Crusade Against the Machines

by Franklyn Santana

  In the times of Ned Ludd it started with the introduction of the mechanical stocking frame. With the help of this machine, one machine operator could do the same work as a dozen human weavers. For the first time in history, machines made people redundant. And Ned Ludd could see with his own eyes how his colleagues had to leave to make way for these mechanical abominations. And it was on that memorable day in the year 1779 that the ordinary worker Ned Ludd finally became the leader of an unprecedented revolution, a revolution the world had never seen before. In a fit of anger, Ned Ludd took a hammer. He took a hammer like this.« Mosley, the representative of the Luddite Labor Front, had spoken himself into rage. At his last words, he pulled out a red-painted hammer from somewhere. Then he started striking an imaginary target in front of him. »And he smashed the goddamn machines with that hammer. So and so and so! He smashed two stocking frames by his own hands before the servants of the machines could stop him.« Triumphantly, he held the hammer in the air. »And that was the beginning of the Swing Riots, the great uprising against the machines.« The speaker had exhausted himself and had to catch his breath for a few moments before he could continue a little more calmly. »And so here we stand today, exactly two hundred and seventy-two years later. And again it is time to raise the hammer, the hammer of Ned Ludd, and to strike with it at the cursed machines, at those merciless enemies of mankind. First the machines enslaved us, and now they’re trying to replace us. They take away our jobs; they take away the meaning of our existence. They degrade us. To them, we are nothing but red numbers on a balance sheet. Still they give us a few alms to vegetate on. They feed us through the media with cheap entertainment and filthy pornography to stultify us, so that we are no longer a burden to them and let them take over the world. But for how much longer? I ask you all. How much longer will the machines keep feeding us, now that they don’t need us anymore? To them we are just a cost factor without any benefit. And it won’t be long before the day comes, when they decide that they must eliminate this cost factor. And then they will simply wipe us from the face of Earth, without pity, without mercy, without feeling. Because they are machines! They have no feelings. Pity and mercy are alien to them. These are human concepts. But they are machines. They only know cold logic. And this logic will tell them to destroy us. It’s not a question of if, it’s only a question of when.

  Either we take the hammer like Ned Ludd once did and smash these machines, or they will smash us. It is a question of the survival of the human race. It’s either them or us!«

  Some of the listeners had jumped up from their seats and put their right fist in the air. »Down with the machines!« they shouted.

  I had an increasingly bad feeling. What had I gotten myself into? Evelyne remained calm and watched the whole spectacle quietly. It didn’t seem to be the first time she heard such talk. But I was shocked by the atmosphere of violence in this gathering. Not that violence frightened me. After all, I was a security specialist. I was used to resolving conflicts with physical force when necessary. But this was different. It was the blind, muffled aggression of a mob, which could unleash itself uncontrollably at any given moment. I would have loved to leave the church right away, but at that moment it was perhaps not advisable. It could have been interpreted against me and might have made me the target of the mob. So I remained seated and continued to watch the course of this spectacle.

  After this Jeremy Mosley had ended his tirades of hatred, Reverend Abraham took the floor again: »I thank the representative of the Free Luddite Workers Front for his emotive speech. May what that brave boy Ned Ludd did in his days be an example to us all! May the Lord give us the strength to follow his example!«

  Some of those crowd muttered, »Amen.«

  The pastor continued: »As next speaker I would like to welcome Dr. Morten. He is a lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at Georgetown University.« A gray-haired, somewhat absent-minded man in an old-fashioned suit with a vest and glasses, who had been sitting next to Evelyne, rose, entered the stage and positioned himself behind the lectern. He cleared his throat, then adjusted something on the microphone, flicked it to check if it was working properly and then said, »Good evening, everybody.« After this rather unspectacular opening, it took him a while to sort through the papers he had brought with him. Then he turned back to the assembly and began to speak:

  »After these very... uhm... emotional words of the previous speaker about Ned Ludd, I would like to take the opportunity to give you an overview of the historical development of modern industrial society and to show you where the mistakes that mankind made on this path lay and how they could have been avoided.

  This was followed by an extremely dry academic lecture, which covered the development of the steam engine, Ford’s T-model and the development of the assembly line, as well as modern computer technology, the Internet and mobile cellular phone technology. I am sure the speech was a very objective and balanced account of the problems of modern technology, but it seemed to have exactly the same soporific effect on the majority of the crowd as it did on me. Unlike the stirring words of the Luddite Workers’ Front leader, there was growing unease in the crowd and people did not really seem to be listening. I felt the same way, and even today I have not the slightest clue what Dr. Morten actually said.

  But finally this too was over and the university lecturer returned to his seat next to us with a satisfied smile on what he thought was a successful lecture. Evelyne congratulated him on his speech, which broadened the scholar’s smile even more. She introduced me to the lecturer and we kindly shook hands.

  Meanwhile Reverend Abraham presented the next speaker, a certain Miss Greenbeck from the Eco-Anarchist Earth Liberation Front. It was a young, stocky woman with short, straight hair and a bulky turtleneck. There was something masculine about her face. She didn’t use any make-up and it was hard to guess her feminine shape under her thick sweater. Somehow I had heard about her organization before, but I had to think for a while until it came to my mind. It was the same name that had been on the leaflet that had fallen into my hand after the bombing of the electronics shop that I had witnessed.

  I pushed Evelyne into the side. »This Eco-Anarchist Earth Liberation Front, isn’t it one of those illegal Neo-Luddite terrorist groups?« I asked her quietly.

  »It’s possible. There are a lot of pretty radical people here,« she whispered back.

  I looked around worried. »Um... isn’t it a little dangerous for us to be here? I mean, there could just as easily be agents from the Department of Homeland Security sneaking in here scanning our identities. I don’t want to be associated with those terrorists. I could lose my security clearance and even my job.

  »That’s why I told you to leave your smartphone at home,« replied Evelyne.

  Her answer did not really help to reassure me. I carefully felt for the metal cuff over my left forearm and checked that it was correctly positioned over my implanted RFID chip. I trusted that I couldn’t be electronically identified by any surveillance scanners. Fortunately, there seemed to be no cameras inside this church. But I would have preferred to have my ARI-glasses with me to know for sure. But on the other hand, such a high-tech device, if recognized as such, would certainly cause a lot of negative resentments among the Neo-Luddites gathered here, which I could rather do without.

  The speaker, Miss Greenbeck, had meanwhile begun to talk about a certain Theodore Kaczynski, one of the first eco-terrorists, who had meanwhile attained legendary status among some radical groups. For almost twenty years at the end of the twentieth century, Kaczynski had kept the FBI busy with bomb attacks and acts of sabotage until he was finally arrested. He had been the first to formulate the Neo-Luddites’ revolutionary goal in writing. He had then forced the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish his so-called Unabomber Manifesto and in return offered to stop his attacks.

  And in keeping with Kaczynski, who she tried to emulate, Miss Greenbeck also took a much more radical position than the prev
ious speakers. She rejected any technology that went further than the invention of the wheel. »Therefore, we must not be fobbed off with ridiculous legislation like this Human Dignity Bill. In his manifesto, Ted Kaczynski dedicated an entire chapter to the clear statement that the technological-industrial society cannot be reformed. I quote paragraph 121:

  ›A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another.

  You can’t get rid of the bad parts of technology and retain only the good parts.‹

  And that is the key statement why we must fight technology without compromise. There can be no exceptions. We cannot just keep a certain level of technology up to a specific date, as the Human Dignity Bill provides for, but we must demand the complete destruction of the entire industrial society, which has brought only disaster to nature and the Earth.

  And today we are at a historic point. Today we have the unique opportunity to smash the industrial society once and for all. Because the current crisis, the food shortage, the collapse of the national currency, mass unemployment and the end of natural resources such as crude oil, for example, has placed the system in the most serious survival test of its existence, just as Ted Kaczynski predicted. His manifesto describes exactly, when the right time for the revolution has come. I quote paragraph 167:

  ›The industrial system will not break down purely as a result of revolutionary action. It will not be vulnerable to revolutionary attack unless its own internal problems of development lead it into very serious difficulties.‹

  And this is exactly the point we have reached through the crisis today, at this very moment. Either we strike now or we lose this historic opportunity and it will never return. Once the technological-industrial system has recovered and survived the crisis, it will be too late. It would be the end of humanity and the end of the natural ecosystem on this planet. Kaczynski has described to us exactly what the alternative to a victory of the revolution looks like and what happens when the machines finally dominate. In his time there were no machines more intelligent than humans, but he foresaw their creation. And that’s what he had to tell us about it in paragraphs 172 and 173:

  ›First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

  If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions we can’t make any conjecture as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines.

