21st century Luddites resist new technology due to concerns such as job loss, loss of control, and cultural values, reflecting the historical labor struggle of the original Luddite movement.

Andrew Luck prefers a flip phone due to personal preference, comfort, and a desire to avoid constant connection, highlighting that one doesn't have to be connected 24/7.

People may be resistant to new technologies due to various factors, including regulatory pressures, lack of awareness, and fear of job replacement, which is consistent with the historical context of the Luddite movement.

The Luddite opposition to new technology is rooted in the fear of job loss and the protection of workers' rights, as evident from the historical context of the Luddite revolt.

Social activists may be opposed to new technologies in the 21st century due to concerns about technological unemployment and its potential to create a large population of unskilled and unemployed individuals.

Government initiatives can play a crucial role in addressing resistance to new technologies by facilitating a transition to a low-carbon economy and promoting community engagement.

A common reason for opposing new technology is the fear of job loss or negative impact on working conditions, as seen in the historical context of the Luddites.

The Luddite revolt was actually a labor movement fighting for workers' rights and jobs, rather than being against technology itself.

21st century Luddites fear a technocratic society where technology exploits and controls humanity, rather than serving it, as evident from the passage's description of a world where technology has failed to address major problems and the commentary on the excesses of a society reliant on digital entertainment.

21st century Luddites resist new technology due to concerns such as job loss, loss of control, and cultural values, reflecting the historical labor struggle of the original Luddite movement.

Title:

Content: Brian Merchant, author: “Luddites are more dangerous to the rich than Robin Hood”

The Luddites have been a great historical resource. Any showy enemy of anything that looked like technological progress has been called a Luddite. Today with generative artificial intelligence and its critics, the word has been revived. The author and journalist Brian Merchant (Iowa City, USA, 1983) saw it coming and has written a book that reviews the Luddite revolt in England at the beginning of the 19th century and its similarities with current technologies: Blood in the Machine (Blood in the Machine, currently without a planned edition in Spanish) thus explores the origins of the current revolt against big technology.

Although the book has appeared in the midst of the AI hype, Merchant began his research a decade ago: “Uber was growing and it was beginning to be seen that it was having a hard impact on taxi drivers, I heard the term Luddite from the pro-Uber sector and wrote an article titled You don't understand anything about Luddites”. Now in his book he remembers that the Luddite revolt was a labor struggle, not anti-technology, at a time when unions were prohibited. In a conversation with EL PAÍS from his residence in Los Angeles, Merchant clarifies the historical impact of the Luddites and the possible similar struggles that are being played today in Silicon Valley.

1. The Luddites were not against progress

The labor revolt over the loss of rights was more important than the destruction of textile machines: “The biggest mistake about the Luddites is to say that they were against technology and progress,” says Merchant. “They were against certain technologies because they recognized the way in which they were going to be used in their context against them as workers. It was a labor movement, against poverty, not anti-technology. The British Government began to mold them in this way almost immediately, it was keen to mock the Luddites and present the argument that they were against progress. It is very similar to how today people in positions of power in technology companies accuse those who complain about poor working conditions. It's the same story for 200 years.”

The book quotes a phrase from historian Eric Hobsbawm that explains this stage: “It was collective bargaining through riots.” According to Merchant, this tactic in a workers' struggle was very powerful for two reasons: “First, it was symbolic because everyone understood that what they were destroying was not just a machine. It was also the specific machine used to transfer wealth from the workers to the employer. Second, it was useful because they destroyed the equipment that businessmen needed.”

2. Why Robin Hood is better accepted than Ned Ludd

Ned Ludd was a legendary character. No one knows for sure if he existed. It was the legend of a teenager who would have broken the first machines at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In 1811, rebellious workers used his legendary name to sign letters and further scare: “Ludd probably never existed. But the incarnation of it would become a mascot, an organizational tool, a wink: a powerful 19th-century meme,” Merchant writes.

See also  The Commander of the Land Forces meets in Muscat a number of Omani military leaders

Ludd lived near Nottingham (United Kingdom), like another legendary figure who has been better treated by history. There must be a reason, says Merchant: “The Luddites organized a popular and powerful rebellion. People wrote popular songs about them. They were like Robin Hood. But it is interesting that Robin Hood has endured as a positive light, while the Luddites have not. He suggests that the myth of Ned Ludd is in some ways more dangerous to the elites and the wealthy than that of Robin Hood, which is a little more nebulous and open. The Luddites say: go ahead and break the machines of your oppression. Robin Hood says: steal from the rich and give to the poor. “I think that’s a little more tolerable.”

