Jak's View of Vancouver v.3

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Whether you like his movies or not, Arnold Schwarzenegger has developed into one of the great motivators and humanists of our age. I missed this speech of his when it first came out some months ago, but it fits perfectly with the hate-filled world we face today. It is 12 minutes well worth your time.

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I would guess that many people who know me would — absent my computer use — consider me a Luddite: I own no car, no mobile phone, no microwave, I’ve never been on Facebook, I don’t watch much TV, and I have very little time for the things out there.

I might have argued that the term should NOT apply to me because I don’t agree with mindless destruction. But an excellent article in The Conversation has straightened me out on the history of Luddism and I now gleefully accept the designation.

“Our circumstances today are more similar to theirs than it might seem, as new technologies are being used to transform our own working and social conditions — think increases in employee surveillance during lockdowns, or exploitation by gig labour platforms. It’s time we reconsider the lessons of Luddism …

“The contemporary usage of Luddite has the machine-smashing part correct — but that’s about all it gets right. First, the Luddites were not indiscriminate. They were intentional and purposeful about which machines they smashed. They targeted those owned by manufacturers who were known to pay low wages, disregard workers’ safety, and/or speed up the pace of work. Even within a single factory — which would contain machines owned by different capitalists — some machines were destroyed and others pardoned depending on the business practices of their owners …

“Luddism was a working-class movement opposed to the political consequences of industrial capitalism. The Luddites wanted technology to be deployed in ways that made work more humane and gave workers more autonomy. The bosses, on the other hand, wanted to drive down costs and increase productivity …

“It wasn’t the invention of these machines that provoked the Luddites to action. They only banded together once factory owners began using these machines to displace and disempower workers …

Sounds so much like today.

“Today, new technologies are being used to alter our lives, societies and working conditions no less profoundly than mechanical looms were used to transform those of the original Luddites. The excesses of big tech companies – Amazon’s inhumane exploitation of workers in warehouses driven by automation and machine vision, Uber’s gig-economy lobbying and disregard for labour law, Facebook’s unchecked extraction of unprecedented amounts of user data – are driving a public backlash that may contain the seeds of a neo-Luddite movement …

A neo-Luddite movement would understand no technology is sacred in itself, but is only worthwhile insofar as it benefits society. It would confront the harms done by digital capitalism and seek to address them by giving people more power over the technological systems that structure their lives.”

Well-worth taking the time to read the article.

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I would guess that many people who know me would — absent my computer use — consider me a Luddite: I own no car, no mobile phone, no microwave, I’ve never been on Facebook, I don’t watch much TV, and I have very little time for the things out there.

I might have argued that the term should NOT apply to me because I don’t agree with mindless destruction. But an excellent article in The Conversation has straightened me out on the history of Luddism and I now gleefully accept the designation.

“Our circumstances today are more similar to theirs than it might seem, as new technologies are being used to transform our own working and social conditions — think increases in employee surveillance during lockdowns, or exploitation by gig labour platforms. It’s time we reconsider the lessons of Luddism …

“The contemporary usage of Luddite has the machine-smashing part correct — but that’s about all it gets right. First, the Luddites were not indiscriminate. They were intentional and purposeful about which machines they smashed. They targeted those owned by manufacturers who were known to pay low wages, disregard workers’ safety, and/or speed up the pace of work. Even within a single factory — which would contain machines owned by different capitalists — some machines were destroyed and others pardoned depending on the business practices of their owners …

“Luddism was a working-class movement opposed to the political consequences of industrial capitalism. The Luddites wanted technology to be deployed in ways that made work more humane and gave workers more autonomy. The bosses, on the other hand, wanted to drive down costs and increase productivity …

“It wasn’t the invention of these machines that provoked the Luddites to action. They only banded together once factory owners began using these machines to displace and disempower workers …

Sounds so much like today.

“Today, new technologies are being used to alter our lives, societies and working conditions no less profoundly than mechanical looms were used to transform those of the original Luddites. The excesses of big tech companies – Amazon’s inhumane exploitation of workers in warehouses driven by automation and machine vision, Uber’s gig-economy lobbying and disregard for labour law, Facebook’s unchecked extraction of unprecedented amounts of user data – are driving a public backlash that may contain the seeds of a neo-Luddite movement …

A neo-Luddite movement would understand no technology is sacred in itself, but is only worthwhile insofar as it benefits society. It would confront the harms done by digital capitalism and seek to address them by giving people more power over the technological systems that structure their lives.”

Well-worth taking the time to read the article.

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In less than thirteen months, both the United States and Canada have seen civil insurgency movements grow in prominence: from the U.S. Capitol riots in January 2021 to “truckers” in Ottawa and Coutts this week.

Whatever level of political power they may leverage through their actions is magnified a hundred-fold by the sensation-seeking media desperate to fill their quota of advertiser-based airtime. We are constantly blasted with headlines like “Is This The End of Democracy?” Today I googled “the end of democracy?” and the following ad appeared, showing a set of recently-published books on the subject.

Talking heads needing a paycheque go on and on about how dire is the condition of this institution we call democracy and how it’s history harkens all the way back to those wise souls — the ancient Greeks. Certainly the word “democracy” comes from them, but their “democracy” did not look much like ours.

What we have — so-called “representative democracy” — with parties and elections allowing for the occasional participation of an ever-widening franchise — is barely 250 years old. The old Greeks were indeed much wiser. They were “well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. This is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odds with democratic principles … allowing commoners to decide who among the well-born should be considered best of all; and well born, in this context, simply meant all those who could afford to spend much of their time playing at politics.”¹

Rather, they preferred to pick their public officers by sortition, or a lottery in which all adult citizens were enrolled and obliged to participate if chosen. As Aristotle puts it: “It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.”² To which Herodotus adds that “the rule of the people has the fairest name of all … The lot determines offices, power is held accountable, and deliberation is conducted in public.”³

Offices were held for one year and, as I understand it, a citizen could only be selected once. A test was applied to establish basic competency, but very few selected were ever refused on this basis.

Some might suggest that the modern world is too complex and requires technocrats and managers to be in charge. However, the ancient Greek city states were important centers of trade, administration, and military organization and yet the citizens chosen by lot managed with the barest of staff. Today we have armies of professionals to operate the levers of civil administration.

It would do us no harm therefore, I believe, to return to a genuine people-oriented system of random selection for political decision-making. It worked for millennia across multiple cultures and can work again here and now. Rather than the end of democracy, this would be a return to it.

Notes:

1. Graebner & Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, p. 356, 367
2. Aristotle, Politics, 4.1294be
3. Herodotus, The Histories, 3.80.6