by Kim Pederson…….

Across the pond in England starting in 1811 and and ending roughly in 1816, a group of textile weavers, employed by others or self-employed, rebelled against the machines. The particular devices were stocking looms, spinning frames, and power looms developed as part of the Industrial Revolution. The weavers feared they would lose their jobs to lower-paid, less-skilled workers because of the new technologies and went on a region-wide machine-breaking rampage in the northwestern part of the country, one that had to be put down with a huge military intervention.

These revolutionaries became known as the Luddites. The origin of the name is uncertain. Some think it came from Neal Ludd, a lad who had smashed stocking frames back in 1779. From there it evolved into King Ludd, a Robin Hood spinoff who also lived in Sherwood Forest.

Today, a Luddite is someone opposed to or even fearful of technology pretty much in any form. Well, there may be reason for the fear it turns out. If you doubt this, just read Jacob Silverman’s “All Knowing” article in the June 19 issue of The New York Times Magazine. The tagline for the piece reads “Just about anything can be made ‘smart’ these days, from surfboards to flatware. While it’s presented as an upgrade, it’s also a means of surveillance.”

Silverman writes about how nearly every device that can be made “smart” is being made smart. This includes, and my jaw dropped at this, a tampon that will monitor a woman’s menstrual flow and surfboards “that let you check text messages between waves.” So here’s the scary part: “The intelligence given to these devices really serves twin purposes: information collection and control.” Smart devices, in other words, report back to their masters.

(I just had a paranoid thought that Alexa is listening to and recording my keystrokes and sending them on to Amazon for marketing analysis and who knows what else.)

Take all those fitness apps, for example. The information you put in about yourself and your habits doesn’t stay put. It goes to the fitness app creator and then to whoever can pay for it and make use of it. As Silverman notes, we don’t buy our smart devices, we rent them from the company that makes them and that company has the ultimate control. He writes of Amazon deleting books from Kindles and car dealers installing devices that will keep vehicles from starting if the owners fall behind on payments. His final word on the topic is that maybe we are being duped, if not downright spied upon, much more often than we know. “Perhaps the real smarts on display here,” he concludes, “are those of the tech-industry mandarins who convinced us that we needed all this stuff in the first place.”

I have to admit that this is eye-opening and makes me look more than a little askance at my smartphone, my Kindle, my Amazon Fire, my Dell computer, my Hum car device, my Gear watch, my Pebble, my Fitbit, and on and on and on. While I’m not ready to join the Neo-Luddite movement yet, at the end of all this I can’t help thinking that someday we will desperately need Hal to open the pod bay doors and all we’ll get in return is the glare of an impassive red eye and “I’m sorry, [your name here]. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

*The Leader of the Luddites, engraving of 1812. Public Domain.

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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings.