For most of recorded time in societies all over the world, goods were produced on a small scale by active hands that turned raw materials into finished products. Traditionally, these industries produced handicrafts using non-mechanized methods to knit, weave, and interlace individual threads to create ropes and fabrics and lace. They were located in people’s homes, thus the term cottage industries. They were easy businesses to start because investment in raw materials was low and products were hand-made by the entire family. The retail equivalent of cottage industries was the ethnic mom-and-pop stores that closely integrated work and family life for millions of New York City families that lived above their street-level shops 50 years ago.
Who Were the Luddites and What Are Cottage Industries?
For many years, unprocessed wool was spun into yarn by hand
Each twist added to the yarn made it stronger. Some hand-operated machines made tasks easier and more efficient by using simple machines like the spinning wheel. Rumpelstiltskin used one to turn straw into gold and Blood, Sweat, and Tears used a Spinning Wheel to weave jazz and rock together, now called fusion.
The spinning wheel is another of the many devices has no known inventor, but is generally believed it came from somewhere in India
When the spinning wheel made it easier to produce more and better yarn more quickly and efficiently, the supply of yarn increased and along with it the production of woven wool and cotton fabrics.
Spinning wheels were replaced in turn by more efficient spinning jennys*
These devices were at first eight times more productive. Continued refinements upped that number to 120 times more productive than a single spinning wheel, yet still operated by a single person. Along came automatic spinning mules that were 150 feet long and carried 1,320 spindles, the same number as feet in a quarter mile. Here’s a 30-second clip of one in operation.
Early machines were able to make eight stitches per inch
A great way to put things in their proper perspective is to think of today’s sheets with thread counts of anywhere from 300 to more than a thousand per inch. Generally speaking, the higher the thread count, the greater the feel of luxury, assuming the proper material and the specific arrangement of how the threads are interlaced. Imagine sheets with 8 threads per square inch, more air than thread.
The Flying Shuttle
John Kay, ancestor of psychedelic rock band Steppenwolf’s lead singer,** improved the reed, the raceboard, the shuttleboxes, and the picker and called it the Flying Shuttle. It doubled productivity. Next thing you know, someone’s invented a Flying Bobbin and a Spinning Roller, Arkwright’s Water Frame and Crompton’s Mule, all devices to weave wool and cotton fibers into fabrics more quickly, more efficiently, and with greater consistency. Step by step, machines continued to evolve from rudimentary devices to ever-more complex and sophisticated instruments and tools.
Cottage industries inevitably gave way to the factory system, one of history’s greatest turning points
The Industrial Revolution was characterized by the transition from an agrarian society and handicraft economy to one dominated by the power of industry’s manufacturing by machine. Machinery improved efficiency and sped up output. Prices went down with mass production and cottage industries couldn’t compete with factories.
Full automation requires a power source
The Dutch used sails to farm the wind, those along rivers and creeks built wheels turned by the steady stream of water flowing by. Once devices are made to perform the same tasks over and over and power is delivered to them (by water wheels, steam, coal, internal combustion, and finally, electricity), you only need to keep a few people around to oil the machinery and take out the trash.
Game changers
The steam engine powered the Industrial Revolution and Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin*** fueled it. Eli’s contraption picked the prickly seeds out of the sticky cotton, what had been an arduous, time-consuming chore despised by the slaves who had to do it every year.
The neck bone connected to the head bone
Mechanization of spinning and weaving in England increased demand for cotton on a larger scale from exporting nations in Africa and the Americas. The unfortunate unintended consequence of England’s ravenous cotton economy was how it supported and sustained the growth of plantation slavery for another hundred years.
Textile workers in England saw firsthand how technology was taking away their jobs
They were being replaced by machines. Automation was taking over their industry. As the story goes, down Nottingham way there was once a young hot-headed apprentice who lived in Sherwood Forest hundreds of years after Robin and his Merry Men were long gone.
To help set the era
This was the same time the British army was attacking and burning Washington, D.C., Francis Scott Key was writing the National Anthem as he watched Fort McHenry giving and taking fire, and a dying Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry gave his last command, “Don’t give up the ship.”
Furious at how handicraft workers were being put out of work by machines, the hot-headed apprentice became a folk hero when he broke into a textile factory and smashed up the machinery
His name was Ned Ludd. Some say he was real. Others say he was a folk hero and a symbol of the gross injustice of machines ruining regular people’s lives by fattening the already fattened capitalists. Man or myth, those who objected to losing their means of making a living came to be known as Luddites.
Ned’s brazen burst of rebellion triggered angry emotions in self-described Luddites everywhere
All across England, Luddites spontaneously began threatening mill owners, rioting, smashing machines, and burning factories. These actions held off the Industrial Revolution until a law was passed where convictions came with automatic death sentences.
Thousands of regular Army troops rounded up the dissenters and protesters
Some they hanged in the public square. The fortunate ones were shipped off to a penal colony as big as an entire continent. Oy oy oy.
Have you heard of today’s neo-Luddites?
Last year, Atlantic ran a story by Brian Merchant, called The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down. In it, we are told about American writer and artist Molly Crabapple, who published an open letter that called for banning generative artificial intelligence. The tech industry responding by calling her a Luddite, the term now evolved to mean someone who is an anti-technology dinosaur. And lately it has been extended even farther by the misinformed to include opposition to anything new. Today, Young Moderns feel up-to-date when they tell you Facebook users are Luddites.
Merchant wrote how “The new Luddites – a growing contingent of workers, critics, academics, organizers, and writers – say that too much power has been concentrated in the hands of the tech titans, that tech is too often used to help corporations slash pay and squeeze workers, and that certain technologies must not merely be criticized but resisted outright.”
That sounds a lot like this site’s Who Are the Early Rejectors?, written nearly 10 years ago
Those born in the years right after World War II and the Korean War were early adopters of all things tech and telecom in the 1980s. When they got older, they became early rejectors of the very technologies they had invented and popularized 30 years earlier.
Thousands of early rejectors across the country told researchers one thing that came with biological and emotional maturity was learning to care less about the newest and latest devices
- They are happily living with longer product cycles and don’t want the latest bigger-better-does more television, or an internet-enabled subscription cheese grater that looks like Aaron Rogers.
- They don’t want to buy a new phone every year because it has a new camera.
- Many are giving up smartphones for simple talk and text devices with no online connection or large usage fees.
Another thing early rejectors learned was to care less about social media
They don’t want to live in fishbowls, take pictures of all their meals, or keep up with the increasingly limited vocabularies of 12-year-olds. They have zero interest in the endless unfiltered commentary around foolish and unimportant things by mobs of foolish and unimportant people.
And they not only don’t care that they’re not keeping up, early rejectors are also happy to get off the treadmill and leave it to the people whose lives fall apart if they don’t check in every three minutes. The hell with Keeping Up With the Joneses.
Where are these Neo-Luddite Early Rejectors going?
One snarky definition of people in sales and marketing that doesn’t wander far from the truth is “Those who sell you things you don’t need at prices you can’t afford.”
In increasing numbers Neo-Luddite Early Rejectors are rejecting the incessant pressures to constantly spend more for things they don’t want or need. They are moving “from magpie to minimalism, from flashy to understated, from the superficial to the meaningful.”
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*Some say jenny is slang for engine.
**I made that up.
***Cotton Gin sounds more like the brand name of the only self-contained completely dry martini. The gin in cotton gin really does stand for enGINe, though.
Bonus
- Some human workers were replaced by machines.
- Some human workers were replaced by robots.
- Some human workers were replaced by computer software.
- Some human workers were replaced by ______.
Sooner or later. Ask any elevator operator.
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