December 1, 2025 • 55 mins
Margaret talks with Robert Evans about the English rebels who threw on dresses, declared a fake person their leader, and set about fighting the Industrial Revolution.
Original Air Date: 3.18.24
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hello and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening,
there's people trying to do good things, and often those
people are trying to destroy technology. Well, at least that's
this week's rewind, because we are doing a rewind this
week because I had last week off, Imagine that, and I,
(00:25):
for some weird reason, am thinking about the ways that
people revolt against technology and how it's not actually usually
about like I just don't like the future or technology itself,
but instead about the way that technology is influencing culture
and economics. Because this week we're talking about the Ludites,
(00:46):
and this week we're going to include my favorite last
words of all time. Hello, and welcome to cool people
who built a militant, popular social movement in face of
your state depression and therefore splintered into a reformist wing
that failed, as well as a more clandestine wing that
also failed, but still changed the course of history. Your
weekly podcast that does exactly what it says in the
(01:09):
title almost every week. I'm your host, Margaret Kildrey. Well
with me today, as my guest is do I get
this right? Robert Avon's host of the podcast derrier les Salude. Yeah,
podcast that focuses on all the bad people in French history.
I get that right, Yeah, all of that's perfect. I
continue to be amazed that the Apple people let that
(01:31):
title into the into iTunes or whatever tunes.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
They use these days. But I guess they knew brilliance
when they saw it.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, clearly because they didn't well or they were you know,
just actually spoke French and didn't realize that derriere had
a different meaning in English. M Oh, yeah, that's so
that's probably what happened.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
What are we hearing about today, magpie?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Well, you ever had a piece of technology that you
just couldn't stand, one that made you, dare I say
it feel like a bit of a luddite?
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Yes, everything that is more recent than about twenty twelve,
with the exception what I'll say, this shows you how
badly Star Trek the next generation hacked my brain. Anything
that's like a cool screen, like a folding screen or
a transparent screen, I'm still on board with. I love
a cool screen. I can't get past that part of
growing up on TNG. But yeah, self driving cars, no,
(02:29):
thank you AI anything, No fucking thank you. I can't
even really good on board with the tiktoks.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I know, I'm like annoyed that I'm so actively annoyed
that they're trying to ban it. Yeah, I also don't
want to use it. But what I do want to
do is remember to do the rest of my introduction,
including introducing our producer, Sophie Hi.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Sophie Hi, Robert doesn't know how to use most technology,
but yet knows how to report on it. It's really
fun for me.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, his business, he's kind of impressive.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I can't even tell you the amount of times I
explained things to him and went but you started as
a tech tourtalist.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
What are you talking about?
Speaker 1 (03:12):
How could you not do basic human thing in Roberts,
I don't know. Let me tell you about something nobody
has ever heard of and explain it perfectly.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I mean, some of it is that like Abe Simpson saying,
it'll happen to you, because like my dad was an
early adopter. He like didn't have a ton of money
and he spent all of it on computers, you know.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yeah, yeah, that was my dad as well. Actually, yeah,
or more than more than he should have. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
and uh and no doesn't I mean, you know whatever
I mean. But I'm starting to hit that point myself.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
I was like explaining computer things to my dad and
now I'm like, you know, one of my friends like
takes the remote away from me while I'm trying to
navigate the YouTube menu, and it's like, give it to me, Grandma.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Hyah. Garrison gives me no end of shit because I
love having motions smoothing on. Well's the most boomer thing
I've ever said.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yeah, it's really upsetting. None of us would be anywhere
with technology without our wonderful editor. And who is he?
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Danel? That was a really good transition.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
It's almost like I'm a professional.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Weird.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, someone should actually pay you at this point, That's.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
What I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, we should get on that. Daniel is our audio editor.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
Everyone says saying hi to Daniel.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Hi, Danel, Hi, Daniel Hy Daniel. Our theme musical is
written for us by unwoman. All right, so follow up question.
You have the technology that makes you feel like a
bit of a lud eite. What's your take on industrial
revolution and its consequences for humanity?
Speaker 3 (04:49):
You know, consequences is such a big word, and to
be honest, I don't think you can. Really. We're still
waiting to see are we going to pull out of
this climate tail spin that we are currently in before
it it kills everything of value on the planet. And uh,
I think the question, I think until we get the
final answer to that, we won't be able to say
for sure because there's obviously there's a lot of horrible downsides,
(05:12):
you know, yeah, fucking sweatshops and industrial war and shit.
But there's also like labor saving devices. There's god knows
how many people have had a chance to explore themselves art, creativity,
just spend more time, you know, with their family because
of labor saving devices. So I'm going to I'm going
to say, like the this is still a neck and
(05:32):
neck fight right now, Like we'll see, we'll see who
hits the finish line first.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Okay, I I feel like one team called climate change
is pulled out ahead.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
It's yes, yes, look is that? Is that? Is that
the best odds you're gonna get right now? Yes?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah? But yeah, but I would I would put words
in your mouth and say that appropriate technology is a
beautiful thing and a worthwhile thing.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Yeah, it certainly can be.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
And so sometimes people assume that to be a luttite
is to be against all technology, and that the people
fighting against the Industrial Revolution were against the idea of
making life better. And today we're going to talk about them.
