00:00:00.000Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, the, the Luddite event turned into an explanation of how to build your own website?
00:00:12.980They're, yeah, this is a little bit confusing.
00:00:14.860It's kind of rich that many of these people who propose to be Luddites are like, well, this is all about human connection.
00:00:21.040I just want to have real human connection.
00:00:23.480When people have very real human connection online.
00:00:27.680the person i talk to most other than simone is leaflet and you look at the like 10 hour
00:00:33.660conversations once every two weeks right i have never seen what leaflet looks like in real life
00:00:41.240when we talk about like an anti-luddite they're like just get to know someone face to face
00:00:46.160i have never interacted once with leaflet face to face like i ask you this sincerely
00:00:52.860would if lived in my friendship be in any way meaningfully enhanced from a flesh to flesh
00:01:00.180conversation would you like to know more hello malcolm i'm excited to be speaking with you today
00:01:06.040because the luddites are assembling once again and you would never know it because you're online
00:01:11.040and they're not online and should we be worried let's find out but thing thanks to wired magazine
00:01:16.720being out there in you know walking around brooklyn we actually know about this because
00:01:21.100otherwise how would we know we wouldn't know but yet they had to find what i love about this
00:01:25.860article they wrote on this group and if you're unfamiliar with who the luddites are historically
00:01:29.660they are anti-technologists who do not like technology taking jobs specifically they wanted
00:01:35.680women in factories working on looms that is that is they believe the natural role of a woman for
00:01:41.360all of human history is being in a factory and working on a loom but they found this in a store0.98
00:01:47.140Yeah, so I'm reading from the Wired article itself called Inside the Luddite Festival, Harnessing Gen Z's Rage Against a Big Tech. Rage, that sounds ominous. The author says, I found out about the event in a serendipitously offline way. Earlier in June, I was with a friend in the East Village, and we got caught in a summer downpour as I was waiting it out in the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, a small venue that documents the neighborhood's history of activism.
00:02:14.140i found the booklet covering the summer of lud's events among other zines posters and pamphlets so
00:02:20.300here i am bone tucked away notebook out playbill in hand because of course our he's not allowed
00:02:26.460to use technology but what's crazier about this she you and i haven't been in the type of a venue
00:02:33.300where we could even presumably find an invitation to a group like this yeah probably in at least
00:02:40.220half a decade I guess you're right yeah so we would never know I mean thank goodness right
00:02:48.020thank goodness I mean they're not they're not posting these at the local BJ's or Walmart so
00:02:52.180where else do we go yeah well I mean I think you have to be like Victoria Elliott the author of
00:02:57.860this article walking around you know in sort of bougie places in New York City and that's actually
00:03:02.820a theme the more I dug into the modern Luddite movement the more I discovered that
00:03:08.380it's it's kind of extremely bougie i would imagine it is yeah it's it's it's very and this is in
00:03:17.820stark contrast to the original luddite movement which will also just go over at the end to kind
00:03:22.120of see like okay how are these different how are these the same but people always to worry about
00:03:26.700in their lives have no reason to be doing this stuff no they're like you can't do this whole oh
00:03:31.720i'm not gonna have a phone i'm not gonna have a computer on me i'm not gonna use ai and what i
00:03:36.660love is they're not even just like anti-ai they're anti the whole ecosystem yeah yeah i i felt like
00:03:44.060we had to cover this particular event though this the summer of lud again because of the author's
00:03:48.960description of it just another part of the article that i found very entertaining the summer of lud
00:03:53.640was preempted with a press conference conducted by the organizer's spokesperson gowanus the media
00:03:59.940puppet. Yes, I am serious. A blue cloth being with soda cap eyes manned by a masked puppeteer.
00:04:07.780Gowanus was conceived of as a way for the movement to speak to the public and the media
00:04:12.700without compromising the identities of the event's organizers who wish to remain anonymous.
00:04:18.620According to Gowanus, New York's Luddite Renaissance is, quote, a loose group of organizers
00:04:24.860that have no formal affiliation as of now, but have been coalescing around noticing similar
00:04:29.700problems of alienation and over-reliance on big tech end quote so yeah this basically though what
00:04:36.440you know at any rate i wanted to kick off with the summer of lud as sort of our starting point
00:04:42.100here because it's seen as a cultural high point in the movements specifically analog and anti-alienation
00:04:48.920wing and there are several wings to this some of which bear more resemblance to the original
00:04:53.280luddite movement and some of which don't but the summer anti-alienation wing what tell me about
00:04:58.380this but tell me about the wings can we see right so the different wings are basically this sort of
00:05:04.280the anti-alienation wing is kind of like well we feel like social media has not been good for us
00:05:08.980we don't like scrolling on our smartphones we would like to performatively be offline and very
00:05:15.080prominently wave around our moleskin notebooks and analog typewriters etc and and you know meet
00:05:21.860in clubs. I'll talk about the clubs. Then there's the anti-big tech and anti-AI data center
00:05:29.600agitators. We did a whole episode on the anti-AI center agitation, which is partially funded by
00:05:37.340outside players who would rather that the U.S. not develop a strong AI infrastructure. But there's
00:05:42.020also a lot of, I would say, homegrown, though, I don't know, we'll say like a fertilizer has been
00:05:47.000added by outside parties, but homegrown concern over data centers. But there are definitely
00:05:52.960reports of escalating tensions between this particular sect of like, I guess you could say
00:06:00.460the modern Luddite movement and some more violent stuff like the vandalism, sabotage threats,
00:06:10.020threats of violence. You'll recall that an Indianapolis city council member who supported
00:06:16.600data center development, heard 13 shots fired outside his home. And then when he opened his
00:06:23.700front door, there was a little note reading no data centers. So people's lives, it is insinuated
00:06:29.680that his life is being threatened by people who don't want data centers, right? So that I think
00:06:35.360is the, we'll say more like militant branch, but this anti-alienation branch has more to do with
00:06:42.180things like this festival with various offline gatherings and events and then also with basically
00:06:49.300school clubs a lot of the original new organization that maybe started to trend in the media back in
00:06:56.8202022 so this is not exactly brand new it was associated with school clubs but back to the
00:07:02.720summer of lud just so like i can cover some of the more important details around that it seems to be
00:07:08.460really centered around new york i didn't actually hear that much weirdly about successful luddite
00:07:14.740movements clubs events etc outside of new york city which is kind of weird as well and it's it's
00:07:22.300actually still happening right now malcolm if we wanted to just drop everything and drive to new
00:07:25.620york we could probably attend some summer of lud events it finishes july 5th and as of today it is
00:07:31.900july 3rd so second we could no it's what is it my god yeah okay so we yeah we can we can go
00:07:41.880it's centered around well i want to hear about the wings i want to hear about the types of events
00:07:46.180yeah yeah so it it has over 120 free public participatory activities there you can learn
00:07:52.940saddle stitching you can learn how to use a shortwave radio you can learn learn how to mend
00:07:58.260clothing also flirt and date offline they have talks and panels like indie web alternatives
00:08:04.620privately owned public spaces fighting data centers so there's certainly like some confluence
00:08:09.580with the anti-data center protest movement and also like i had described to you when we were
00:08:14.780talking earlier today there's a google in real life session where you get to like talk to a human
00:08:18.980expert right so yeah there was also that q a event where it's just google in real life like oh my
00:08:24.800gosh what if you just asked someone except of course it's not anywhere close to as good as
00:08:28.640google and certainly not as good as any ai search engine that i love it that i hear the idea of
00:08:34.120somebody googling something and my thought now is wow that's quite antique you know that's that's a
00:08:40.820little that's a little dated what what ai are you using googling googling well of course google's
00:08:48.320trying to serve up gemini ai answers to everything which people are really mad about so they're not
00:08:52.840i've been googling anymore but anyway according to gothamist which talked about this a little bit
00:08:56.980as well quote at a monday panel discussion on nyc event calendars an array of neighborhood
00:09:02.580characters older punks fresh-faced flip phone users and various others packed at the stone steps
00:09:10.120of the east village community garden la plaza cultural to discuss ways to learn irl happenings
00:09:16.440of irl happenings without social media overall the evening was largely a technical discussion
00:09:21.180on how to build and maintain your own website or newsletter it never got particularly ideal
00:09:26.220ideological wait wait wait wait wait the the the luddite event turned into an explanation
