The term "Luddite" historically refers to the early 19th-century English textile workers who destroyed machinery they believed endangered their livelihoods.

These original Luddites opposed technological change because it directly threatened their jobs and working conditions, not due to an inherent rejection of progress.

In the 21st century, the label "Luddite" has evolved to describe individuals or groups who resist new technologies or ways of working, particularly in corporate and social contexts.

However, modern resistance is less about rejecting technology itself and more concerned with how it is implemented and its broader social impact .

Contemporary resistance to technology often stems from psychological, economic, and social factors.

Psychologically, individuals may experience fear and uncertainty stemming from rapid technological changes.

These changes can disrupt familiar work routines and threaten personal and professional identities, causing anxiety about economic security and future employability.

This insecurity is compounded by skepticism about whether new technologies will deliver promised benefits equitably, leading to distrust in organizational leadership or institutions driving the change .

Economically, resistance is driven by fears of job loss, wage suppression, and diminished worker rights.

In workplaces where technology adoption is perceived to prioritize capital owners or large corporations over workers, employees may feel alienated and powerless.

The phenomenon of "surveillance capitalism," where tech giants extract value from data at the expense of privacy and autonomy, adds another layer of concern.

Workers often perceive technological innovation as benefiting owners and shareholders while shrinking opportunities for stable, fulfilling employment.

These systemic conditions resemble the exploitative dynamics that originally motivated Luddite protests .

Workers may band together to defend traditional roles and seek fairer involvement in decision-making.

The term "Luddite" historically refers to the early 19th-century English textile workers who destroyed machinery they believed endangered their livelihoods.

Title:

Content: Does AI make the arts poorer?
The real difference between the rich and the poor is the human mind.
▲ Since we have AI tools, we can do things quickly and well with a simple prompt, and the cost is low. (Illustration / Reuters)
2nd / Podcaster
I had a friend who had been unemployed for a while and asked me if I had a job for him to do, such as simple things like keeping an account and sorting out documents.
I said, if you asked me two years earlier, there must be, but unfortunately not now.
In the past, those chores took time, since the AI tool, as long as the simple prompt can be completed, the monthly fee is only a few hundred yuan, two or three hundred hourly wage students may not do so well.
He listened to me, didn ’ t believe it, and was curious to ask me how I use AI now.
In fact, the application is too broad and too complicated. To make him understand it as soon as possible, I cite my entire workflow as an example.
For example, when writing an article, in the stage of collecting materials, AI helps me to make notes of books / meetings / lectures / courses with speech, and the content is accurate and the grammar is strict. It can also be converted into various forms of charts, different lengths and various articles.
At the writing stage, I will discuss with AI what different topics can be cut into perspective, such as this article I want to know how AI is changing our society, ask it to help me summarize the main views on the Internet, and I will continue to ask for some details, and also ask it to grab the latest data for me.
Next, before po comes to the community, ask it to help me modify the typos and punctuation, the correction only takes a few seconds, and the text creation is basically completed.
I asked my friend, do you think you can do better, faster and cheaper than AI?
▲ AI can help users to take notes with voice, and the content of speech to text is accurate and the grammar is strict. It can also be converted into various forms of charts, different lengths and various articles.
(Chart / CFP)
Next, the image creation.
Now many devices, including WebCam and Monocular, the camera can lock the portrait to move in small amplitude, and even deliberately create a natural hand shake, self-portrait images are becoming more and more dependent on others.
Before the oral video, mainly rely on improvisation or reading, the former plays subtitles until the hand is broken, the latter has to get a reader to adjust the speed, now AI recognition subtitles are very common, the reader also evolved into the script will follow my words run (used readers will know how convenient this is), greatly speeding up the efficiency of recording videos.
It is also a technology derived from AI speech recognition: AI editing. Although it is not completely free from manual work, the editor is now editing by reading the text, without the need to listen with ears, which saves a lot of effort.
Music and images can be generated by AI, saving a lot of time to find materials and reducing the risk of copyright infringement.
As for the job that my friends are looking for, such as document processing and answering e-mail, I just write a SOP file to feed the robot, and it can do it flawlessly, and there is no need to rest for 24 hours.
It doesn ’ t matter if what is said above is not understood, in simple terms, I used to find two or three more people to deal with the process of chores, and it was replaced by AI, and AI did well and fast.
After all, it was all simple work.
▲ Document processing, e-mail and other things, as long as you write a SOP file to feed the robot, it can do flawless, and 24 hours without rest.
(Chart / CFP)
My friend is angry after hearing it.
I said, but I still need someone to help me, because I ’ m saving a lot of time now, have more capacity, and have the opportunity to make more money.
Do you do business sponsorship? Do you write creative scripts that are popular with young people? Do you have experience in IP marketing?
He was frustrated and said that he would not be those, as if he could only be eliminated.
Then he complained to me, saying that Taiwan's industry is serious, only the technology industry can make money, and other people live in deep water.
In fact, every technological innovation is like this, the British textile industry in the 19th century industrialization, a group of textile workers are also very angry at their loss of work, in the factory to destroy the loom.
These people are called Luddites. Now Luddites have become synonymous with opposition to technological progress. Most people also know that Luddites are marginal beings who will eventually die.
But it is obviously not accurate to attribute the fierce competition to the struggle for literature. In the example above, I am also a writer, but my property has leapt with the industrial revolution.
The difference is that I did two things: the first is the investment trend, and the second is that I treat AI as extremely cheap capital and use it to make money.
But I have taken advantage of resources, like I do not mix badly, will mix better, and mixed badly, will only mix worse.
Times change too fast, now this environment can not guarantee that you listen carefully to the classroom to teach those textbooks out of the society to eat, talent needs a flexible brain, as well as a variety of information judgment, to keep up with the pace of faster and faster technological development.
Then it is true that some people can not do, some people from the past to the present, all want to do the simplest job, they either can not find a job, or they have to get a lower salary than the robot.
▲ In the era of rapid technological changes, the advantages of language have been greatly weakened.
(Image from Google Translate)
In fact, education must be reformed as soon as possible, we need new departments, abolish some old departments, and now it seems like the pure language department of the college is really harming students, ensuring that they graduate and lose their jobs. (This sentence is easy to be misunderstood, it seems that I am belittling a particular department, I am not necessary.) And...
In my experience as a minor in Japanese at university, although I can also study culture and history, the advantages of language have been greatly weakened, and the teaching syllabus must be adjusted.)
The gap between the rich and the poor is inevitable, and policies can only try to avoid too many poor people, otherwise there will be social unrest.
Put on the beautiful idea of science fiction, before the civil unrest of mankind, I hope that robots will take care of our food like mothers.
Can you think about it? – I love this post.
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These original Luddites opposed technological change because it directly threatened their jobs and working conditions, not due to an inherent rejection of progress.