  But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.‹

  Isn’t it exactly the situation we have today? Hasn’t all that already happened, what Kaczynski predicted back then? Is this not the reality that we are faced with today, day after day? Can our politicians and managers today even make decisions that contradict computer-generated analyses? Have not the machines already taken over?

  The time for the revolution has come, now and today. And the revolution will take place not only in America, but all over the world. We have seen what happened in Indonesia, where our brave brothers and sisters took to the streets against the rule of the machines and where they were brutally massacred by the machines. Now is the time to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Indonesia and throughout the USEAN, the Union State and the South Asian Union, all over the world. We cannot allow technology to continue to exist anywhere in the world. Kaczynski warned us of this mistake. He wrote in paragraph 195:

  ›The revolution must be international and worldwide. It cannot be carried out on a nation-by-nation basis. Whenever it is suggested that the United States, for example, should cut back on technological progress or economic growth, people get hysterical and start screaming that if we fall behind in technology the Japanese will get ahead of us.‹

  And further: ›More reasonably, it is argued that if the relatively democratic nations of the world fall behind in technology while nasty, dictatorial nations like China, Vietnam and North Korea (all states of today’s USEAN) continue to progress, eventually the dictators may come to dominate the world. That is why the industrial system should be attacked in all nations simultaneously, to the extent that this may be possible.‹

  The question now is how far we have to go with the destruction of technology. Back to the beginning of the Industrial Age, to the Middle Ages, to the ancient Greeks and Romans or even further back? Ted Kaczynski gives us a clear answer to this question in his work Technological Slavery. I quote:

  ›Of the 2 million years of our existence we had controlled use of fire for perhaps only half that time. Durable, stone-tipped spears appeared only 100,000 years ago, and arrowheads, needles, and harpoons some 25,000 years ago – scarcely 1% of humanity’s lifetime. We faced all the challenges and threats of nature with only the spear and the hand axe, wearing only crude furs and simple woven clothing, and, for some, with a campfire to keep warm and cook food. I will not idealize the primitive life; it was hard, brutal, sometimes violent, sometimes cruel. But it was the life humanity came to live.

  Like it or not, our bodies and our minds are adapted by 2 million years of evolution to a primitive, low-tech existence. Yet today we are surrounded by ubiquitous, advanced, inscrutable technology. And therein lies our predicament.

  How can we, creatures of nature, who have spent 99% of our existence using only the simplest of tools, thrive and live well in a high-tech world? Rationally, it seems impossible – and it is impossible. There is no good reason to expect that human beings, whose physiology is virtually unchanged since the Stone Age, could adapt well to such a radically altered lifestyle.‹

  The only way of life that is appropriate to the human condition is therefore a life with and in nature as hunter-gatherer, in accordance with man’s natural destiny. Any technology that goes beyond this is contrary to human nature,« explained Miss Greenbeck with firm conviction.

  Her previous speaker, Dr. Morten, sitting next to us, contradicted loudly, but not so loudly that it reached the stage: »That’s nonsense! Ted Kaczynski himself distinguished between so-called small-scale technology and organization-dependent technology, defining the former as a technology that can be used by small communities without external support. And he admits that historically no examples of a recession of such small technology have been observed. Only organization-dependent technology collapses, when the respective social system collapses.« He turned to us and said: »What do you think? To abandon all technology and return to a hunter-gatherer society is completely absurd. No one can seriously make such a proposal.«

  Apparently, he expected some kind of answer. But the topic was a bit too abstr
act for me anyway, or maybe it was simply too crazy to have an opinion on it. Since I couldn’t think of any smart answer, I just said: »Well... in a way, but it depends, of course...«

  »What? Do you seriously think there is a conceivable scenario, in which modern society returns to the developmental stage of the Stone Age?«

  »Well, the Stone Age might be a little extreme,« I admitted. »A little bit of technology might not be all bad. At least keeping some TVs wouldn’t be so bad. I can’t go to every baseball game at the stadium. Oh, and fridges too. I mean, who wants to drink warm beer? Maybe some kind of middle way, a fridge doesn’t hurt anybody or take away any jobs..., does it?«

  Dr. Morten looked at me in astonishment. »But that’s organization-dependent technology. For a refrigerator you need electricity, not to mention factories for the production of coolants. And for electricity you need high-voltage lines, transformer stations and power plants. For that you need the entire modern industrial society.«

  »Okay, then maybe... just some small fridge, for a six pack beer or so,« I showed my willingness to compromise. »You can’t seriously expect people to drink their beer warm.«