00:09:36.520of how to build your own website that's what they were doing there yeah this is a little bit
00:09:42.600confusing yeah a lot of it's it's not actually about being a luddite what i'm discovering is
00:09:47.860that this sort of social element of the movement they kind of just want to go back to like late
00:09:52.4001990s early 2000s internet with flip phones and with just before this the the any sort of social
00:10:00.940media feed and not actually go offline which is interesting but yeah it's very interesting that
00:10:07.180they're like all technology up to what i got comfortable with when i was a youth is bad yeah
00:10:13.580well i mean as one person is at the event put it it's not quite a digital versus analog thing
00:10:17.800it's a question of who controls how your community or operates itself it's a mark zuckerberg or you
00:10:23.240thing explained thomas you're not an idle passenger of history you get to control the
00:10:27.880impact of your technology that your technology has on you in your society so what a lot of people
00:10:32.420are trying to do is take back sort of some level of sovereignty which i think is not inherently bad
00:10:37.380i mean it's it can't no no i mean what's interesting is that makes it a lot like our
00:10:42.460communities we're just a lot more like i mean the skybrow cinematic universe rfab which is
00:10:48.660basically a cinematic universe at this point by the way one thing i've started working on with rfab
00:10:52.840simone just in terms of features building is a replacement for descript because i too frequently
00:11:00.060have issues with descript it's a useful feature i think descript massively overcharges if we did it
00:11:06.560we'd be doing it at like one tenth the cost of descript and i don't use the vast majority of
00:11:11.040descripts features yeah you just don't want to use them so yeah i really only need it for for
00:11:16.160people who don't know this is what we use to edit our videos to automatically take out ums and stuff
00:11:20.140like that and so what i would do with this system is use it to edit our videos but also give it to
00:11:26.660you guys so you guys can just like move text around and it'll move around where it is i think
00:11:30.500it's a great idea a lot of the organizations present just sound kind of like late 90s seattle
00:11:38.900style zines and letters so a lot of the orgs that were present when at least i think gothamist was
00:11:46.220there covering one of the events for nyc off tech which just does events to connect outside of big
00:11:53.440tech like it's just dedicated to that unplatform which is a guide to escaping social media
00:11:58.700red cow and when you go to red cow's website it's just literally images of posters that people make
00:12:06.620like the kind of, wheat paste posters you might see put up in a city about
00:12:10.120events and concerts and stuff, but it's just a website of them.
00:12:13.080So just in case you're not walking around the streets of New York city or
00:12:17.720Brooklyn, you can, you can go to Red Cal's website to see what you're all set.
00:12:33.780Yeah. So you can see it's just a series of the posters. It's like, well, if I just wanted to see all the weight paste posters in Brooklyn, I can just go to cal.red, which is not, I mean, like, so this is exactly what they're talking about. Like, how do we be offline and not have online advertising and not post on Facebook, but still have people come to our events, which is like this really tough thing to do in modern society.
00:12:55.960So I do find that somewhat interesting from like a just purely logistical, how do we work this out
00:13:00.280standpoint? Then there's also Moon Bulletin, which is just one person, I guess, talking about what
00:13:06.520they know is going on. And then also the People's Circuit, which is this encrypted ProtonMail-based
00:13:11.700email newsletter. So the big themes there are like, I'm really concerned about Mark Zuckerberg
00:13:15.820knowing everything about me. And I just hate these big tech companies and I don't want to
00:13:19.820be manipulated by social media. So here's my attempt to live a different type of life.
00:13:25.300i like the intentionality of it no it's so interesting about seeing this and these types
00:13:29.900of events and stuff like that is it reminds me of stuff i felt was like cool and subversive when i
00:13:37.280was younger and the aesthetics of it certainly look like that yeah like a punk thing or like a
00:13:42.260goth thing and i'd be like i want to go to this cool subversive whatever and what's wild is like
00:13:50.120now that's the internet right like to to go to one of these you're just gonna find a bunch of
00:13:55.600aging hipsters they said that all generations were there that there were some aging hipsters
00:14:00.160but there were also a lot of young people so i i think that that's i i think there's probably some
00:14:06.660but yeah i i i no no apparently like early reports from this from this event show that there's been
00:14:13.200a lot of a lot like really good turnout at these events a lot of gen z a lot of locals a lot of
00:14:17.560families and then of course older activists too but i what i think is more interesting is that
00:14:22.500the new ledi movement in terms of like persistent ongoing social clubs is primarily um is is
00:14:30.140primarily gen z but i think that's because this is the first generation that was raised as what
00:14:37.200people describe as like ipad babies where they they actually don't know what it's like to be
00:14:41.440more offline and when they describe these like revolutionary things that they're doing to live
00:14:46.360more offline. It just honestly feels a little bit more like our lives because we, we, we
00:14:52.320intentionally don't like scroll media feeds. We don't have TikTok on our phones. And like,
00:14:55.900that's kind of as far as they're going. They're like, well, I just think, you know, TikTok is
00:14:59.840bad. Although they try to go there though, you know, to mix results. Yeah. Just take your track
00:15:04.240zone, man. That'll, that'll get you off media feed. No, for real actually. But I just think
00:15:08.620that basically millennials and older can't participate in this movement because they are
00:15:13.600by probably kind of the standards of younger generations actually Luddites like actually
00:15:19.940terminally offline which which I think is also quite interesting but anyway there's this interesting
00:15:24.380New York Times piece called now in college Luddite teens still don't want your likes and it's it's
00:15:30.340this fairly recent New York Times piece that is checking in on a bunch of Luddite teens who had
00:15:36.560a Luddite club who were first covered by the New York Times in 2022 so this is four years later and
00:15:42.540is checking to see like are they still offline which i think is interesting i like that they're
00:15:46.920like oh how persistent is this how committed are these people so most of the members or at least
00:15:52.100former members still use flip phones and are still very like concertedly not online one teenage
00:16:00.420ludic club in brooklyn that the new york times profiled in 2022 that that really was highlighted
00:16:06.080in this article quote sketched and painted side by side they read quietly favoring works by your
00:16:12.180Dostoevsky, Kerouac, and Vonnegut. They sat on logs and groused about how TikTok was dumbing down
00:16:18.940their generation. Their flip phones were decorated with stickers and nail polish. Doesn't that just
00:16:24.720sound like us as teens? Yeah. That's what's so weird about it. It's like, oh, the Luddites. I
00:16:30.720pictured they'd be weaving or something, but they're just behaving like we did. I'm like,
00:16:35.100hold on. I didn't even get a flip phone until really late. So again, this is not what I expected
00:16:39.820to hear. But years later, most of the former members didn't go back to more heavy tech,
00:16:46.740but one detracted at least. She wrote, it's constant access again. It's the relief of
00:16:51.880knowing I can do things easier. I got Instagram too, and it's been nice reconnecting with people
00:16:57.140on it. The point being, and I appreciate that she acknowledged this, that when you choose to be
00:17:02.640offline, you're just not going to see certain people again. You're just not going to communicate
00:17:07.660with certain people again like it's this concerted choice to give up many relationships and i think
00:17:12.820it's kind of rich that many of these people who propose to be luddites are like well this is all
00:17:17.640about human connection i just want to have real human connection when people have very real human
00:17:23.240connection online like this morning on discord and whatsapp i had some very personal and deep
00:17:29.620conversations with people that i'd not i would not have had if i was well and what's wilder is
00:17:35.600what the personal connections mean for people like us like the person i talk to most in our lives
00:17:42.460other than simone is leaflet this is both on discord and on our bi-weekly chats and you look
00:17:49.140at the the long communications i have with her it's just like 10 hour conversations once every
00:17:54.620two weeks right yeah drinking having fun chatting about life philosophy it's kind of yeah it's like
00:18:00.900it's like a modern symposium which is really like extra old school and yet super new school
00:18:06.960so weird i would ask you guys anyone who has seen one of these like how many people in your life do
00:18:13.340you have that deep a conversation with or that deep of a friendship with right that you're having
00:18:20.500these really long form conversations i have never seen what leaflet looks like in real life okay i
00:18:29.620the person i'm interacting with is when we talk about like an anti-luddite they're like just get
00:18:34.020to know someone face to face i have never interacted once with leaflet face to face
00:18:40.660and i have no interest in escalating our relationship i that has never been something
00:18:46.520that is i mean like we have to visit together we have to go on a vacation together if i drove by
00:18:53.180where she lived in texas i wouldn't even i think she probably wouldn't stop if you were like a mile
00:18:58.980away you'd be like matt would our and and and to our audience like i ask you this sincerely
00:19:04.460would our friendship leaflet to my friendship be in any way meaningfully enhanced from a flesh to
00:19:13.400flesh conversation would we know anything meaningfully additional about each other i mean
00:19:20.340maybe what they look like they're like deformed or been highly misrepresentative of themselves
00:19:25.280or something like that but i don't think they have been like i would gain no additional nature0.76
00:19:30.840to our friendship the only thing that requires being in person with someone is having sex with
00:19:38.540them and look at the way i interact with my wife on this very screen right like we're in different
00:19:45.180rooms even with your loved ones sometimes it can be more efficient to communicate with