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.

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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

In the 21st century, the label "Luddite" has evolved to describe individuals or groups who resist new technologies or ways of working, particularly in corporate and social contexts.

However, modern resistance is less about rejecting technology itself and more concerned with how it is implemented and its broader social impact .

Title:

Content: Technology in the face of democracy
In September 2021, data scientist Frances Hogan resigned her position at Facebook and then revealed tens of thousands of pages of the company ’ s documents, research and correspondence, which were submitted to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The documents, which sparked a storm of hate and lawsuits against Facebook and its CEO, indicate that the platform not only affects the mental health of adolescents, enables the spread of populist hate speech, and enhances the work of human trafficking gangs, but the company is aware of these drawbacks, and is either satisfied with them or unable to reduce them; contrary to what Mark Zuckerberg says about the platform ’ s ability and algorithms to provide a safer environment for teenagers. To contribute to the promotion of democratic values and the reduction of hate speech.
In this article, I do not want to try to prove the company ’ s intention or claim, but rather to trace the reasons that made such phenomena possible, whether on Facebook, Instagram or other social media platforms; which will lead us to the conclusion that this case does not apply to Facebook alone, and it is not related to someone ’ s intention or disability, but it is a fundamental characteristic of all the tech giants and determine how they work and dominate their business model. This is what the American economist Shoshana Zuboff calls “behavioral surplus value. ”
In Zuboff ’ s view, the tech giants of today ’ s world are operating on a single business model that Google established after the dot-com bubble in 2008 — one that doesn ’ t stop selling consumer data, information, and surveillance — what Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism, ” but rather establishes what Zuboff calls the“ prediction goods market, ” a market that relies on collecting user information from social networks and converting it into algorithms. able to predict their behavior.
These algorithms and their results are then sold to marketers, contestants in election races, or authoritarian governments to monitor consumers more broadly and make their control more monopolistic in the market.
Zuboff ’ s analysis will be very useful in understanding the phenomenon, which leads us to trace its historical roots in the first section of the article.
It seems that we will be facing a fundamental thesis that we will have to criticize, and this criticism is the first objective of the article.
There is a thesis led by Zuboff herself and shared by many of the top technicians in these companies, and a number of commentators and democratic politicians, all of whom argue that the phenomena revealed by the Hogan documents and other similar phenomena are real, but they seem to see it as a tax to be paid for the promised fruits of the technical world, and that algorithms are able to correct its course by themselves, especially Zuboff. Inside it is led by the “top minds of the business world. ”
The second argument the article will address is that a mere commodity such as the “prediction market commodity ” is hostile to democracy, the rule of law, equality, and privacy.
It is true that “surveillance capitalism ” is part of monopoly capitalism, but I would argue that it goes beyond this, and that its effects extend from the economy to all spheres of social life, especially its negative effects on the future of democracy.
The third thing we focus on is that falling into a pessimistic vision of humanity ’ s future under technology is just another facet of the rosy narrative promoted by tech giants of the story of the inevitable rise of technology, but in its pessimistic version.
The emergence of the forecasting market and behavioral surplus value
After the rise of neoliberal capitalism following the waves of inflation and recession in the 1970s, the authors of neoliberal programs decided that the policies of state intervention in the economy and the extension of social protection for the people were no longer profitable.
Neoliberalism retained the core elements of classical economic liberalism, such as freedom and individualism, but the role of the state in social protection and welfare programs was hotly contested by policymakers and legislators.
While some countries in Europe have pursued so-called systemic liberalism aimed at maintaining and expanding social protection programmes, notably Germany, Britain and the United States have gone the other way, reducing the role of the state in the economy and expanding market freedom, trade and international lending institutions at the expense of social spending.
Hence the story of monopolistic technology as we know it today began, coinciding with the collapse of the value of the shares of major technology companies in the so-called dot-com bubble in 2001, which was followed by severe frustration with the future of technology and its promise and ability to develop capitalism.
After that, Google took a step that will henceforth define the future of tech companies and their practices; the move is to abandon its hostility to advertising gains due to shareholder pressure.
Google has decided to increase advertising revenue through hell, which has opened the door for the rest of the companies to follow suit by monopolizing access to its users ’ data and using it in online promotion and marketing services, which has long been known as “data exhaustion. ”
Using its superior analytical capabilities, Google has adopted a new way of making money by building algorithms that can predict consumer behavior; from monitoring your online activity, for example, the algorithms recognize your buying habits and preferences and ways of diversifying your sources of consumption, and of course, the level and types of spending, and even your reluctance to buy a particular product when you receive an ad for another.
These algorithms provide sellers with not only real-time information about consumer preferences, but also predictions of consumer preferences in the near future.
With this behavioral revolution, excess data has become the basis for new prediction markets that we now know as targeted advertising.
This is what Zuboff calls “behavioral surplus-value, ” where a user ’ s online behavior, obscene and monopolized data, becomes a mine for value extraction and profit.
Google does not care about the consumer and his decisions, and this data is often taken without consent or acknowledgement from the consumer.
This new type of “prediction goods market ” quickly became a role model for all major Silicon Valley companies, and advertising became as important to Google as the development of the search engine on which the company was founded.
When Google went public in 2004, the company revealed that after adopting the plan, it increased its revenue from 2001 to 2004 by more than 3,500 percent.
Zuboff points out that Google CEO Sheryl Sandberg ’ s move to Facebook represented a magical, contagious transition to this new plan based on behavioral surplus value extraction, or “prediction goods trade, ” which is no longer limited to Silicon Valley companies since 2008, but has moved to sectors such as insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and so on, creating a“ new production pattern. ” Zubov is a whole “new environment ” of suppliers, producers, customers and market makers.
In that market, every product or service starts with “smart ” or“ customized, ” every device connects to the internet, and every “digital assistant ” is simply an interface for a supply chain of behavioral data that helps predict the future of what Zuboff calls the“ surveillance economy. ”
The “prediction goods market ” merges three categories into one:“ user, consumer, and consumer data, ” and this triad is henceforth just multiple facets of a single phenomenon, which Zuboff calls “indigenous people ” in the style of the colonial invasion and exploitation model.
Today we do not lack a plethora of expressions that attempt to describe what the technological market has changed the structure of global capitalism.
We will find “algorithmic capitalism, ”“ cognitive capitalism, ” “communicative capitalism, ”“ data capitalism, ” “digital capitalism, ”“ information capitalism, ” “platform capitalism, ”“ surveillance capitalism, ” and “virtual capitalism, ” to name a few.
Recently, then, capitalism is abandoning itself and retreating into a world of “data emperors, ” which is why this phenomenon has been called“ digital feudalism, ” “technological feudalism, ”“ information feudalism, ” or simply “new feudalism. ”
But if tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are not accumulating their wealth through capitalism ’ s old exploitative mechanisms of labor itself, and while today ’ s production process is not based on manufacturing, but on monopolistic control over data sets and algorithms to extract advertising revenues generated elsewhere in the capitalist economy, is this a new stage of capitalism?
The big companies that rely on technology do not make a profit, but their market value continues to rise due to speculation in the markets, representing what is known as the model of "selling growth", is this model considered a transgression of capitalism?
Is it a new form of “digital expropriation ” that fuels a new logic of accumulation that can be seen as a structural change in the structure of capitalism, similar to the model of“ accumulation by plunder ” posited by David Harvey in The New Imperialism?
Or is it, as Cedric Durand put it in his book “Technical Feudalism, ” that the tech giants are effectively subjecting us to their rule by controlling information and knowledge in a“ knowledge monopoly, ” thus creating ever more sophisticated means of seizing surplus value without getting involved in the production process?
Darwinism and counter-Darwinism
The main problem of technology today, and the way it extracts value through monopoly, is not merely that it is a monopoly, not that it leads us to a social reality similar to Big Brother ’ s world, but that it is based on a structural transformation of the labor market.
The merging of knowledge with technology and markets means that everyone who has nothing to sell will be despised, and a new kind of individualism will triumph, not the “liberal individualism ” promised by the liberal project, but a technical individualism that cares so much about the“ user-consumer-data ” triad. Achille Mbembe: “The Nasi ” who will be every day the firewood of a new“ trend ”, a new empty battle, incitement against minorities, or the fire of populism that has become the hallmark of our time.
What matters is that the individual is a vessel of data, a catalyst for more consumption of this class struggle that denies its nature on the Internet, for more gain, the Hogan documents published by the Wall Street Journal tell us.
It will now seem to every user aware that “contempt ” is the basic commodity of the Internet, as the statistics contained in the documents indicate that the most popular and promoted materials are the materials inciting hatred and intolerance against minorities and insults and self-generated nonsense every day, which are most able to acquire interested people who volunteer their data to participate in battles for gains, as leaked studies from Facebook Labs tell us. A humanistic library containing the most accurate information of community members that is updated in real time for the purposes of censorship and social regulation, as China ’ s experience tells us.
So it doesn ’ t stop at monopoly, it doesn ’ t break down into a pessimistic picture as terms like “feudalism ” or“ big brother ” are trying to tell us.
The problem with such critical attempts is that they confront conflict-based technical Darwinism with a counter-Darwinism stemming from what American businessman and writer Alvin Toffler in the 1960s called the “shock of the future, ” a disappointment in the ambition of resisting capitalism.
These thinkers now present technology to us as a new stage in our human history, as if it were irrelevant to the recent capitalist past.
Technology and its hostility to democracy
The philosophers of the Enlightenment preached historical progress, a linear time on a straight path to better and higher, but the irony of the history of progress is that every historical frustration we have experienced has turned the idea of progress against itself and portrayed history as an ominous march towards further degeneration and ugliness.
The present of technology is no exception: the fleeting hopes of the rise of technology, which heralded a future in which machine and man are allied against evil, have been transformed into an antithesis that foreshadows the merging of machine and evil into a tragedy in which man becomes the victim.
We just have to start by accepting that every sinister scenario we invent to terrorize ourselves is only a part of our history, built by human beings like us, and can be transcended.
Western intellectual traditions have traditionally explained and understood the modern political world through a dichotomy between the private and the public, with the private sphere centered on the family, personal life and self-reflection, and the public centered on public morality, communion, governance of the state, administration, and institution.
But there is a third scope proposed by the famous German political thinker Hanna Arendt that mediates these two arguments: the “social ” sphere where collective feelings, feelings, and preferences are concentrated among connected groups of people — a set of values that people share without agreement that express their hopes, moral biases, and vision for the future.
When democracy defeated Nazism in World War II, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s coincided with the rise of globalization, a set of public values had settled in the West, with the private between the values of conservative Christian families and the values of generalized individualism, dominated by capitalist values, the state of institutions, the free economy, and the decline of the welfare state.
The social sphere is dominated by the values of democracy, individualism, scientific appreciation, technical optimism, and other values that neoliberal capitalism reluctantly shared with democracy under the pressure of labor movements and social participation.
However, a greater aspiration is emerging within the institutions of neoliberalism, which has tended increasingly to abandon democratic values, with greater emphasis on reaping the benefits of globalization and wealth accumulation, and withdrawing from the industrial to the financial economy.
At the height of this ambition, technology and its investments waited for the attention they deserved.
Technology today is taking over human history, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger once warned us that the problem of technology does not stop at the fact that our perception of the future is always linked to technology in a way that prevents us from imagining any future at all without thinking about it, but goes beyond that to the essence of technology itself, the social motivations behind its creation, reliance and attachment to it.
If it is the case that we are looking at technology as a savior who will arrive in the future to solve our tragedies at one time, and seeing it as a catastrophe that drags the present into an ominous future at another time, the tragedy here is not due to technology as a set of machines or tools to extract value, but rather to what led us to turn between these two extremes.
There are several reasons why the technical age is not a transgression of neoliberalism, not even a transgression of the worst.
One of these reasons is that the crisis of neoliberalism has manifested itself in a set of chronic problems that technology does not overcome and replace with other problems that require new thinking, but rather radicalize, expand and transfer to other spheres of social and individual life; or simply generalize them.
The Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen argued more than a decade ago in his book The Theory of the Luxury Class that the capitalist class by its very nature tends to withdraw from the burden of engaging in the productive process, which culminates with the expansion of monetary capitalism and the increasing transformation of relations between the capitalist and other producers, producers and workers into creditors and debtors. Technical "user-consumer-consumer data", in which the debtor himself becomes the user, the worker, the consumer and the data miner that feeds the forecasting market.
This brings us to a second crisis caused by neoliberalism, the crisis of employment, which is usually presented as a problem independent of the rest of the productive system that gave rise to it.
It goes without saying that the tendency of capital to invest in debt products will attract a large amount of assets that were previously earmarked for investment in commodity production, which will have a negative impact on employment opportunities.
But if we look at the essence of this technological triad, we find that technological transformation is at the heart of this process: less reliance on labor, less wage labor, because the very existence of the triad “user ” on the Internet produces value by itself through an algorithm that works in a vacuum of its own, which is originally a set of programming phrases written by one or more people.
The programmer ’ s income may rise to unprecedented levels, and indeed this is happening, but on the other hand, the chances of employment will be very low.
Most importantly, it brings us to a third dilemma: social inequality will increase dramatically, as “knowledge workers ” will have all the opportunities, while anyone who finds nothing to sell in the commodity market relationships of forecasting will be shamed.
We shall live, or rather we shall live, in a new division of social positions in which knowledge becomes, by definition, logarithmic knowledge, and there will be no value left for any other profession that is unable to transform itself into the language of zeros and ones.
One of the most important characteristics of the modern technical sector is that it operates, to a significant extent, outside the framework of the law governing the rest of social life, in a situation similar to that of the medieval church of independent rule.
Technology ’ s work outside the law is due to two things: the “computational ambiguity ” inherent in the very nature of its work.
Western critics and philosophers of the law have long complained about the ambiguity of the law, about the multiplicity of cases of application of the law, and about incidents of social and human life, but now we are faced with a phenomenon so vague that the legislator is unable to understand the subject to which he will be asked to enact a legal framework to regulate his work.
We have all seen the expressions of the congressional committee at the hearing of Mark Zuckerberg against the background of his accusation of misuse of Facebook subscriber data for political purposes, a scene not without the horror on Zuckerberg ’ s face, but the signs of surprise and misunderstanding that the members of the hearing committee, as people of the world war generation unfamiliar with the Internet, are unmistakable.
The second thing that surrounds the mystery of the technology is the topics it deals with and depends on its transformation into commodities, and the pace at which this rapid and unprecedented process took place in history, a process that has no legal precedent, of course.
Did Google, for example, have to obtain permits from countries around the world to photograph its streets and monitor its maps in order to develop the Google Maps app?
Did an algorithm to track phones to detect traffic jams on motorways and pedestrians need the approval of a constitutional court in a country?
The answer is no, of course.
Even the most democratic legal solutions, especially those that the EU is doing through its various institutions and are already appreciated, trying to reduce the opportunities and possibilities of the technical monopoly, and trying to protect the privacy of its citizens against the transformation of their data into resources for extraction of value; they all seem to remain worthless for two reasons: First, they are trying to legalize the extraction of data that should not exist in the first place. Second, political and authoritarian uses for security control are attractive to any country with borders and sovereignty, especially at the first intimidation of its political borders, the harm of refugees to its national unity, or the harmony of its social fabric, as the case of China clearly illustrates.
Finally, technology relies on undermining individual self-determination, individual autonomy, and decision-making rights in favor of the unfettered flow of behavioral data that feeds markets that are ours but not ours.
This anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian tyrant is best described as a market-driven coup from above: the overthrow of a people hidden within a digital Trojan horse, without finally being able to emancipate.
Based on the power of human inclusion within it, this coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power, that is, it is a form of tyranny that feeds on people, but not people.
Paradoxically, this coup is celebrated as “personalizing ” things, while ignoring, transcending, and replacing everything that is personal.
Source: The Island

