EP 421: AI, Automation, and the Case for Luddism

I am on board when it comes to technological progress. I look forward to updating my devices (although I don’t do it as frequently as I used to). New apps and features excite me. I’m pretty quick to adapt to change. 

I am not a Luddite. Or so I thought. 

“The word Luddite still means an old-fashioned type who is anti-progress,” writes Jeanette Winterson in her book 12 Bytes. “But the Luddites of the early 19th century were not against progress; they were against exploitation.” Reading these lines was the first time what the Luddite movement actually stood for really sank in. Where I had once seen atavism and fear, I now saw labor politics I could get behind.

When I picked up Gavin Mueller’s Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job, I did so to learn more about the radical roots of Luddism and how the movement could inform my own thinking on the future of work. I also picked it up amidst the current fervor over AI and debates about whether the robots were finally coming for writers’ jobs.

In this episode, I share my favorite ideas from Mueller's book and apply them to commonplace tools like project management apps (ClickUp, Asana, etc.) and social media scheduling apps. I think you'll have a different perspective on tech once you've listened!

Footnotes:

• Breaking Things At Work by Gavin Mueller
• 12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson
• Gavin Mueller on the Chris Voss show (YouTube)
• "AI and Automation are destroying jobs, not work" via Quartz (YouTube)
• "Dear YouTube, creators keep burning out. Here's the fix." via Channel Makers (YouTube)
• "Creator burnout is real. 6 ways to recover" via Sidewalker Daily (YouTube)
• My 2021 TEDx talk on remarkable work
• "Kids at Work, Games as Labor, Content as Product, and Surplus Elite" by me on Substack
• "The Game is Rigged: Rethinking the Creator Economy" by me on Substack
• "Intelligence Superabundance" by Packy McCormick on Not Boring
• "Moss introduces Jen to the internet" from The IT Crowd (YouTube)
• "You have to start talking" via GaryVee Video Experience (YouTube)

• (00:00) - EP 421: AI, Automation, and the Case for Luddism
• (05:03) - Luddism as Political Struggle
• (08:04) - Marker
• (09:28) - Marker
• (20:43) - Marker
• (31:54) - Marker