00:19:49.520through a screen are we not building our relationship through conversations like this
00:19:54.820for real yeah and we we act like we do it literally in separate rooms of our house
00:19:59.340those are our most now imagine the luddite what they're building in terms of a friendship
00:20:04.080so they have to sit out in a park you know they sit in a park and they awkwardly talk to somebody
00:20:10.220who they meditate do you think those conversations are going to be one one hundredths as deep as one
00:20:16.200of the conversations that leaflet and i have over like many people offline have very deep
00:20:21.560conversations but i'm not saying the number of people you can you can interact with and the types
00:20:26.740of people you can interact with are extremely limited when you choose to only interact with
00:20:30.240those whom you can reach but but also the depth of the conversation is limited by the format when
00:20:37.020you are one in a park and two have a tight time limit on your conversation like an hour an hour
00:20:43.780and a half you're just not going to get to the same type of topics you get to in a 10-hour
00:20:47.240conversation that's happening overnight while you're both you know kind of out of it because
00:20:51.740you've been interacting for so long the level of conversation that you're going to get to
00:20:57.200and i often the conversations that i have with people in person especially the ones that where
00:21:02.320i meet them in person because you don't know as much about their background because you don't know
00:21:06.280what's going to offend them because you don't know where to go your conversations start at such a
00:21:10.720lower level right like leaflet of my conversations can start at a very high level because both of us
00:21:17.100have watched a probably hundreds of hours of the other person's content before that conversation
00:21:23.240even started right this asynchronous relationship that people are able to have when they consume
00:21:27.800each other's content or read each other's messages asynchronously and then have live conversations
00:21:32.720again there's this additional level of depth that you can have that you just can't have otherwise
00:21:37.300but it's it's the irony of i don't even know off the top of my head what her real name is i do not
00:21:43.860know what she looks like and those things would not this is what gets me so much about these
00:21:49.120luddites is they are choosing a form of relationship which is strictly lesser
00:21:56.180think about the conversations you have on a discord like our our discord right people are
00:22:02.360coming in after having watched a video and they are interacting with each other in a thread so
00:22:07.220they're having a conversation basically now the depth that they're going to have in that
00:22:11.720conversation is going to be higher than any random conversation in a park because they're
00:22:16.780coming into the conversation with a shared context eg we both watched the information
00:22:22.840in the video and are now conversing about the information in the video yeah i think that's
00:22:28.700interesting with what also as i said earlier stood out to me is that there is this strong
00:22:36.960undertone of privilege that pervades a lot of this, the people described and profiled when I
00:22:43.080read about this movement, for example, of the alumna of this club, this Luddite high school
00:22:52.660club that are now being interviewed later, like they're all getting humanities degrees at fairly
00:22:59.060expensive schools, stuff that like implies they don't actually need real jobs. Like one is studying
00:23:04.340russian literature at oberlin college this is not something that someone does if their family
00:23:11.020is what are they going to do with their life like i don't know because they don't use the internet
00:23:16.620actually so the one who's working a bookstore the one the one who's studying at oberlin
00:23:22.500college actually is working for light phone which as it happens is one of the many companies that
00:23:29.280is capitalizing on the interests of this, this. Oh, light phone. Oh yeah. Where's like a lighter,
00:23:36.940that's not a terrible idea if you have like addiction problems. Yeah. It's a minimalist
00:23:40.660device. It costs between 300 and $700. And there's this whole collection of devices for people
00:23:47.580who want to develop more focus or like varying degrees of modern, what I guess you could say.
00:23:54.040so there's also the mudita compact k-o-m-p-a-k-t that's $399 it's this e-ink screen
00:24:02.680device that that has online it's basically like a smartphone but without any color that has offline
00:24:10.000maps and basic apps it's it's a little bit more flexible than the light phone and it it i think
00:24:15.600it also costs no it's $399 so it's it's like kind of mid-range phone wise mudita by the way really
00:24:21.960odd name mudita weirdly is was the name of when my when one of my family members was a member of
00:24:31.520a cult her name was mudita in the cult which is interesting anyway then there's also the minimal
00:24:38.580phone which is $449 it has an e-ink touchscreen touch touchscreen touchscreen and it it also has
00:25:45.580But I feel like it's one of those ecosystems where, again, the point that the young woman getting this degree in Russian literature is now working during the summer at Light Phone, but also like kind of not sure about getting an office job.
00:25:58.840But like, what is she going to do then?
00:25:59.820She's going to end up marrying some guy working in AI.
