Inconceivable!

Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), from The Princess Bride, via YouTube.com

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

For anyone not familiar with The Princess Bride, go watch it. I’ll wait. (The tragic death of director Rob Reiner may lead to many new people watching this wonderful film, and many others to re-watch it. A true masterpiece.)

For everyone else, just enjoy the exchange between Inigo Montoya (played by Mandy Patinkin), and Vizzini (played by Wallace Shawn).

Now that everyone has seen the film, I can note that “inconceivable” is the word in question. While there is a pedantic argument to be made that Vizzini is using it in the sense of something being extremely unlikely, the word implies that something is impossible to even imagine, and he uses the word with near-inconceivable frequency.

This got me thinking about other words that are misused or misunderstood. I don’t mean things like the debate about Alanis Morissette’s song Ironic, or “affect” vs “effect”, or even the use of the word literally, which I discussed previously.

And, while a great many people use the word without understanding what it means, I don’t even want to talk about the word “socialist” again (at least not yet).

The word I had in mind was “Luddite”.

Like most people, (I assume), I understood the word as referring to people who were reluctant to adopt new technology, but thought that the reasons were around nervousness or being uncomfortable with change. I associated the term more with my Dad’s failure to appreciate the value of the brick-sized phone I bought in the mid-1990’s.

In fact, the Luddites were members of a group of 19th-century textile workers in England, who opposed certain types of machinery due to concerns about worker pay and treatment. They opposed and destroyed certain machinery as a means of protest.

I recently mentioned the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, and noted the loss of jobs experienced in the textiles industry, but the human cost of this process is often underestimated. In the course of shifting from small-scale spinning and weaving, where the equipment was owned by the workers, the expense of the emerging technology and the scale of the new operations meant that the new factories were owned by those wealthy enough to afford to build them. This ultimately led to widespread abuse of workers, who were now receiving poor wages to work under poor conditions, including long hours, unsafe equipment, child labour, and harsh treatment by supervisors. In addition, variations in the availability of raw materials led to unpredictable fluctuations in wages and levels of employment.

For more on the working conditions, perhaps consider the works of Charles Dickens, but that may be too light-hearted for some of what was happening in these early days...

Or, consider the fact that the English textile industry was used in Das Kapital as an example of many of the problems with capitalism, particularly around the idea that workers should own the means of production.

In any case, the Luddites were often people who understood the machinery they were destroying, and their actions were a means of protest, rather than having anything to do with a dislike for technology per se.

Members of the group identified themselves as followers of “Ned Ludd”, who, according to legend, destroyed two stocking frames in a fit of passion. Whatever the truth of the story, he was appropriated as the “leader” and “founder” of the Luddites, who credited him with acts of sabotage, and signed his name to letters and proclamations.

At the peak of the movement, between about 1811 and 1816, England’s economy was suffering from issues including the effects of the Napoleonic Wars, low birth rates, and the disruption caused by the rapid introduction of new technologies. At this time, large-scale strikes were not practical due to the fact that factories were scattered quite broadly throughout the country. As an alternative, damaging machines was an effective way of putting pressure on employers, and was described as “collective bargaining by riot”, by historian Eric Hobsbawm.

While they were often referred to as if they were a single group, Luddites are better described as members of a movement made up of many smaller groups. Some of these groups were well-organized, and adapted their tactics to the region in which they operated. In addition to sabotage, they coordinated public demonstrations and sent letters to local industrialists and government officials. These letters explained why they were destroying machines, and focused on such issues as child labour, working times, and recognition of workers’ groups.

Predictably enough, though, labour conditions did not improve, and escalations on both sides eventually led to violent clashes between Luddite supporters and government troops. In response, 12,000 government troops were deployed, and harsh sentences were given to people convicted of crimes connected to Luddite activism. After a number of executions and transportation to penal colonies, “machine breaking” (ie, industrial sabotage) was made a capital crime, effectively ending the Luddite movement.

Given that context, I find it entirely unsurprising that many would like to emphasize the machine-breaking and downplay the concerns around working conditions.

Are concerns about how new technology will affect working conditions really so different today? Are workers better off when their supervisors know there location at all times? Are workers safer when the focus is on speed?

Often, if someone raises concerns about location tracking, surveillance, AI, robotics, self-driving cars, the gig economy, or the use of pretty much any other technology in the workplace, you’re likely to see people accused of being “Luddites” who are afraid of new technology and talk about the risk of “falling behind”, and so on.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?

Cheers!