Contemporary resistance to technology often stems from psychological, economic, and social factors.

Psychologically, individuals may experience fear and uncertainty stemming from rapid technological changes.

These changes can disrupt familiar work routines and threaten personal and professional identities, causing anxiety about economic security and future employability.

Title:

Content: • City
• City
• Business
• TOP 50 2021
City
How Vitaly Nesis made Polymetal a pioneer in the transition to green energy
The gold mining company Polymetal is in the top 10 of the planet (with enterprises from Karelia to Chukotka!) and became a pioneer in the transition to “green ” energy, the first from Russia to be included in the index of the most environmentally friendly enterprises in the world Dow Jones Sustainability.
This initiative is a merit of the Chief Executive Officer of Polymetal Vitaly Nesis.
Polymetal regularly receives “green ” loans from banks.
What do you want them to do?
The first priority is solar energy.
The second is the transfer of underground mines to electrical equipment.
This is a pioneering practice for Russia, the enterprises that have introduced it all over the world can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
This is a difficult but important project for us.
It will reduce the use of carbon fuels, improve working conditions and increase the completeness of extraction of precious metals.
The third project that we have just begun to discuss is alternative sources of heat energy.
We chose a technology that I think is promising – wood chip power plants from sawmills.
But this project makes sense only in parallel with reforestation.
In order to affect the climate in the long term, it is not enough to reduce the carbon footprint.
For real change, you also need to invest in something that will clear the atmosphere of carbon already trapped in it, and this is primarily forests.
In order to reduce the carbon footprint, Polymetal is building hydrometallurgical plants, which are also the first in the industry.
Tell me, what is this technology?
In the world, hydrometallurgy is being used everywhere, but in Russia we were the first.
If it is very simple, then the essence is that the metal from the ore is not smelted, but washed out with an aqueous solution with acid.
Imagine, you can fry the meat, and you can cook.
If you fry, there is a risk of getting burned, the meat can turn out tough or raw, and oil for frying is harmful.
And if you cook it, then open fire is not needed, hands are intact, and the meat is guaranteed to be soft.
Reducing the carbon footprint will not change the climate.
You are leading the company forward to an environmentally friendly future, and your colleagues seem to have gone backwards: Russia is shaken by catastrophes due to raw materials companies.
How is that?
Industry is inertial.
If something bad happens, it ’ s not because the company has made a mistake in the last year or two.
If you do not process metal structures from rust, they will not fall immediately, but will slowly rot and collapse in 30 years.
Recent catastrophes should not be seen as a consequence of short-term trends: they are the consequences of years of neglect of basic care of buildings and structures.
Inertia works in the other direction: to change for the better resource companies quickly will not work.
Explain on your fingers, please.
Take, for example, our investment in renewable energy.
Two years ago, we launched the first solar power plant (SES): we tried and evaluated the results.
We decided to build another one this summer.
If the first one was 1 megawatt, then this one is 3 megawatts.
The next step was outlined three more SPPs with a total capacity of 15 megawatts.
However, noticeable changes in the scale of the company will be felt after 5-6 years.
That is, a change in the technological order of large companies cannot happen in a matter of years – it takes decades.
This is true for Polymetal, which is ahead of the rest of the planet, but a significant part of our industry is in the rearguard: the cover troops have not begun to move - only remove tents.
Vitaly was photographed at the head office of "Polymetal" on Prospekt Narodnogo Opolcheniya, 2.
This skyscraper for VNII Galurgiya was designed by the famous architect Alexander Zhuk, the leading representative of Leningrad modernism, the author of important St. Petersburg buildings - Pulkovo Airport, Youth Theater and Oktyabrsky Concert Hall.
If things don ’ t change so soon, maybe the mining industry will catch up with what ’ s called cancel culture sooner?
In the foreseeable future, it will not be possible to completely abandon the extraction of new raw materials, even from coal, I am silent about oil and metals.
However, it is obvious that it is necessary to extract all this more carefully.
There is a wide public demand for a conscious attitude to the environment, and it will determine the dynamics of economic development.
And this is a very correct request: the rate of pollution of nature and disturbance of the ecological balance has approached a critical level.
But the correct answer to this challenge is not the elimination of an entire sector of the economy, but the introduction of new technologies that will make more rational use of natural resources.
Environmental rhetoric is very loud, companies also tear their shirts on their chest in response, but in fact do little.
I cannot but praise Polymetal here: we do not make the loudest noise, but what we say we do is absolutely accurate.
The real risk is not the closure of enterprises, but the oratory, which is not translated into action.
You are planning the future of the company for decades to come.
As a strategist, make a prediction that we will all be a hundred years from now?
A hundred?
Come on, no one will tell you that.
My favorite story about the expediency of such distant forecasts is about the English economist Thomas Malthus.
In the middle of the 19th century, he urged to leave London, predicting that due to the growing number of carts, the city would inevitably sink in horse manure.