00:30:10.880then you can just block faith. Like there are very easy offline ways without buying some expensive
00:30:16.400phone. And when you could just get an Android phone for a hundred dollars, or if you still
00:30:21.740want a smartphone, for example, that allow you to do this. And then you can also just,
00:30:27.460cause I just did this with an Android device that I'm sort of repurposing for, for our oldest son,
00:30:33.240you can just set necessary apps on an Android phone or use something like Google family link,
00:30:39.660which I know is annoying you, but I'm still setting up the settings to set downtime schedules
00:30:43.880where like during these hours of the day, you can't use the phone. You can't use the phone
00:30:47.060for more than two hours. Like it just literally shuts off. And then the person who is the admin
00:30:52.080on the Google family link can give you more time if they think you should have it, but they can
00:30:57.540cut you off like a bartender. So these are all super, like you don't need a special device for
00:31:03.060it, but this community feels like it performatively needs to. But what I think is more meaningful is
00:31:07.180that in Mennonite communities, there are just social norms around not taking out your phone
00:31:12.080at certain places. Like a Mennonite would never go to church and pull out a phone because they1.00
00:31:16.500know that they would be like socially ostracized for it. And I think just having those social
00:31:21.740norms is way more helpful than even using some kind of tech if you know that you're going to
00:31:27.600be shamed. And that is something at least that did really show up in the summer of Ludd in New
00:31:32.520York. It's still probably still showing up at these events is that when people take out their
00:31:36.060phones people see that they're doing so with great shame that the phones are like held really low
00:31:40.160like you know when someone shamefully takes out a phone to like check something and they do that0.98
00:31:43.220they hold it at like hip level and they think that you can't see it's like it's the stupidest0.98
00:31:48.120thing it's like when our kids play hide and seek and they're like hiding under a table making eye0.72
00:31:51.560contact but they assume that you can't see them it's like i love the the them wanting to play1.00
00:31:57.320hide and seek and being the worst hiders in the world it's i know man like i think they're so0.98
00:32:03.500excited to do it too oh yeah well and then they're like when they find a good hiding spot and then
00:32:08.020you find them in it they're so delighted that they immediately want to play another round but
00:32:11.820then they just run directly to that same hiding spot like not clear on the concept guys like at1.00
00:32:18.340what age do they figure this out at any rate maybe our kids are just stupid no our kids are beautiful0.97
00:32:24.380and wonderful and i love them so much i love you so much simone i love you too the original0.97
00:32:30.680Ludic movement though I want to point out is like so different from this because one these are
00:32:36.980working class artisans who are deeply concerned about their jobs just being completely obliterated
00:32:43.460it lasted very it was very short though it went from 1811 to 1816 one of the reasons it was so
00:32:49.700short is that the stuff they did was super violent and illegal and harmful and damaging
00:32:55.260And even a guy was killed at one point. So in addition to raiding factories and breaking machines, starting in Nottingham in 1811, they ended up breaking over a thousand machines. I mean, people lost fortunes in the damage done.
00:33:11.420I mean, some, some equivalent of this would have to be like, I don't know if, if they
00:33:16.520like broke into Apple stores and just took a baseball bat to every device they could
00:33:20.520get their hands on, even in like the backroom inventory.
00:33:23.080But I guess Apple stores are kind of designed to make that impossible.
00:33:26.140It seems like they've anticipated this.
00:33:28.100We've learned, but they also ultimately killed this man, William Horse, Horsefall.
00:33:35.840They, this, I think started with the Rothold's mill in 1812.
00:33:39.600And so obviously there were immediate legal and military repercussions. So this is the kind of movement that had to be repressed. So in a sense that the modern Luddite movement is at least more sustainable and that most of the even anti-data center protests are just protests.
00:33:57.740There hasn't been at least very successful sabotage of data centers, which is nice.
00:34:03.600And at least they're using mostly legal channels, like both in the EU and other parts of the
00:34:08.020world, plus in the US, they're trying to move more through like zoning councils and be
00:34:12.320nimby about it instead of like, I'm going to break all of the things.
00:34:16.720But there are some similarities in that like there were many threatening letters sent to
00:34:21.860people who are trying to buy and implement the use of these machines.
00:34:25.820but these are by the way it was it was mostly about textiles just in case people are not which
00:34:33.260was a predominantly female industry at the time if i understand correctly no i don't think no
00:34:38.280this this was predominantly men i i think exclusively men but yeah no it it arose among
00:34:44.300skilled english textile workers who were like framework knitters and and stockingers in
00:34:51.380North Hampshire and croppers and shearers in Yorkshire and weavers and Lancashire. So they0.98
00:34:58.960were primarily men. And when they organized, they would organize like kind of semi
00:35:04.920militias. Like they would even sometimes do military style drills as their preparations.
