The singularity can be stopped
Justin Pickard
Present tense
Justin Pickard attempts to derail the engine of human progress, with a little help from General Ludd
T his year marks the 200th anniversary of the Luddite strike on Rawfolds Mill in Yorkshire, England, one of the more ambitious attempts at machine-breaking and, crucially, the Luddite movement’s first defeat.
The attack on Rawfolds Mill was led by a group of croppers armed with pistols, hatchets and muskets. Trained to remove the fuzz from the surface of finished cloth, these skilled, relatively well-paid workers feared that the mill-owner’s adoption of fifty new “shearing frames”, powered by the water mill, would put them out of work. Gunfire from the mob was followed by retaliations from a skeleton crew of guards and militiamen stationed inside the mill. The building had recently been fortified in anticipation of such an event; the defenders used a newly fitted bell to attract the attention of a British cavalry regiment stationed nearby. The bell’s knell echoed across the moors. Spooked by the likely arrival of military reinforcements, the attackers abandoned their more serious casualties and beat a hasty retreat.
A closer look at this early 19th century churn may have lessons for us yet. The social and structural dislocations of the 1810s mirror the shifts and transformations of our own age – a world described by Bruce Sterling as “cyberneticised, globalised, liberal capitalism in financial collapse”. For instance, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s business school have noticed that US employment has declined since the recession of 2008/9; in the same period, economic output has risen. They reckon computer technology is at least part of the explanation. In July this year, in the Technology Review , McAfee explained: “A tax preparer can get automated away by software like TurboTax, and just not find work anymore.” He also pointed to the massive increases in productivity ushered in by digital technology. “An example is the legal discovery process. By one estimate we heard, one lawyer is now as productive as five hundred used to be. You might not lay off five hundred lawyers, but the next time you might hire a few people and some software to read documents.”
And if the plight of lawyers does not move you, consider the predictions of Marshall Brain, the founder of HowStuffWorks . According to projections set out in his essay “Robotic Nation ”, humanoid robots will be commonplace by 2030, and able to replace people in retail, food service, and house cleaning. More than half of all Americans could be unemployed by 2055.
As the spectre of structural unemployment haunts a new generation, networks of like-minded people are learning to collaborate to solve problems, protest laws, and raise funds. What solutions will they hit upon? What chance have they of success? Will these movements embrace threatening technologies? Repurpose them? Or will they simply try to smash them? On 12 February 2012, the following statement, purporting to originate with the Hacktivist movement Anonymous, was posted on Pastebin:
“To protest [the Stop Online Piracy Act] , Wall Street, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun, on March 31, Anonymous will shut the internet down.”
So much for that.
The resources of other brands of viral iconoclasm are altogether more terrifying. But even if your act of destruction attains global, 9/11-scale impact, is it an effective way of halting history? To find out, I set off on the trail of Luddism’s patient zero: cross-dressing saboteur, petitioner, and extraordinary popular delusion, the ever-elusive General Ned Ludd.
Rough music
Luddism was born against a backdrop of privatisation, as rich landlords colluded with central government to facilitate the enclosure of forests and public rights of way. “Landlords,” says social historian Katrina Navickas, “enclosed large swathes of the Pennines to take advantage of rising land and food prices, and to enact an ‘agricultural revolution’ by making farming much larger-scale.”
The movement took its name from the Leicestershire shorthand for a machine-breaker. That moniker, in turn, derived from the name of a feckless worker who was supposed to have destroyed two mechanical knitting machines in an angry outburst back in 1779. By the 1810s, Ludd had acquired yet another, military meaning. In a skirmish, whoever proved themselves the most capable practical leader was dubbed General Ludd. His was a tactical identity, assumed as and when it served the aims of the movement, and thrown aside once it had outlived its utility. General Ludd could not be killed, for he had never truly lived.
“Part of the reason for using a mythical folk hero,” says Navickas, “was that he represented older customary forms of justice, which intended to ‘turn the world upside down’ and impose community authority over wrong-doers.” She is thinking, in particular, of “rough music”, where transgressors were taunted with a loud, discordant wall of sound as their indignant neighbours resorted to hastily improvised instruments, loud songs and word-of-mouth to enforce community norms. These traditions, though unpleasant, provided a pressure valve for the community: a levelling mechanism, with which the vain and antisocial could be brought low; and a means to address, and correct for, a wide range of social grievances.
In addition to its acts of machine-breaking and organised raids – the recourse of the desperate – Luddism had a powerful impact on popular attitudes, as protesters sought to undermine the authority of the magistrates and thief-takers with a tide of threatening letters, songs and bogus legal summonses. Straddling oral and written culture, the traditions of rough music delivered a clear message, according to Navickas: “The workers had lost faith in the legal process to protect them, and therefore mocked it and tried to make it their own.”
This is an impulse familiar to today’s digirati, many of whom still cling to the belief that information technology can at best transcend (or at least, offer a genuine alternative to) realpolitik, brute force and physical coercion. On 8 February 1996, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s John Perry Barlow issued “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” from Davos, Switzerland: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
We had heard this sort of thing before. For Kevin Binfield, author of Writings of the Luddites , it seemed, for a time, that the various missives of General Ludd had opened the space for dissent – a space quickly filled “both by protesters in enlarging their demands for change and by the authorities in their attempts to come to terms with what seemed to them a many-tentacled underground conspiracy.” From the outside, this gave the Luddites the impression of being – like the social-media-wielding movements of the Arab Spring – far more organised and cohesive than they actually were.
Alas, the antisocial transgressions this rough music was supposed to punish were being delivered from the very top of society. They were part and parcel of a nationwide campaign of land enclosure and profit-seeking mechanisation. Community-level folk justice proved to be a wholly inadequate defence. Luddism failed.