We know what happened, we invented cars.
In the medium term, something can still be predicted.
For example, I read Vladimir Sorokin ’ s “Oprichnik Day ” in 2007 and immediately realized that this is the closest to reality prediction of the next 15 years – in many ways it has already come true.
“Excess people ” were both under Turgenev and in the Soviet Union.
You once said that a top manager should read Dostoevsky instead of business literature.
Why? Why?
From the point of view of the depth of psychologism, Dostoevsky has no equal.
He fantastically accurately describes what is happening in the inner world of a person placed in a difficult situation.
Tolstoy convex and sincerely writes about simple fundamental things: marital love, jealousy, parent-child relationships.
Dostoevsky writes not so clearly, but he knows how to fix the most complex emotions that arise in non-linear relationships between people.
I do not agree with those who consider Tolstoy and Dostoevsky a dichotomy: either one or the other.
It's like wine, there's red and white.
I, say, love white Burgundy, but sometimes under a steak I can drink and pinotage.
Please advise me to read more!
It is impossible to recommend books to everyone, I can tell you about those that I love.
There is a set that includes the New Testament and Eugene Onegin, which is necessary to understand the universal cultural code.
But that doesn ’ t mean the books on this list are my favorites.
Of the artistic, I was greatly influenced by Fowles' The Magician in my youth, and in adulthood by Anna Karenina, when I reread it, already being a family man.
One of the few books I recommend reading on business is Think Slow, Decide Fast by Daniel Kahneman.
It is complex and not very well translated, but it is worth it: after all, a Nobel laureate in economics and one of the most important scientists in the social sciences of the last 50 years.
I am a big fan of Shakespeare, but in the original: sonnets in English and in translation - two beautiful, but very different works.
I appreciate the classic novels of Stephen King: it may sound funny, but he is in a sense a version of Dostoevsky - tells how the human psyche reacts when placed in abnormal conditions.
Photo: archives of press services
How much does the translation decide for the original source?
Conventionally, “Over the Catcher in the Rye ” and“ The Catcher in the Field of Bread ” are two identical books?
A book in the original language is always preferable, but I do not accept "Over the Catcher in the Rye" in any form.
I don ’ t like the book itself – it ’ s proto-hipster.
From the point of view of technical mastery, it is written exceptionally qualitatively, but its ideological message is deeply unpleasant to me.
A novel about a young man who refuses to grow up and feels sorry for himself.
In recent years, I have come across young men who are so confident in their exclusivity that they do not want to force themselves to do anything.
Graduated from school, sat down to play tanks, then did not pass the first session and consider themselves a modern embodiment of Chatsky.
Your company is working with the technologies of the future, so there are a lot of young specialists.
Aren ’ t you afraid that soon such young people will be the majority of your employees?
"Extra people" were in the days of Turgenev, and in the USSR.
Only if they drank there and died early, now they sit in online games and social networks, eat healthy food, and in terms of life expectancy they are doing well.
Leisure people are different, but the essence is the same and most likely not the one that will lead a person to work in high technology, and to us in the team.
The company, of course, is getting younger, we welcome it and adjust.
Oddly enough, older people, who were formed in the 1990s, are less demanding of the obligations of the employer on the social package.
Personally, as a leader, the American concept is close to me: I pay you good money, and you do what you want with them.
This has been our strategy for many years.
In 2021, we provided all our employees with VMI.
However, in 2021, we provided all our employees with VMI.
First of all, because of the pandemic, this is a message for the collective: we care about your health and want you to spend this money on it.
But the fact that the preferences of promising employees, especially young ones, have changed also played a role: they already consider VMI as a mandatory, rather than an optional element of the social package.
Well, the attitude to my own health is different: at the age of 25, unfortunately, I did not care so much about it.
Indexing or VMI: the manager makes a difficult choice even in good things.
Polymetal from Karelia to Chukotka implements social programs.
Road or kindergarten - how to decide what is most needed?
There is no need to reinvent the bicycle, it is better to ask.
Social programs are another business process within a company that is well described and regulated.
Surveys, focus groups, statistics on the level of satisfaction with social services.
Mostly people care about health, education and leisure.
So the standard project in the regions of presence is the repair of something that has not been repaired since the 1980s: gardens, schools, sports facilities, roads, bus stations.
Photo: archives of press services
You personally also do a lot of charity. How do you choose who to help?
When I decide which charity project I will participate in as a private person, I prefer, firstly, to do it without agents: not to give money even to very good foundations, but to actively participate.
Secondly, invest in social lifts.
In small towns, it is necessary that children have the opportunity to receive a quality education, play sports.
It ’ s not as sentimental as helping the sick, but from my point of view, it ’ s just as important.
Therefore, I support two schools where I studied in Kaliningrad, implemented a tennis court project with my wife in Magadan, and we are finishing the construction of an ice arena in Amursk, Khabarovsk Territory.