3. How are they similar to today's problems?

The background of the book is that the history of the Luddites is similar to what happens today in Silicon Valley, where a small group of corporations dominate new technologies. “The way technologies are developed has basically not changed. You have a handful of people with access to enough capital or political influence to be able to build a factory and use automation technologies. “Back then, the most aggressive owners didn’t ask anyone how to find a way to make this a win-win.”

Merchant has received criticism for equating the great businessmen of 19th century England with 21st century America. But there are details that he does not see that far away: “The technology development process is in some ways even more undemocratic today than then. There is this immense pool of capital available to Silicon Valley innovators through venture capital. Uber wasn't profitable for 10 years, but they had access to that capital. Did anyone really like that? Did it work for workers and delivery people? Nothing mattered, they just had more money and moved on.”

See also  Just the mystery

Andrew Luck prefers a flip phone due to personal preference, comfort, and a desire to avoid constant connection, highlighting that one doesn't have to be connected 24/7.

Title:

Content: Andrew Luck Finally Upgrades His Flip Phone … To Another Flip Phone

Intro: Andrew Luck has made it clear that he’s not interested in joining the world of smartphones. He’s just fine with his flip phone, and he finally got an upgrade this week.

INDIANAPOLIS — Has Andrew Luck finally turned in his ancient flip phone for a smartphone?

No. No he has not.

But, he did get a new flip phone this week.

The Indianapolis Colts quarterback on Thursday shared on his Facebook account that his mobile carrier had hooked him up with a new phone.

In June, Luck became the recipient of the most lucrative contract in NFL history, and many wondered if the fifth-year Stanford product was going to splurge on the newest smartphone for himself.

"One, I like it. It's a comfort thing," Luck said of not giving up the flip phone lifestyle. "I think anybody can appreciate that, if you're used to that. … Two, I don't think I want to be connected 24/7, and this phone is maybe sort of a reminder that you don't have to be connected. And it's nice to get away. It's nice to turn your phone off."

Luck's phone at that time — and his new one, we assume — can send and receive text messages, and for all the newest crazes in apps and technology, he says he has an iPad.

"What else do you need?" Luck asked. "I'm not a Luddite."

Luddite | Ludd·ite | Noun: "One of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly :  one who is opposed to especially technological change." Thank you, Merriam Webster.

Nice word choice, Andrew. Looks like his "Andrew Luck Book Club" is paying huge dividends.

While many of us (including the author of this article) remain glued to their smartphones, Luck is obviously content with what's gotten him to this point in life.

Smartphone or flip phone — or rotary phone — he's back on the field and healthy for the Indianapolis Colts, and that's all that should matter to his fans and his organization.

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Please use the Contact Us link in our site footer to report an issue.

Related Content

2023 Season Tickets On Sale Now!

Secure the best seats, benefits & more for next season! Be there live for exciting matchups against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and more opponents to be announced soon. Learn more today!

Advertising

People may be resistant to new technologies due to various factors, including regulatory pressures, lack of awareness, and fear of job replacement, which is consistent with the historical context of the Luddite movement.

Title:

Content: You will not miss us!
8,008 followers
Why robots will take your job, and what to do - panic or rejoice
Why robots will take away your profession.
Increasingly, you can hear about the challenges posed by automation and cybernization to existing professions today.
And we are talking not only about unmanned vehicles and chatbots replacing call center operators, but also about programs that can calculate bank loans and insurance rates, depriving analysts and, moreover, neural networks that claim to compete with highly qualified and creative employees.
Exemption from routine or danger of unemployment?
A cause for concern or long-awaited freedom?
History of the problem
Mechanisms of ancient times.
Competition has always existed – professions disappeared and arose, people fought for jobs with each other and with technology, philosophers and economists built forecasts and tried to predict the prospects and are still doing it.
For example, you can assess how much automation threatens your profession and how quickly robots will replace you by using Will Robots Take My Job.
Aristotle was the first to think about the possibility of transferring “work ” to machines.
In the first book of his Politics, he suggested that they could evolve to such an extent that the need for human labor would disappear.
For him, quite in line with the views of work at the time, as something distracting from participation in public life and personal development, this was an extremely optimistic forecast.
“Work ” in ancient Greece was considered to be the lot of the lower classes, and the mechanisms would only liberate slaves, considered nothing but“ machines of flesh and blood. ”
The reorientation of the economy to the export of wool led to the introduction of a policy of “enclosures ”.
The real competition of a sufficiently large mass of people technology for the first time was only more than a millennium and a half later in England.
At first, the reorientation of the economy to wool exports led to the introduction of a policy of “fencing ”, in which landlords expelled farmers from the fields in order to free the territory for sheep grazing, which led to the first massive surge of“ unemployment ” – albeit not in the current sense.
The then arising vagrancy and poverty contemporary of these events, the Chancellor of England and philosopher Thomas More described the famous "sheep ate people."
However, after a few decades it became clear that no – not eaten.
The former peasants were absorbed by the growing cities, where they found a new job in textile manufactures, processing the same wool obtained from shearing sheep.
This was the first example of how, by taking away one thing, “technology ” is able to offer something different.
But we must admit: the process of urbanization was painful, the work that replaced the cultivation of land turned out to be hard and dirty, the gap with the traditional way of life was very traumatic, and the population of England as a result of hunger and the fight against vagrancy, which was conducted, including the use of gallows, decreased, according to some estimates by 30% (to understand the scale - the Soviet Union during the Second World War lost "only" 15% of the population).
Workers in a textile factory, late 18th century.
The next episode of the confrontation between people and technology occurred a century later in the same field of light industry - the invention in 1785 by Edmund Cartwright of a mechanical loom increased labor productivity forty times.
Jobs that had just been lost were once again lost.
But again temporarily – after spinning machines, others appeared and all of them demanded new resources, and their extraction – new types of labor.
Manufactures were replaced by factories, and muscle strength by the power of steam obtained from coal.
Machine Destroyers
The Luddite movement.
This time, the changes that occurred were met with bayonets - there was a movement of Luddites.
Sabotage of work and direct action: attacks on factories and the destruction of machines caused a harsh reaction of the state, which sent troops to suppress the “army of Ned Ludd ”.
It is characteristic that no one at the top bothered to convey to the workers the idea that there will still be work for them, even if not the one to which they had time to get used.
The fact is that the “top ” themselves at that time did not think too much about how all this was arranged, and people were perceived as expendable material, while the inertia of consciousness of ordinary workers who had just recovered from the transition from the agrarian to the urban way of life was also very high.
The First Industrial Revolution at the beginning of the 18th century.
The theoretical basis for the interaction of technological innovations and the masses of labor began to be summed up only by economists and philosophers of the middle of the XIX century.
They were the first to suggest that the disappearance of certain types of work in the process of technological development entails the emergence of new ones, and “work ” as a whole is not something final, which may be“ not enough ”.
The First Industrial Revolution was in full swing and the optimism of its apologists only grew stronger over time.
By the end of the century, it seemed that progress would eliminate not only social problems and contradictions, but could also rid humanity of wars.
However, while some spoke of the "Luddite delusion", others spoke of the "enslavement of the masses" and the need to hand over to the "factory workers", predicting that as long as the instruments of production are in the hands of the big proprietors, their employees will remain disenfranchised, and the lack of social security will cause explosions of unemployment at any moment.
Second wave
The Second Industrial Revolution.
The word “unemployment ” came into being at that time.
The fact is that a peasant working in the fields or a craftsman who provides for the needs of himself and the small surrounding community could not face something like this - he himself formed his employment.
When the scheme of selling labor on a strict schedule became mass within the framework of fulfilling a strictly regulated set of duties, the challenge arose to lose such an opportunity.
The Second Industrial Revolution was on the way.
The basics of streaming production were laid at the end of the 19th century, and by the beginning of the 20th century, the combination of Ford ’ s marketing strategy (he invented that the car was not an attribute of the elites, but a mass need) and the conveyor he introduced led to new changes that went beyond factories and factories.
On January 18, 1886, the first car invented by Karl Benz was released.
It was the emergence of technology on the streets of cities that brought a new wave of competition.
Look at the photos of the streets of the beginning of the last century: here they are dammed with carts, among which a lonely clumsy car is trying to maneuver, but ten years later, the only horse frightened by the roar of engines and sobbing of klaxons is clutching to the sidewalks.
