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 Mueller12 Bytes by Jeanette WintersonGavin 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
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