[CamperBob2]

Would we be better off today if the Luddites had prevailed?

No?

Well, what's different this time?

Oh, wait, maybe they did prevail after all. I own my means of production, even though I'm by no means a powerful, filthy-rich capitalist or industrialist. So thanks, Ned -- I guess it all worked out for the best!

[marnett]

The Amish seem to be doing fine — and I don’t know if their way of life is under as much existential risk of upheaval and change as everyone else’s

[unscaled]

The Amish approach to technology is completely different from the Luddites, and it doesn't teach us anything about whether we, as a society, should accept or reject a certain technology.

To be more exact, there is no evidence that historical Luddites were ideologically opposed to machine use in the textile industry. The Luddites seemed to have been primarily concerned with wages and labor conditions, but used machine-breaking as an effective tactic. But to the extent that Luddites did oppose to machines, and the way we did come to understand the term Luddite later, this opposition was markedly different from the way Amish oppose technology.

The Luddites who did oppose the use of industrial textile production machines were opposed to other people using these machines as it hurt their own livelihood. If it was up to them, nobody would have been allowed to use these machines. Alternatively, they would be perfectly happy if their livelihood could have been protected in some other manner, because that was their primary goal, but failing that they took action depriving other people from being able to use machines to affect their livelihood.

The Amish, on the other hand, oppose a much wider breadth of technology for purely ideological reasons. But they only oppose their own use if this technology. The key point here is that the Amish live in a world where everybody around them is using the very technologies they shun, and they do not make any attempt to isolate themselves from this world. The Amish have no qualms about using modern medicines, and although they largely avoid electricity and mechanized transportation, they still make significant use of diesel engine-based machinery, especially for business purposes and they generally don't avoid chemical fertilizers or pesticides either.

So if we want to say Amish are commercially successful and their life is pretty good, we have to keep in mind that they aren't a representation of how our society would look if we've collectively banned all the technologies they've personally avoided. Without mass industrialization, there would be no modern healthcare that would eliminate child mortality and there would be no diesel engines, chemical fertilizers and pesticides that boost crop yields and allow family farm output to shoot way past subsistence level.

In the end, the only lesson that the Amish teach us is that you can selectively avoid certain kinds of technologies and carve yourself a successful niche in an wider technologically advanced community.

[marnett]

I somewhat reference the technicalities on Luddite vs the selective rejection of technology that the Amish represent (although arguably they are the closest we have to neo-Luddites, mentioning obviously Luddites anti-progress for all was too radical a stand, not on ideological grounds, but in its anti-capital stance).

I think the broader point I am trying to push is every critique of these technologies is not necessarily demanding their complete destruction and non-proliferation.

And the lesson of the Amish is that, in capitalist democracy, certain technologies are inevitable once the capital class demands them, and the only alternative to their proliferation and societal impact is complete isolation from the greater culture. That is a tough reality.

[mock-possum]

Im sorry but - Who do you think, precisely, seems to be doing ‘fine’ among the Amish?

White cishet men?

I cannot imagine what a hell my life might have been like if I were born into an Amish community, the abuse I would have suffered, the escape I would had to make just to get to a point in my life where I could be me without fear of reprisal.

God just think about realizing that your choices are either: die, conform, or a complete exodus from your family and friends and everything you’ve ever known?

“The Amish seem to be doing just fine” come on

[marnett]

I was not super precise in my remark, so I think it suffered from being misconstrued as written. My remark was strictly in the context of the Parent posts remark on Luddites prevailing or not.

In the context of Luddite societies or communities of faith, the Amish have been able to continue to persist for roughly three centuries with Luddite-like way of life as their foundation. In fact, they are not strictly Luddite in the technical sense, but intentional about what technologies are adopted with a community-focused mindset driving all decisions. This is what I meant be "fine" - as in, culture is not always a winner-take-all market. The amish have persisted, and I don't doubt they will continue to persist - and I envision a great eye will be turned to their ways as they continue protected from some of the anti-human technologies we are wrestling with in greater society.

All of this is to say, we have concrete anthropological examples we can study. I do not doubt that in the coming years and decades we will see a surge of neo-Luddite religious movements (and their techno-accelerationist counterparts) that, perhaps three centuries from now, will be looked back upon in the same context as we do the Amish today.

As an aside, if we place pro-technological development philosophy under the religious umbrella of Capitalism, I think your same critiques apply for many of the prior centuries as well. Specifically with regards to the primary benefactors being cis white men. Additionally, I do not think the racial angle is a fair critique of the Amish, which is a religious ethno-racial group in a similar vein of the Jewish community.