Engines of progress
Many of the more whiggish among us talk about the singularity; that future moment when our technological creations gain the ability to self-bootstrap, lighting the fuse on an era of exponential change. Proponents cast the singularity as an event horizon: a veil of ignorance, behind which our capacity to predict or forecast rapidly breaks down. What they miss is that this technological singularity would be only the latest in a long line of earth-shattering paradigm shifts. The development of human language. The discovery of fire. The birth of agriculture. The first cities. The settlement of the New World. The Luddites erupted from the traumas and tumult of their own singularity: the development of the steam engine.
In his 1995 book Rebels Against the Future , US environmentalist Kirkpatrick Sale points out precisely how threatening the first steam engines must have seemed. They were, he reminds us, “the first manufacturing technology in human history that was, in a sense, independent of nature, of geography and season and weather, of sun or wind or water or human or animal power.” By Sale’s calculations, the spread of steam-powered looms followed an exponential curve. In 1813 there were an estimated 2400 such looms operating in Britain, but by 1820 the number had grown to 14,150. And steam looms went on multiplying, like mushrooms in a waterlogged basement, as the century rolled on: a mechanical-alchemical means to turn 300-million-year-old forests into rotary action. As Apple said of the iPhone: “This changes everything.”
As we trace the lineage of uncanny technology, it does not require a very great leap of the imagination to equate the steam engine then with the high-frequency trading algorithm now: both are alien intelligences put to work by bankers and high finance to spin straw into gold. The algorithms are Alan Turing’s stepchildren. Born in 1912, a century after the events of Rawfolds Mill, Turing delivered computer science into the world: a squalling lump of half-cooked logic. Before Turing, a machine was hardware and nothing more. With function determined by form, it could perform one or maybe two specific, well-defined tasks. A Regency-era shearing frame could finish cloth to a consumer-grade standard, but it couldn’t play chess. Turing changed all that, with an idea for a machine that could simulate any other procedural calculation.
Though the Turing machine as described was never realised, Turing’s later writings on stored-program computers prepared the ground for electronic computing and knocked human history down a very peculiar path. As biologist-turned-literary critic N. Katherine Hayles points out in her 2005 book, My Mother Was a Computer , in the 1930s and 40s “computer” was a title given to clerical staff who were employed to do calculations. “Computing” was a pink-collar job.
In a post-war US of picket fences and nuclear fission, prognosticators began to suggest that the spread of increasingly efficient production technologies would deliver a substantial economic dividend, freeing many from the tyranny of work. By the 1960s, it seemed like a bright future of super-abundance was just around the corner. In 1964 a coalition of activists, technologists, and academics delivered “The Triple Revolution ”, an open memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The signatories pointed out that “wealth produced by machines… is still wealth”, and used this to argue for more a equitable distribution of global profits.
The 1973 oil shock saw the dream stumble. Stagflation, energy shortages and social unrest called into question the post-war futurists’ blueprints for a global leisure society. At the same time, computers were opening the door to a whole new realm of screen-based employment. For much of the late 20th century, economists and businessmen continued to rubbish the Luddite creed that technology necessarily put people out of work, even as low-skilled jobs were outsourced to the developing world. In the 21st century, however, things have begun to shift.
It is becoming easier and easier to automate white-collar jobs, and to do so more quickly than ever before. Wealth is becoming more concentrated, and more middle-class workers are getting left behind. At the 2011 World Economic Forum (again, in Davos), income inequality and corruption were singled out as the two most serious challenges facing the world. Richard Freeman, professor of economics at Harvard University, sums up the picture : “The triumph of globalisation and market capitalism has improved living standards for billions while concentrating billions among the few. It has lowered inequality worldwide but raised inequality within most countries.”
In a world of bailouts, austerity, and crowd-funding, General Ludd urges us to keep a wary eye on the technological juggernaut, and remember that new technologies have far-reaching consequences. An unbottled genie can transform the world.
There may yet be hope. While the signs of dislocation are as evident in the 2010s as they were in the 1810s, with events playing out against a background of war, economic depression, political unrest and radical social innovation, perhaps we’re better served by Mark Twain’s observation that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”.
Voltaire’s garden
For technology strategist Simone Cicero, today’s deck seems less stacked in favour of established interests. In much the same way that digital technologies have democratised the tools of professional photographers and film-makers, advances in rapid manufacturing, social media, and open-source software have opened the door to a very different kind of world. “In the longer term,” he says, “the tools are becoming more user-friendly, with new knowledge increasingly accessible, and far more evenly distributed.”
French ethnographer Stefana Broadbent , an expert in environmental psychology and domestic technology, sees the seeds of a shift back to some kind of smaller-scale, cottage industry. “It may actually be the financial crisis which sees the reintroduction other activities into the home,” she says. “In the case of manufacturing, there does seem to be the scope for some form of simplified home production.” While Broadbent is unconvinced that domestic manufacturing will spring, fully formed, from the DIY-ification of consumer-grade 3D printing, continuing economic uncertainty may, she concedes, be enough for people to begin viewing their homes as a possible source of productive capacity, resilience, and, eventually, income. Perhaps we should follow Voltaire’s advice, then, and each tend to his own garden.
Still, I wonder: what would happen if the Occupy movement focused their ire on those trading algorithms? The much-mooted Robin Hood tax on financial transactions could be joined by a Ned Ludd tax on machine-generated wealth, with the proceeds helping catapult us into the long-predicted 21-hour work week.
With a vacuum-formed Guy Fawkes mask strapped to your face and a pitchfork held aloft, ask yourself: what would the General have us do?