Topic

Automation

The displacement of human labour by machines, historical and present.

Automation has a 200-year track record. Each wave produced gains. None of those gains were shared automatically — they were extracted by force, by strike, by legislation. The story that this round will be different because the technology is smarter is the same story they told about the power loom, the assembly line, and the call centre. We trace the historical parallels and refuse the amnesia.

Columns (3)

  1. Who Buys the Slop When the Worker Is Fired

    Henry Ford paid his workers enough to afford the cars they built. The AI economy is firing the same customer. A column on the consumer demand problem nobody in the pitch deck wants to address.

  2. The Luddites Were Right

    History remembers the Luddites as fools who feared machines. History is wrong. They feared the owner of the machine, and the owner vindicated them. A column on what the original machine-breakers actually wanted.

  3. Scab in the Machine

    The AI scab does not drink coffee and does not cross a picket line. It scabs by default. A column on how capital learned to break strikes without a body.

Parallels (2)

  1. Then · 1811

    Luddites smash power looms in Nottingham. They are not afraid of machines. They are afraid of what the factory owner will do with them.

    Now · 2024

    Hollywood writers strike over AI-generated scripts. They are not afraid of LLMs. They are afraid of what the studio will do with them.

    The tool is never the enemy. The hand that holds it without sharing the surplus is.

  2. Then · 1914

    Henry Ford raises wages to $5 a day so his workers can afford the cars they build.

    Now · 2025

    OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google race to replace the knowledge workers who are the only people left who can afford a $200/month subscription.

    A consumer economy cannot survive the abolition of the consumer.

Contradictions (2)

Claim
AI is just the next industrial revolution.
Reality
The first industrial revolution eventually produced unions, the weekend, public education, and a middle class. It took 150 years and a lot of blood. Nobody has that kind of runway twice.
Claim
AI will create more jobs than it destroys.
Reality
Every hand-waving study saying this assumes the profits of the new jobs will be shared. Nothing in the current ownership structure suggests they will be.

Demands (1)

  1. 01

    A shorter week at the same pay. Every productivity gain from automation belongs first to the people automated out of a job.

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