Rethinking the Luddites

When a dollar store moves into an area, it provides most products for cheaper than an independent grocer possibly can, inevitably putting the local grocer out of business. It's sad for the grocer, but surely it's for the benefit of the community as a whole, right? Everything is cheaper! Except that the dollar store doesn't sell produce, and it just put the store that did out of business.

I see a similar trend with automation: it can do most of the job far cheaper than the specialist can, so short-term rationality says we should embrace it completely. But then the specialist goes away, and we don't have access to them anymore for the things that automation is bad at.

When you call in to customer support you can't talk to a human, because they replaced them with chat bots. When you need a good website designer because Wix won't cut it, they're out of your price range because the only ones left are working for large companies. When you want a new book, you can't find one written by a human, not because the robots have gotten as good as a good author, but because they've gotten good enough to spam the marketplaces so thoroughly that writing a good book isn't profitable anymore.

That's not entirely fair. The main downside Capitalism has in this discussion is that the wellbeing of the people is not even one of it's stated goals. You can argue all you like about Socialism being a failed ideology, or impossibly utopian, that's it's own conversation. But it makes the common welfare a stated goal to strive for. Capitalism does not.

Capitalism's goal is to maximize the creation wealth by allowing individuals to privately hold wealth and efficiently leverage it to produce more wealth. Currently, humans are a crucial element in the production of wealth, which has allowed labor to capture some amount of that wealth for themselves. But that's not central to Capitalism. If you can generate massive amounts of wealth and give none of it to your workforce, you've succeeded at Capitalism, even if it means the 90+% of the population who don't own much capital at all starve in the streets.

In contrast, Communism's stated goal is the achievement of a classless, moneyless society that provides to each according to their need, and each works according to their ability. Unlike Capitalism, the elimination of the necessity of labor doesn't intrinsically cause everybody to starve. It just dwindles away the necessity of the "from each according to their ability" part.

So you can argue about what other better solutions there are, but if we're pushing towards a world with less and less need for human labor, Capitalism is flatly untenable. Capitalism's answer to human labor being optional is that the former labor class dies.

There are many things twisted like this in our living memory and it irritates the hell out of me. How do we deal with it aside from endlessly correcting people? Indeed, Luddites weren't against technology.

The McDonald's hot coffee lady case wasn't frivolous.

"The customer is always right..."? Yeah, "... in matters of taste." It means you don't sell a customer who wants a green car a red one.

The "welfare queen" story wasn't about a woman who was lazy and collecting benefits, she just fit a profile that matched peoples' prejudice. It's difficult to stay on the government dole and there's a lot of conditions for receiving it. Defrauding them can disqualify you from further benefits or land you in the slammer. People aren't out there living the high life off of SS.

Sorry if it seems scattershot, I'm just describing other things that get twisted far away from their original circumstance, usually just to enable anti social behavior, like calling someone who takes a careful approach to technology a Luddite.

So it's okay to perform the harmful act, knowing the harm it will cause, as long as you leave yourself the out of being able to say it'd have come to nothing had others declined to participate? I once heard a heroin dealer make a similar claim.

Why is it people like yourself can not learn from history? I'm all for moving in a better healthier direction, i'm not interested in repeating the mistakes of the past. For all its failings, capitalism has done more to improve the lives of every human on this planet more than any other system before.

The burden of proof is thus on those who want to destroy it, to prove they have a viable and useful alternative that will ACTUALLY make the lives of people better. Instead, what I see is a direction that is guaranteed to lead to bloodshed and misery, with only a dreamers hope that what comes afterward is any better.