00:35:11.040But one of the other big things was they would send threatening letters signed by General Ludd
00:35:16.400or by this mythic likely mythical at least ned lud that's why they were called luddites which is
00:35:22.120kind of similar to the the 13 gunshots fired outside that one council member's house
00:35:30.360and then leaving the note of like no data centers outside his his his door but that's really the most
00:35:36.500that is close as they get but the luddite movement was so small that even at its peak
00:35:41.880there were maybe seven to eight thousand sympathizers and the in terms of like the
00:35:48.780raids so the mud eye movement was smaller than the base camp fandom yes like that's kind of crazy
00:35:56.160yes it is it is genuinely crazy and i know we even mean like yeah like arguably paid fandom
00:36:02.860which is like extra committed people who are actually willing to put money down it's it's
00:36:07.440rather it's rather insane and the raids never really got bigger than approximately 100 men
00:36:13.200so this is not i would say the anti-data center movement is bigger than the entire
00:36:19.180luddite movement which makes sense because it isn't just textile workers whose livelihood is
00:36:24.000being threatened by ai it's like any it's human job email job or what do they call them yeah email
00:36:32.320job employee or like white collar worker at this point is being threatened by them and plus these
00:36:39.060were working class artisans whereas the primary participants of the Luddite movement appear to be
00:36:44.340privileged young people and then kind of retired boomers and then just like some families that are
00:36:52.600like well I live in Brooklyn and we're looking for something we can take our kids to so this
00:36:55.720looks fun there's a play about the Luddite movement and there's a puppet frog oh our kids
00:37:00.520will love that you know like i think they're just kind of they're there because they kind of like
00:37:05.480the aesthetics of the movement and you know they probably are anti-screen parents because they live
00:37:08.820in brooklyn and they're just going because it's there right so i i wouldn't say that this is a
00:37:15.480movement this isn't some kind of domestic terror movement in the same way the original luddite
00:37:19.480movement is i think it's kind of odd that they're choosing the word luddite because the original
00:37:24.240luddite movement was very much about like destroying career threatening tech whereas
00:37:29.440here they're more like well i just don't really want you know mark zuckerberg to well i mean a lot
00:37:34.840i also took on a vernacular term over the years it did it did but i don't know and i also think
00:37:41.940that like it's it's very interesting i feel like it is a market correction of sorts that's that's
00:37:49.360it's worth listening to in the sense that a lot of people are trying to go back to like kind of a
00:37:55.860early 2000s era internet use which i could see as being relatively healthy like worth pursuing
00:38:01.900because i think that worked pretty well for us it's working really well for our kids who i think
00:38:08.820are having that kind of relationship with tech and the internet and i think that's kind of maybe
00:38:15.220the sweet spot for humans and i think it's important to note if that's where people are
00:38:20.120converging but what do you think yeah like video game consoles they're not really good ones
00:38:26.520no vr no feeds i think no feeds is kind of a good just don't be wasteful just don't be wasteful
00:38:33.500but like come on that's what i think with this stuff like with our kids i'm getting them the
00:38:38.520little video game rom console and stuff like that no that's my point though that's what we grew up
00:38:42.940with no but it's more than we grew up with it's everything i think it's operating in an anti-big
00:38:51.060tech environment is a better way to do this than an anti-tech environment and that's functionally
00:38:58.260what they're trying to achieve they just yeah like how to make your own website how to host
00:39:02.560your own things i was so surprised to not hear orbit in all of this so look at the video game
00:39:08.580system i'm going to be giving octavia right like yeah this is not from nintendo this is not from
00:39:12.980xbox this is made by hobbyists who wanted to make a system that could play any raw right from any of
00:39:20.380the old systems and so he can play through any of the old games on a local device look at the
00:39:26.060rfab it's coming down the rfab pipeline you guys will have this soon i am so excited to be working
00:39:31.240on this but an rfab hardware we're gonna have soon which will allow you to give to your kids
00:39:37.700a little talking companion that keeps the conversation focused on educational topics
00:39:43.320and you can also see the point because we found that our kid when he walks around with the that
00:39:48.440rabbit ai device that the camera is really crucial he wants to be able to show his ai companions what
00:39:54.920he's looking at and learn about it like is this poison ivy or what do you think of this or what
00:40:01.540business which is really cool i cannot wait to have our fab hardware but with all of the things
00:40:08.180in our life you can choose to just not go with the big tech and you're generally going to have
00:40:13.840better outcomes especially as big companies get worse at things like right now while we've been
00:40:19.620having this talk i have been specking out what it's going to take for me to to clone descripts
00:40:24.880features and just make it better and cheaper that's because like what why go and work with
00:40:30.520descript when i can build this myself and frankly they charge way more than they should
00:40:34.040you should do no i actually really like stream yard but maybe stream yard next