Here it will be important to note how unpredictable this jump became: “At the beginning of the 20th century, the French Academy warned about an environmental disaster, which inevitably should lead to the accumulation of horse manure associated with the development of horse-drawn transport in Paris, ” recalls, reasoning about the prediction of the future Stanislav Lem.
However, note: in those regions where human labor is cheaper, technology can not replace it, as we are shown, for example, rickshaws, until recently used their own muscle power and only with a sharp drop in the cost of small vehicles motorized.
A more modern example is “computer rickshaws ” – hundreds of thousands of low-skilled Chinese, hacked captchas all day, because their work costs less than the introduction of scripts.
Technological unemployment
The line of the American unemployed during the Great Depression.
In the 1930s, Maynard Keynes, who gave the world the theory of the “social state ”, from the attempts of which many economies have not recovered so far, introduced the term“ technological unemployment ” into mass circulation.
Since then, the debate about whether the introduction of new technological solutions and opportunities can create a long-term job crisis or whether everything is limited to repurposing, when obsolete professions are replaced by new ones, and it is enough for people to change or improve their skills.
Until the end of the last decade, most experts were inclined to believe that “technological unemployment ” is always a temporary phenomenon, leading to the renewal and improvement of the professionalism of workers.
Mechanical labor was replaced by physical labor, the operator - a profession more status and highly paid than the worker, the reduction of costs leads to the release of time - these are the main theses sounded then.
Pessimistic views remained largely the domain of marginals, such as Theodore Kaczynski, famous for his terrorist struggle against progress under the name of Unabomber and primitive philosophers.
Pessimism
The first full-fledged computer in the USSR BESM-1.
Cautious voices expressing doubts about the correctness of this approach sounded even then.
And if in one of his speeches in 1962, President Kennedy said that “if people are able to invent new machines that take away their jobs, even more so are able to invent new jobs, ” then two years later, a letter from scientists and activists concerned with the problem of technological unemployment, sent to his successor, Lyndon Johnson, stated that“ a revolution in cybernetics will create a separate nation of poor, unskilled unemployed. ”.
Theorists disputed the impossibility of long-term unemployment, as did Martin Ford in the book “Light in the Tunnel: Automation, Acceleration of Technology and the Economy of the Future ” or Marshall Brains in“ Robotic Nation ”.
Gasne-Peter Martin and Harald Schumann, in their Global Trap, describe a society in which the labor of twenty percent of the population is enough for the world economy to continue to develop.
There are those who see it as a threat and a danger, like Paul Krugmann in his article “Sympathy for the Luddites ” or Frey and Osborne in“ The Future of Work. ”
In addition, in practice, it turned out that technology is not so freeing up time – for example, representatives of professions requiring high qualifications, at least in the United States today work more than 30 years ago, and technologies that provide remote access to working tools allow them not to break away from professional tasks and in their “free time ”.
It is also important that new jobs, as it was noticed at the beginning of the XXI century, are created not so much by technology as by the change in the way of life that they entail.
So in the mid-2010s, nine out of ten working people are employed in professions that did not exist a century earlier, but only 5% of the jobs that appeared from 1993 to 2013 are in high-tech areas, such as IT or telecom.
However, the question is whether this does not mean that indirectly they still arise due to technologies that provide an opportunity for development for the service sector.
Is it bad?
A shot from the film "I, Robot" (2004).
Harvard economics professor Lawrence Summers, who previously served as U.S. Treasury Secretary, said in 2014 that he no longer believes that automation will always create new jobs and that it is not some hypothetical possibility in the future; it is something that is emerging now.
In his opinion, the changes will be very global and will lead to mass unemployment not only among low-skilled employees, but also for “blue ” and“ white ” collar workers, because “there are many reasons to think that the software revolution will be even more significant than the agrarian one. ”
The robot prepares food.
However, this is what allows us to look to the future with optimism.
Summers ’ s thought of the meaning of the digital revolution echoes the position of futurologist Alvin Toffler.
As early as 1970, in his book Future Shock, he wrote that by comparing the Digital Revolution with the Industrial Revolution, we downplay its significance and it would be more correct to draw a parallel with the exit of mankind from caves and the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and cattle breeding.
Potentially, this means that humanity is on the verge of an unprecedented, unknown written history civilizational leap of colossal proportions.
And, due to the fact that the speed of changes in the world has increased many times and now, the fact that in the case of the end of the Stone Age, took millennia, is being carried out in front of one, a maximum of a couple or three generations, this breakthrough, of course, will be painful.
However, having reviewed the usual way of life, the attitude to it and their values, will not humanity be able to break through to the conditions of life, previously even unimaginable.
"Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (1991).
We are easily accustomed to such changes in “work ” as freelancing and remote work, quite calmly came to a repeated change of professions, instead of a continuous, decades-long“ career ” and even were able to include them in your life, saying that this is the way to find yourself.
So is it not time to begin to accustom ourselves to the idea that, as economic historian Robert Skidelsky said, “Sooner or later we will run out of work ”?
After all, freelancing and remote employment are about freedom, about leaving the “office slavery ” and searching for the way of life that is convenient for us.
Yes, to get used to the idea that the traditional “work ” is over and now we will have to independently invent what to occupy ourselves will not be easy.
It will require responsibility, but it is freedom.
Isn ’ t it time for us, joyfully exclaiming “Glory to the robots! ”, to go in search of our place in the new world?
Why robots will take away your profession.
The fact that it is not only about robots, but also about the “work ” itself and the possibility of life without it, about the risks associated with negative scenarios of confrontation between people and machines and the possibilities of overcoming them, we will talk in the next parts of the cycle.
source
If you liked this post, please share it with your friends:
And don't forget:
Subscribe to my Instagram
Link to the original source
Picture of the day
top