You studied at Yale, worked in New York, live in St. Petersburg.
How well do you know the distant regions in which the company operates?
It is so good that in all the regional centers where our enterprises are located, I can recommend a restaurant for breakfast, lunch and dinner, maybe more than one.
I am deeply immersed in the activities of the company in the regions.
I have been working at Polymetal for 18 years, and during this time in the Magadan Region, in the Khabarovsk Territory, in the Sverdlovsk Region, I probably lived for six months on a number of business trips.
The front of the fight against smartphones passes through children.
We will catch you on the word - advise!
And take Petersburg, please.
In the regions, probably, not only restaurants, but favorite dishes.
In the Khabarovsk Territory, this tala is a kind of local fish stroganina, only the fish is cut into cubes and served with pepper and onions.
In the Magadan region, there is nothing better than a roasted trumpeter.
We have units in Kazakhstan: there are, of course, Beshbarmak and Baursaks.
If we talk about St. Petersburg, then my favorite places are "On Wine!", "Wine Warehouse" and Zazazu on Rubinstein.
But I personally like this – I love wine, and so usually the wife and children form the culinary agenda: with them we often find ourselves in the MA and Mozzarella Bar on Moskovsky.
In 2019, you said you don ’ t have a smartphone. Is that true?
And your children, too?
The truth is I have a push-button phone: moreover, look – this is the same device that was in 2019.
Because of smartphones, warm, lively, real communication has replaced the electronic surrogate.
People do not talk, do not walk, but sit in social networks, watch Instagram and tick-talk.
The family comes to the restaurant, and, instead of communicating with the child, parents put him on the tablet cartoon - that's the whole family dinner.
Mining works of Polymetal in Kazakhstan.
Photo: archives of press services
Our kids don ’ t have smartphones or tablets.
First, they are still small - they are two, six and eight, but even the older we are not going to start it yet, although some classmates daughter phones already have.
Okay, I'm old and settled, but right now the front line really goes through the kids.
Of course, this war will end in a loss.
I have no illusions that my children will not use a smartphone, they will.
But there is hope that this will happen when they are formed people, able to avoid excessive use of modern means of communication.
What to do so that they do not suffer from the fact that around their peers use smartphones, and they do not?
As with any other question - talk to children, understand what they are interested in.
When I was a teenager, my classmates gambled, smoked, drank alcohol.
So what?
I didn't. I didn't.
At least he didn't then.
Smartphones are the same.
One of the main tasks of parenting is to convince children that they are able to make their own choices and go against dominant practices, including cultural ones.
It is possible, it is necessary, it forms character.
They will live in a global world!
No matter how far the friend was, he sent him a smiley face - and kind of talked.
Key word, I think.
It is better to communicate less, but more meaningful.
"Stir a kitten" is a meaningless form of communication.
It is better to gain strength, force yourself and write an e-mail: where you say in your own words what is happening to you, ask questions.
I have a lot of university friends in the US, and when we communicate, it ’ s a conversation between two specific individuals, not someone ’ s canned content that two abstract users send to each other.
Being constantly in touch is not a requirement of business, it is an internal decision of a person.
Managing a multi-million dollar international business in 2021 is also possible without gadgets?
Being in gadgets 24 / 7 is a personal choice of the head and it is not related to the management of a real business.
In the traditional industry, of course.
Maybe somewhere in high-tech this is not the case, but in our metallurgy this is not a necessity.
Messengers, social networks are the decision of a particular person to use these channels to solve professional and personal issues or not.
I don ’ t use it and it doesn ’ t bother me at all.
If I left work during working hours and I am not on the email, then I, as a responsible person, decided that other things are more important to me.
If someone needs to find me immediately, you can text me, call me.
Yes, there are legends, as you, working at McKinsey, went to rest in the afternoon.
What about those who don ’ t have a work-life balance?
First of all, you want to have that balance.
If a person does not want privacy, he will not be in it.
So first you need to understand inside yourself why you like the work so much that it is impossible to distract yourself from it even for a few hours or days.
The answer is definitely not in your work, but in your attitude to life.
Being constantly in touch is not a requirement of business, it is an internal decision of a person.
FACTS
• Polymetal is one of the top 10 gold mining companies in the world and the largest non-state company by market capitalization with its headquarters in St. Petersburg.
• In 2020, Vitaly Nesis took the seventh place in the rating of capitalist directors of Forbes magazine.
The value of his stake in Polymetal was estimated at $71 million.
• For its achievements in sustainable development, Polymetal was included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index World in 2020, the first Russian company.
• More recently, the company received two loans worth $400 million tied to greenhouse gas emission reduction goals.
Text: Anastasia Pavlenkova
Photo: Alexander Ogurtsov, Yana Miloradovskaya
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This insecurity is compounded by skepticism about whether new technologies will deliver promised benefits equitably, leading to distrust in organizational leadership or institutions driving the change .

