frames to knit large sheets of fabric, which were then cut and sewn into cheap stockings called cut-ups.

The cut-ups were [music] shotty. They unraveled. But, they were cheap and they could be made by workers who had never served an apprenticeship at lower rates. To the knitters, this was not progress. It was a broken [music] bargain. So, they broke the frames. The raids [music] were disciplined. The men targeted particular machines in particular workshops, [music] often those belonging to employers who paid below the customary [music] rate.

Neighboring frames were sometimes left untouched. Afterward, letters appeared signed by a mysterious commander, Ned Ludd, or General Ludd. Or, with a touch of theater, King Lud. There was no such person. Lud was a legend, a name borrowed from a story about an apprentice who had smashed a frame in a fit of anger years before. But a leader who didn't exist was very hard to [music] arrest.

By early 1812, the movement had spread [music] north. In Yorkshire, the croppers, highly paid craftsmen who finished [music] woolen cloth with enormous hand shears, faced shearing frames that could do their work with a fraction of the labor. In Lancashire, handloom weavers watched [music] power looms arrive in the cotton mills. The grievances were different in detail and identical in spirit. A way of life and the wage that supported it >> [music] >> was being dismantled from above.

In Yorkshire, the croppers weapon of choice was a heavy sledgehammer they nicknamed Enoch. The name came from Enoch Taylor, a blacksmith in the village of Marsden whose firm, run with [music] his brother James, built many of the very shearing frames the croppers hated. [music] The hammers and the machines came out of the same forge. >> [music] >> The croppers turned that irony into a grim slogan. Enoch made them and Enoch shall break them. The government's answer was force.

Thousands of [music] soldiers were sent into the disturbed counties. Spies and informers were paid to infiltrate the groups. And in February 1812, Parliament moved to make frame-breaking a capital crime punishable by death. Not everyone in Westminster agreed. On the 27th of February, a 24-year-old poet rose in the House of Lords to give his first [music] speech. His name was George Gordon, Lord Byron.

He had traveled widely and he wanted his fellow peers to understand what he had seen at home. "I have traversed the seat of war in the peninsula," he said. "I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces [music] of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness [music] as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country." The bill passed anyways.

That spring, the conflict turned violent in earnest. In April 1812, a large band of Luddites attacked Rawfolds Mill >> [music] >> in West Yorkshire, where the owner, William Cartwright, had fortified the building and was waiting with armed soldiers. The attack failed. Two of the attackers were mortally wounded. Weeks later, another mill owner, William Horsfall, was shot and killed on his way home from market. The reckoning came in January 1813 [music] at a special court convened in York.

When the trials were over, 17 men had been sentenced to hang. Others were transported to the penal colonies of Australia. The hangings were public and the message was unmistakable. The movement faded after that, though it flickered back to life in later years. Trade eventually recovered after the war. Wages never fully did. Within a generation, the handloom weavers of Lancashire, once among the best-paid workers in England, were among the poorest. [music] Here is the part we usually get wrong.

Today, Luddite is an insult. It means someone who fears technology, who doesn't understand it, who wants to stop [music] the clock. But the original Luddites understood their machines intimately. [music] Many of them had worked at frames for decades. They weren't opposed to machinery as such. They [music] were opposed to a particular use of machinery. One that cut wages, degraded quality, and ignored the customs [music] that had governed their trade.

One of their songs put the demand plainly. It called for [music] full-fashioned work at the old-fashioned price, established, in the song's words, by custom and law. That is not the language of people who hate technology. It's the language of people negotiating over who gets the gains. They lost that negotiation. They lost it with hammers in the dark [music] against an army and a parliament that had already decided whose interests counted.

Every decision to deploy a new machine is also a decision [music] about people. Whose skills will be devalued, whose earnings will rise, and whose voice will count? In 1812, the employers made that choice alone with an army behind them. The usual story leaves that part out. Two centuries later, we are having the same argument again. The machines are different. They write, reason, draw, and drive. [music] But the questions underneath haven't changed much at all.

Who owns the new tools? [music] Who decides how they get used? And when productivity rises, who gets the raise? The Luddites asked those questions first. >> [music] >> They deserve to be remembered for asking them, not mocked for losing.