The Luddite opposition to new technology is rooted in the fear of job loss and the protection of workers' rights, as evident from the historical context of the Luddite revolt.

Social activists may be opposed to new technologies in the 21st century due to concerns about technological unemployment and its potential to create a large population of unskilled and unemployed individuals.

Government initiatives can play a crucial role in addressing resistance to new technologies by facilitating a transition to a low-carbon economy and promoting community engagement.

Title:

Content: Climate change backlash exploited by right-wing deniers shows need to win popular support for green policies – Joyce McMillan

Governments need to be much more serious about the profound political and social transformations required to bring about a low-carbon economy

They call it DARVO, and it works a treat. It’s a term originally used in criminal psychology to describe the behaviour of some wrongdoers when accused. They first deny (D) that they did any such thing, then begin to attack (A) those accusing them; and finally start a process of reversing victim and offender (RVO), in which the perpetrators of crime somehow become victims, and those accusing them are framed as powerful oppressors, backed by dark elite forces.

And if all of that sounds familiar, in the age of Donald Trump, then it’s hardly surprising; because DARVO is not only the continuing leitmotif of Trump’s narcissistic personality, but also, increasingly. the chosen modus operandi of the global political right, which has had an iron grip on global economic policy for more than a generation, and is now – as Liz Truss’s bizarre speech at the recent CPAC conference in Maryland vividly demonstrated – in profound and aggressive denial about the human, environmental and economic damage those policies have inflicted.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

As I write, there are three arenas where this right-wing hegemony and the attitudes it spawns are being challenged, or exposed for what they are. There is Ukraine, where the armed forces are trying to defend some kind of European liberal democracy against the brutal aggression of an oil-fuelled Russian Federation. There is Gaza, and the horrific slaughter and destruction now being wrought there by a far-right Israeli government.

And there are the city streets, in the West and beyond, where people of all races and creeds have turned out in millions to march for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza/Israel conflict; and where mainly young climate activists try to find ways of expressing their horror at the “business as usual” complacency that is destroying the natural world on which we all depend, sometimes even halting the sacred motor car in its tracks.

Not, though, for much longer, if governments like the current Westminster administration have their way; because now, political DARVO is in full swing on all of these issues, with assorted politicians – including, sadly, Britain’s Prime Minister – conspiring to smear millions who have marched peacefully for a ceasefire in Gaza as in some way linked to political violence, and to dangerous threats against politicians. In an inflammatory and frankly ridiculous speech on Wednesday, Mr Sunak even claimed – without a shred of evidence, and despite a sceptical response from senior police officers – that there was now a “growing consensus” that Britain is “descending into mob rule”; a development which would, of course, necessitate further repressive measures against all kinds of protest.

Russian propaganda

The effects of DARVO are now becoming particularly heartbreaking and terrifying, though, for those who care about the future of the planet on which our lives depend. Across Europe and beyond, policies designed to meet the challenge of climate change – and those who support them – have now become one of the main “culture war” targets of the political right, ranging from the “Net Zero Research” group within the parliamentary Tory party to the Russian bots using online propaganda to persuade Polish farmers angered by falling global prices that their real enemies are the Ukrainian people, and EU environmental policies.

In the age of the internet, it would be naive to imagine that the farmers who have come out to protest in other European capitals recently are not also seeing the same online ideas and memes, all suggesting a top-down green conspiracy by governments against farmers and food production. This week the PM – abruptly losing his aversion to disruptive street protests, when they serve this side of the argument – even turned out in Cardiff to back Welsh farmers protesting against Welsh government green policy proposals which they say will break them; although perhaps, as it turns out, not quite as much as Westminster policies will break farmers in England.

In the case of climate change policy – and the vital issue of food security – these political movements should act as a double wake-up call to administrations seeking to deal with 21st-century realities. First, those governments should never underestimate the sheer financial and political might of the forces still trying to defend existing food and energy systems, and how adept some of their political allies have become in using online propaganda and organisation to obstruct change.

Democratic renewal

Then secondly, those governments need to become much more serious about the profound political and social transformations needed to support a transition to a low-carbon economy. To put it bluntly, no such transition will be achieved unless communities at the grass roots feel a strong sense of ownership of the policies involved, and are motivated to implement them in full; and that is as true in Scotland as anywhere, where numerous well-intentioned and necessary green measures have been applied in such a top-down manner, with so little buy-in from key stakeholders, that they have become nothing more than political footballs, and in some cases ramps for the worst kinds of anti-green propaganda and outright climate change denial.

The resistance to climate-related policies, in other words, represents not only a massive political opportunity for those who oppose all progressive change, but also a profound challenge to Western and other governments who imagine that change on this scale can be achieved through 1990s-style methods of top-down management, imposed on an apathetic or hostile public. The economic transformation we need to see will go hand in hand with democratic renewal, and with the re-empowerment of local communities, or it will not happen. And far more than the future of any one nation may therefore depend on the skill and wisdom of politicians committed to that viable future, in re-engineering their politics to meet the challenges of the times, and enabling and supporting the new age of citizen empowerment that will be necessary to deliver a liveable future, for us all.

A common reason for opposing new technology is the fear of job loss or negative impact on working conditions, as seen in the historical context of the Luddites.

The Luddite revolt was actually a labor movement fighting for workers' rights and jobs, rather than being against technology itself.

21st century Luddites fear a technocratic society where technology exploits and controls humanity, rather than serving it, as evident from the passage's description of a world where technology has failed to address major problems and the commentary on the excesses of a society reliant on digital entertainment.

Title:

Content: Blog post

We cannot buy tomorrow — using stories to understand technology change

By Mark P. McDonald | December 03, 2021 | 0 Comments

tech NO logyPersonal ObservationHuman AbilityFuture of High TechDigital Society

The dynamic and accelerating rate of change, disruption, societal concerns, etc can make it difficult to see what it all means, the direction we are heading in.  Speculative fiction is one of the ways that people try to make sense out of what can appear to be senseless.  Gartner instituted a special project called “Stories from Planet B“.  The goal was to use stories and other artifacts to help stakeholders envision preferred and plausible futures in a way that is transformative, inspiring and disrupting.

Here is my story, you can find the others at “Stories from Planet B” on Gartner.com

Enjoy

Mark

YOU CANNOT BUY TOMORROW

Tara sat down, rubbing her leg to work out a cramp she had picked up on the walk from her house. She had delayed this to the last minute. “Can’t turn ten ‘till you talk to the old men,” her brother reminded her.

Tara cleared her throat. “Question: What was it like at the start?“

Response: Project 2207, Darius Senna, aged 105, recalling the founding of Pantos.

The front of the room darkened. “Tara. The name means star,” came a man’s voice from the darkness.

“Dad says it’s also a lubricant that has gone bad, ‘Tar — ahh!’”  The room got even darker.

“We call ourselves Pantos. The fifth wave of Planet B colonists, B5, like the vitamin,” the man’s voice continued.

Darius Senna walked out of the darkness. He was wearing a blue collarless shirt rolled up at the sleeves, dark pants and brown boots. Tara noticed his rough hands, and his face, lined from UV rays. A bench appeared. He sat down.

“We were not the first. The first were the explorers. They discovered Planet B, determined it could support life, and summoned us to our new home. Then came ships, filled with those who could afford to leave Earth behind.”