00:40:38.860you want me to do video hosting cloning i can do video hosting i can do that easily you want me to
00:40:44.740you want me to knock out stream yard we won't be able to afford it much longer so yeah how much
00:40:51.040how much are they charging us now well remember when we we were able to grandfathered in on their
00:40:56.200non-business plan for just a little bit longer because of our non-profit but they wanted to
00:41:01.140charge I think like 500 a month or something like some insane amount that we were like oh my god we
00:41:05.020just can't yeah I can I can do this anyway I'm excited think about it but yeah anyway I think
00:41:13.620this is fine I think that it's bougie but that's fine I just I think that the most reasonable
00:41:21.760approach to the future is kind of solar punk. Malcolm and I were talking about it earlier that
00:41:27.840while the original solar punk movement sort of came from a very progressive coded environmentalist
00:41:33.180coded space, all of the solar punk environments and families that we know are more on the sort
00:41:39.400of like conservative, like big family side of the spectrum where, you know, they may live on
00:41:45.760some kind of homestead, but they're using AI to work out everything from medical solutions to
00:41:51.860complex health issues to how to develop strong, like a strong permaculture system for their unique
00:41:57.080microclimate. And it's, I think it's really hard to do all these things without AI, because a lot
00:42:03.020of us are coming into this without tacit knowledge that has been passed down from generation to
00:42:07.600generation. In other words, I feel like we can't actually return to the land, return to nature and
00:42:12.440return to old ways, like more sustainable offline ways without AI, because we have collectively as
00:42:20.140a society forgotten how to do most of these things. We've forgotten how to tie knots and
00:42:27.100go fishing and do all these other things. And the only reason that we're able to learn these things
00:42:30.420again is by leveraging AI and asking for that help. AI is playing the role that our grandparents
00:42:38.240used to play and teaching us how to do things the way that things used to be done so i would just
00:42:43.960warn people who like want to go super offline that it's going to be hard to learn the old ways
00:42:49.240to learn how to do things without the internet if you don't leverage i love they're like the old
00:42:53.900ways when you used to make a website for yourself that's what's again what's so funny about it is
00:42:59.660like oh this isn't a line movement this is like go back to the early noughties internet anyway
00:43:04.920though i love you very much malcolm thank you for cheering me up i by the way i got the blood work
00:43:11.780back and i am just the it just completely failed i have no hcg i'm not pregnant at all we lost we
00:43:20.320lost our baby and i'm so sad and i really appreciate that you've been that's really sad
00:43:26.020but this happens you've cheered me up a lot and i really appreciate it and we're gonna keep
00:43:30.000trying and you will get pregnant yeah thanks malcolm all right i love you bye
00:43:37.820simone statistically this should have been happening way more no i know that i know that
00:43:41.960no i'm not gonna dwell on it i'll yeah bye bye did you find the book you were looking for i did
00:43:49.880find it and now it's included with the rest of the documents that we'll be able to get it digitized
00:43:53.820and i didn't just find that but included with it was a write-up of the collins family history
00:43:58.640which i otherwise would have not had included dude okay that's so one thing i'd really like
00:44:04.960to find for the documentary team is the first book i wrote in high school
00:45:32.480Ultimately, all of the effort I put in was going to make me happy.
00:45:35.920And if I simply economized and constantly worked hard, I would recap the benefits later
00:45:40.740coming out ahead as far as happiness goes in my life.
00:45:43.520It was in that I asked myself why I should strive for happiness, and I realized that I didn't know.
00:45:49.080I was aware that pleasure centers in my brain were activated when I was happy, and that this rewarded me for doing things and achieving certain things, but why should I care?
00:45:58.720Should I work hard to become successful, or instead drift through life, finding happiness where I could, if overall I would have more happiness doing that?
00:46:06.120should i help other people or help myself without knowing what motivation should be everything i put
00:46:12.240my efforts to would be completely pointless i decided from that point on my motivation in life
00:46:17.120would be to find a motivation and then i go through but yeah this is i i would hope bar
00:46:21.880kids do something like this at 15. i think this is something an exercise you can see the pragmatist
00:46:25.840guide to life is basically just a longer rehashed version of this basically yeah
00:46:30.200hmm that's freaking wild that is really crazy oh memory lane today
00:46:37.040kind of fun thank you for storing that simone you're so diligent oh thanks
00:46:43.340there we go that's good right yeah that's a lot of me hey tex do you think you look like octavian
00:46:54.740now. He can't see himself. Well, he's smiling. You smile a lot. Yeah, and I like it. I like
00:47:05.920his smile when he looks at me. He's like laughing. Yeah. Yeah, you make him laugh. Hey, it's
00:47:14.480close to three. It's kind of, it's just close to three. It's just close to three. Super
00:47:21.960close, huh? Yeah, I'm actually, I can't write the lyrics here. I'll play with Tex, because I really
00:47:31.100want to, I'll play with Tex the way for Eric. Okay. Because I know he really want him to smile. I do.
00:47:37.020Yeah, I play with him, makes him smile. Perfect. Aw, look. Look, Tex, there's a carrot.