Economically, resistance is driven by fears of job loss, wage suppression, and diminished worker rights.

In workplaces where technology adoption is perceived to prioritize capital owners or large corporations over workers, employees may feel alienated and powerless.

The phenomenon of "surveillance capitalism," where tech giants extract value from data at the expense of privacy and autonomy, adds another layer of concern.

Workers often perceive technological innovation as benefiting owners and shareholders while shrinking opportunities for stable, fulfilling employment.

These systemic conditions resemble the exploitative dynamics that originally motivated Luddite protests .

Title:

Content: The new is the old well forgotten.
Where in the Network there was a fashionable insult to the opponents of AI
In the Internet discourse, deep in the study of sarcastic comments of anonymous persons, you can find the term "Luddite".
This label is often referred to as people who dare to express the slightest inclination to inhibit the constant development of artificial intelligence (AI).
Related video
Interestingly, such prominent figures as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have been awarded the Luddite Award, which is recognition of their cautionary position regarding the potential dangers associated with artificial intelligence.
During the ceremony, Robert D. Atkinson, the organizer of the award, noted: “Unfortunately, luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have contributed to the feverish refraction of hands about the impending apocalypse of artificial intelligence, ” writes IFLScience.
In Focus.Technology appeared its own Telegram-channel.
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Atkinson also explained: "Do we consider any of them personally Luddites?
No, of course not.
They are pioneers of science and technology.
But they and others have done a disservice to the public — and undoubtedly have helped and comforted the increasingly common neo-Luddist impulse in modern society — by demonizing AI in the popular imagination.
But how did the term come about?
Its roots can be traced back to the early 1800s in England.
Before the industrial revolution, skilled craftsmen who knew a lot about textile production made clothes using their own machines and specialized tools.
However, a situation arose when new technologies and methods of mass production appeared, as a result of which artisans were unable to compete.
The result was a movement whose purpose was the destruction of the textile industry and the destruction of new machines.
Although there is some truth to this story, it does not reflect the whole essence of the Luddite movement.
Their actions were not driven solely by a reaction to new technologies; rather, they were a response to the profound transformations taking place in their professional activities.
While it is true that they often attacked a knitting machine known as a stocking frame, as well as other mechanized fixtures, their main concern was the labor practices associated with these machines.
Kevin Binfield, editor of the Luddite and Compassionate Works, explained their motives: "They simply wanted machines to produce high-quality goods, and that these machines employed workers who had been trained and received fair wages.
It was their only concern. ”
The nickname "Luddites" comes from the nickname "Ned Ludd", an apocryphal figure who allegedly sabotaged a textile factory in 1779, although historical evidence suggests that this man was most likely a fictional one.
In a 2007 paper, researcher David Linton explained: “Some say that a young man, possibly with cognitive impairment, named Ned Ludd once misunderstood an order and accidentally broke his frame machine.
Others argue that this was done deliberately, in a fit of anger.
Whatever the motive, it seems to have become a joke phrase that whenever the machine breaks, for whatever reason, you can say something like, "Ludd must have been here."
From this construction, it is a short step to the ironic application of the name Ludd to vandalism for political purposes. "
Between 1811 and 1816, the Luddite movement held sporadic and somewhat unorganized protests, characterized by the destruction of cars and the burning of factories.
In response, the mill owners resorted to extreme measures, using deadly force against the Luddites.
In April 1812, there was a grim turning point in Huddersfield, where at least four people died at the hands of the mill owners.
In retaliation, the Luddites killed the owner of the mill, William Horsfall, who boldly declared his intention to "smear himself with Luddite blood to the saddles."
Horsfall was shot while sitting on his horse.
Faced with these uprisings, the government immediately sent thousands of soldiers to quell the protests.
Moreover, they adopted a law according to which the breakdown of cars was subject to the death penalty or sending to colonies.
Subsequently, the movement dissipated, but the stable expression "Luddite" could not accurately convey the ideals and goals of the Luddites.
Previously, Focus wrote about the first IPSO in the history of mankind.
It turns out that it was invented in Babylon and it concerns the Flood.

Workers may band together to defend traditional roles and seek fairer involvement in decision-making.