Beside the point, but IMO, all podcasts should have a transcription option as well. I unfortunately just don't have the attention span to listen to hours of people talking, but put it in text format and I have zero issues.
I'm not against technology: I'm against inferior technology. I know what you can build with a computer: with a smartphone not so much. I don't see many professional sound engineers, architects, chip engineers, developers and all the myriad of profession requiring serious tools to do serious work working from their mobile phone or from their Internet-of-Insecure-Shitty-Poinless-Thing-with-a-3-inches-screen (yup, I know, there's that one guy who made a hit pop music tune using only his smartphone, but that's more than uncommon).<p>Yet because there are a very select few megastar who became famous because they kept posting selfies taken with their smartphones, we are to believe that the smartphone "is the new computer".<p>Luddite? What about we talk about the specs of my workstation vs your IoT device? We'll see who's adopting modern tech ; )
This is a synopsis of the book described here: <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/3184-breaking-things-at-work" rel="nofollow">https://www.versobooks.com/books/3184-breaking-things-at-wor...</a> Breaking Things at Work. The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job, by Gavin Mueller<p>The basic gist is that <i>software</i> is eating people's jobs, and everything has to be an /app/ these days or it's not credible.
I was trying to get a zoomer relative of mine interested in technology. I said, "let's mine cryptocurrency." He didn't want to because, according to him, "that's hacking." Kids these days!
This resonates with me. Two different people at a job dubbed me "The Technological Luddite" because of, among other things, my lack of a cell phone, the absence of a Facebook page, pointing out where the "all you have to do is ..." algorithms break, and so on.<p>I will admit it, I prefer the downslope of the Hype Cycle. I choose boring technology. At the end of the day, I am trying to solve problems, and playing with new stuff often doesn't pay out for solving those problems.<p>I related this once on another site: we had this process that was heavily manual and the people performing the task would want this part at the end automated, or maybe a reminder email at the end, or some instructions here ... can we just <i>do</i> that part by computer? Bit by bit, the process maxed out on automation.<p>And then the people who asked for the automation were fired and replaced with minimum wage intern types. Also, the final product was inferior but hey ...<p>I think technology <i>can</i> be marvelous but we often do stupid things with it, ending up in unemployment and some crap results, like "American cheese."
A better term than Luddite may be obstructionist. Hackers object to new technology due to their disagreeing with everything Cloud, Tracking, limited user rights, DRM, etc.
Jonathan Corbet in this week's LWN:<p>> Your editor recently moved house; part of that move involved carefully packing up the dust-covered household television set, gently transporting it to the new home, and lovingly moving it to its new location — followed by gracelessly dropping it on the floor while lifting it into place. The search for a replacement involved asking a salesman for a reasonable "non-smart" television, a request that was met with mirthful incredulity. It would appear that such things no longer exist; all televisions are built to be placed on the network now.<p><a href="https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/850218/d38e18d65e4d8fc5/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/850218/d38e18d65e4d8fc5/</a>
I sense a trend <a href="https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-happens-to-tech-workers-when-their-skills-become-obsolete?utm_source=pocket-newtab" rel="nofollow">https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-happens-to-tech-work...</a>
Oh how timely, Gavin Mueller, the first author mentioned here, is part of a this panel tomorrow <a href="https://twitter.com/SciSocJournal/status/1368662709923966983" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/SciSocJournal/status/1368662709923966983</a> with Aaron Benanov.<p>My take from reading some of each is that the disagreement is more superficial: Benanov has a soft spot for what automation could be but is very much keen on chronicling the economic context it's actually gone down in, while Mueller likes to criticize "actually existing automation" itself.<p>But, I guess we'll see how it actually goes down tomorrow.
Hah, you should see the comment threads in some of the European nation subreddits on Reddit, whenever an article mentioning FAANG / Big Tech comes up.<p>They <i>really</i> want to burn them.
If you find this conversation interesting you might want to check out this Ep of The Filter: Our Glorious Future as Amish or Termites.<p>See <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6uSd3fSZz3gg6idbdUyvKB" rel="nofollow">https://open.spotify.com/episode/6uSd3fSZz3gg6idbdUyvKB</a>
I was going to say no but then I realized I would be unfairly judging the actual Luddites. (I would like to say that I am going by the podcast blurp rather than its content so they may very well cover the point I am making).<p>Hackers seem to oppose 'new' things in the technology space because most of them limit us and bind us to monolithic entity. Similarly, Luddites did not <i>technically</i> oppose technology but rather were outraged at their own loss of autonomy as crafts were replaced by mechanized, industrial production. Really the opposition of large, opaque, and closed software and services has very similar underlying drives as that of the Luddites. It's then not really a surprise when Marxist themes (some would say more libertarian but in practice not really) are somewhat common in open source & hacker spaces.