Rhi Axtell – Writer

Today, I’m thinking about Luddites.

If you don’t know what a Luddite is, here is a description ripped right from Wikipedia:

The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality. They often destroyed the machines in organised raids.

The word luddite also became an insult – to describe someone who wasn’t up-to-date, someone stuck in the past.

Now, one of primary motivators behind the Luddite movement, as you can see above, is that a new type of technology was introduced. A technology that did the work they were trained to do, faster, at a lower cost, but maybe not at the same quality of their work.

Remind you of anything?

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I wonder if my attitudes towards AI and social media make me a bit of a luddite. There is a little part of me, a small whisper of anxiety, which tells me I am just resisting progress. That this is the future and I should just get on board. It’s everywhere after all.

This reflection is also following the fact that today, I deleted my Facebook for good. I was going to wait until the end of the month, but certain events which are taking place today made me want to speed the whole thing up. Goodbye Instagram. Goodbye Facebook. I’m off all that now.

I can already feel the whisper in my head urging me to go back just in case. I’m going to ignore it.

When I think deeply about both AI and social media, I can’t help but recognise that they are both fundamentally flawed in ways that the spinning machines in the 19th Century were not.

Even if you not consider all the damage to the arts and artists that AI is doing by ruthlessly scraping the internet for their work without permission, the data centres needed to run an AI bot are actually really bad for the environment. There are still plenty of ethical issues surrounding the use of AI and there aren’t proper regulations in place around AI use yet. It’s a real AI wild west out there.

Social media is potentially harmful for mental health. It’s polarising and gets people trapped in bubbles of similar viewpoints, potentially encouraging conspiracy theories. With the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg at the helm, there are also subtle (and not so subtle, in the case of Musk) political agendas being thrust into spaces that were originally meant to be places of connection and creativity*.

*Women are allowed to be referred to as ‘household objects or property’ and trans and non-binary people referred to as ‘it’ in Meta’s new policy update.

Considering all of this… If I’m a luddite for not liking social media, and for resisting using AI, then fine. I guess I’m a luddite.

Don’t mind me, I’m going back to my cave to sit by a fire. Technology just depresses me these days.

See you tomorrow (for a funnier blog post, hopefully!)