The Luddites probably mended their clothes

I’ve been on a reading-about-tech-history streak lately, including Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine (I didn’t like it) and Ruth Goodman’s The Domestic Revolution (I liked it a lot). Fashion history and textile history are particular interests of mine, I like archaic crafts, and I like mechanical objects. See: my 1937 treadle sewing machine, modified to have a hand crank. It took me a bit to get it working and I love it. Simultaneously, I have been trying to learn more about AI tools, what they can do well, and if there’s any problems they can solve for me. I’m kind of neutral on AI for a lot of reasons, most of them personal preference: I like writing, I like building things, I like solving puzzles in code. But I’m also usually trying to do three more projects at a time than I have time for, and I feel compelled to try anything that makes that easier.

As such, I’ve gotten really stuck on the way the Luddites and the mechanization of weaving/cloth production live in the modern mind in complete isolation from the actual technology involved. I came to Merchant’s book really late (it came out in 2023), so I have to take him at his word that the popular conception of Luddites at the time was mindless anti-technology smashers. His story paints them as principled labor agitators reacting to being undercut by new machines that could do their jobs somewhat worse but hugely faster. Right now, I mostly see Luddites referenced as being an inspiration for anti-AI or anti-tech agitating. And like, the metaphor works!

To me, what the fixation on this one (famous, well documented) case of pushback against mechanization misses is that 1. This is a thing that happened many times as many different types of labor (relating to textiles, specifically) were replaced and 2. Clothing produced without mechanization was expensive to a degree that’s hard to contemplate these days.

Just offhand (again, not a historian of this), the introduction of the spinning jenny (mechanizing spinning of yarn/thread) caused riots, the framework knitting machine was refused a patent and drove the inventor to go to France about it, and the power loom caused riots. Arguably, the Luddites were starting from a place of high autonomy and high wages only *because* of previous automation (they were framework knitters, on machines that had displaced hand knitting, using yarn created by more efficient spinning jennys). Merchant’s book argues that the output of the new machines displacing the Luddites was lower-quality, which seems to have been true, but people at the time seem to have preferred “worse stockings, but I can afford them” to “nicer stockings, but I can’t afford them”. Personally, I own a number of socks that would have been unfathomable to people of the era (more than 10, even), so I don’t feel comfortable judging them about that choice.

If you’re going to lean on the Luddites as an inspirational example, even if you are arguing more that they should have been compensated/protected rather than arguing the tech shouldn’t exist, I think you have to grapple with what that would look like. There’s some good literature on household inventories over time, frequently including clothes, and it seems like even the moderately well off just didn’t own that many items. It was *incredibly expensive* to buy fabric, because of all the labor involved in producing it. I’m generalizing, but the amount of clothes in a normal wardrobe today would be shocking to most people in history. Things were mended, passed down, repurposed, and taken care of to an enormous degree. There are items in museum collections that were remade into new styles some 50 years after the original construction of the item.

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Anyways, this returns me to my original point: if you’re going to be using the Luddites as an example, and thus clothing manufacture as an AI parallel, then you should probably learn to mend your clothes. Pretending for a moment that it’s hideously expensive to get a new coat, you should know how to reattach a button or replace a cuff. I suppose for true authenticity to my point, I should be talking about darning socks, which you should also try (although you’ll have a hell of a time with the modern super tight knit elastic-y variety). Re-sewing rips and torn hems is probably the easiest thing to learn, although making it look nice is a challenge. This is especially handy if you’re the sort of person who catches your clothes on things all the time (not that I know anyone like that). It’s a useful set of skills, I think it’s fun, and it’ll let you hang on to your stuff for longer.

It is possible, even likely, that you’ll try this and think it sucks and is boring. That is maybe a little the point- this was a thing that people DID until not all that long ago, even when it sucked and was boring. (Nitpickers may point out that there used to be an industry of people who would do these things for you, for relatively low prices, due to the abundance of cheap labor. I think the point stands.) I think it is healthy to understand what would have been necessary to exist in an environment before ultra cheap clothing manufacture when we’re using it as a casual point of comparison to our modern developments.

Do I have a point here? This may be an oops all vibes post? I started writing a very detailed point by point account of why I didn’t like Blood in the Machine, but half of that was “it doesn’t actually care about the technologies in question”, which is only a problem if you happen to think those technologies are neat. The other half was “the author is wrong about some things I noticed”, including the irritating lazy thing of confusing life expectancy with how long an adult could expect to live, and a point about where trousers came from. While those things DO make me wonder if he’s wrong about things I can’t easily verify, I don’t actually know, and I didn’t really care to dig and find out. I’m fairly sure my objection is mostly, as described above, that he doesn’t grapple with the knock-on effects on the entire population of clothes-wearers. It’s an interesting story, don’t get me wrong, but I kept coming back to “okay, and the alternative is…..??”