Senna leaned back. Tara noticed the old style comms implant on his wrist. “Six centuries ago, the English sent ships carrying goldsmiths, jewelers, governors and soldiers to Jamestown. They sought to civilize their ‘new world.’ Likewise, the first ships to Planet B carried engineers bankers, officials — the cream of a curdled civilization.”

Looking out the window, Darius continued: “Those first ships were technological marvels. Gossamer solar sails, filled with technology and terraforming equipment. They landed in the northern hemisphere of Planet B. When their technology failed, they starved, just like the colonists at Jamestown.”

He paused and looked at Tara. “After three more waves, some of them are still around, eating from waste regenerators, asking their tech why it doesn’t work. We don’t see them much. We think about them even less.” Darius leaned forward, clasping his hands, just like Tara’s father did when making a point. “We Pantos understand — the physical world feeds the digital world. When the physical does not work, the digital does not matter.”

“Old Earth technology changed in the early 21st century. It turned inward. It became obsessed with experience, entertainment and consumption.” His face hardened. “Before then, technology had made people’s lives better. Then society went digital, and consumption mattered more.”

Darius unclasped his hands. “Data replaced reason. People focused on themselves. Technology meant looking down at a screen, not up at the world around them. People thought it was wonderful. Screens made them feel better.”

He leaned back. Tara noticed the scar down the inside of his left arm. No one had scars anymore, not since the invention of Dermaplast. Darius saw her staring and, almost under his breath, said: “With their narrow datasets, myopic algorithms and self-centered beliefs, they couldn’t see what was really coming. And they never did.”

“I had just turned twenty-seven,” Darius said. He paused, lost in a memory.

He resumed, “We Pantos are not Luddites. We are some of the finest innovators and engineers humanity has ever known. Old Earth technologies were advanced, but consumptive. They were great for solving little problems. Distributing products instantaneously, keeping their users’ attention, showing each other how successful they were.”

“But when the big problems came, technology could not handle it. The heat, the drought, the pandemics, the inequalities, the authoritarian states. This was the world as it really was, not how it appeared online. Their technologies spent what resources they had, but could not create more. When their inherited wealth dried up, it all fell apart.”

“You know why we Pantos tell each other, ‘You can’t buy …”

“… Tomorrow,” Tara finished. She heard that at least ten times a month.

“Right,” Darius replied. “We say that when it’s time to get to work.”

“The ‘northerners’ brought Earth’s ethos of control and exploitation. Digital entertainment, not physical engagement. They binged on culture as they starved and froze to death. If you go up north you can see the graves of trillionaires, and screens looping videos demonstrating their importance.” Darius went silent.

Tara waited, unsure of what to do next. “If we are not the first, then when did we get here?”

Darius looked Tara directly in the face. “We came in the last wave. We came on outdated ships driven by ions. The ships were cannibalized once we landed on the southern hemisphere, far from the first four failures.”

He smiled, “The first waves came to Planet B in space limos. Pantos came in space beaters.”

“Pantos went to work. Our technology fits our hands, not our eyes. We built our homes, rather than having them printed. Building them ourselves proved we were here to stay. Doing things yourself teaches you the true costs and benefits of your actions.”

He paused for a moment, and said: “Tara, remember to feed the Briax when you get home.”

She knew. Doing builds ownership and responsibility; consuming builds nothing but your waistline.

Darius resumed: “Technology is part of our agency. Planet B sustains life, but we are building a world to ensure our minds stay broad; we think before we act. We make mistakes, like we did at Junction.”

He rubbed the inside of his left arm.

“Failure is acceptable when we learn from it. Unacceptable when it is a cost of doing business, or called an externality.”

“We stay strong, acknowledging challenges and celebrating progress. Technology encourages contribution, not consumption. Contribution brings meaning. Meaning motivates innovation and improvement. If it does not work for all of us, then it does not work well enough for any of us. We have much work to do. You know…”

“You can’t buy tomorrow,” Tara repeated, reflexively.

The room brightened. Senna was gone, as was the bench. A woman’s voice spoke up. “Congratulations, Tara. Welcome to your next decade.”

Tara stood up. As she was leaving, she thought she heard the woman say: “Another turning ten. A blessing.”

“Yes,” came Senna’s reply. “Old enough to understand, and young enough to care.”