We're going to talk about the Lunites. Hell, yeah, you
know much about the Luddites. I know that they were
skilled workers, mainly in the garment industry, like weaving and
(06:24):
like that, which is just having done one part of that,
like shearing the animal part of it. It's the whole.
Like the amount of human labor before we developed the
machines we've developed was titanic. And my understanding is a
lot of them did not like that these machines were
coming in, at least certain types of the machines that
came in to automate this process, because they turned it
(06:46):
from a skilled trade where people, the people doing it
were valuable and had some leverage because you needed it
done and only a certain number of people knew how
to do it to something that where they were all
just kind of slotted in like little machines themselves, right,
And they viewed it as like reducing the dignity and
of labor, among other problems, yeah, I would say that
(07:08):
that's a good overall look at the Luddites and what
they were doing is that they were opposed to what
the machines were doing, rather than like that thing has
too many spinning wheels.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Yeah. The issue isn't I don't like machines because they
do things better. It's I don't like the way these
machines are being used to turn us into machines. Right.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
And also, interestingly, a lot of people are really proud
of their work, and some of these machines, not all
of them, but some of these machines were absolutely turning
out junk. We're turning out inferior quality work.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Oh. Interesting, I wonder if that's going to ever happen again.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Yeah, no, I'm not sure. I actually don't think that
this has any reflection. This is a very in the past,
no modern Okay, well I'll just get into it.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
In eighteen eleven, during the middle of the Industrial Revolution,
a bunch of textile workers in northern England came together
to fight against the mechanization of their industry. Labor organizing
had been outlawed, so this didn't stop them. They formed
a secret society and they went about smashing machines with hammers,
burning down factories, and occasionally shooting back at the owners
(08:17):
who were shooting and killing them on a regular basis.
A bunch of them were men wearing dresses.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Love to see it, I mean it's efficient, it is. Yeah,
all that room to move, you know. I go hiking
all the time in long skirts and people are like,
what are you doing? That's gonna catch on things? And
it's just like, I've been doing this for a very
long time. When you're doing a lot of hallucinogens, you
learn the best way to do certain things. And that's
(08:45):
how I realized that the most efficient kind of dress
was like a slightly longer than ankle length skirt. Yeah,
like dress in terms of clothing, Yeah, that's totally stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yeah, the maxi skirt. This is the finest thing. It's
pajamas you can wear all day.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
It's easy to make too. I used to make my
own skirts.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, yeah, that's actually the only thing I used to
be able to sew.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Yeah, I'm not a great se just that.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
So these ludites pushed England right to the brink of
outright revolution. The other thing that I didn't realize coming
into this was just how big of a deal the
Luodite Rebellion was. The government decided to declare its loyalty
with the owners and not the people. Soldiers put down
the uprising quite violently. A bunch of people were hanged,
(09:33):
a bunch of people were deported to Australia, and the
lud eight Rebellion was quelled. Its songs and its name
live on, though mostly sadly are quite horribly misrepresented. Yeah,
there's a few mainstream of it narratives available about our friends,
the Luddites. The first, of course, is the simplistic version.
Some people didn't like technology, so they smashed up machines
because they hated change. Sure, and then if you're going
(09:55):
galaxy brain chart, Next up is the more historically informed one.
The Luddite and hate technology is a concept. They hated
the automation of their jobs that robbed them of employment,
like kind of like cashier's matt itself checkout lines or something. Sure,
you can keep going higher up you get to kind
of you know, It's not that the Luddites had one
job in a factory and suddenly had a different job
(10:15):
in a factory so that they didn't have a factory
job at all. They had a job as an artisan,
right yeah. And the ludite rebellion is positioned in the
midst of the Industrial Revolution, and it was a revolt
by those used to artisans, skilled labor and a life
with some level of dignity and as you pointed out,
some level of bargaining power, right yeah. And from this
(10:36):
point of view, it is a revolt against the modern world,
is a revolt against what future friend of the Pod
Woiam Blake, only seven years earlier had called the dark
satanic mills of industry that were cropping up.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
M okay, but that kind of makes them sound cool too.
I know.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
This is one of the problems when you hang out
mostly in history books from like the early eighteen hundreds,
a lot of people saying really cool stuff are framing
it theologically, and so they're like confusing my like metal
head conception of what makes something cool, you know.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Yeah, yeah, Because I if like somebody was like, hey,
I've opened up like an occult themed like wool clothes shop,
could I would you donate some of your wool to
the dark Satanic loom or whatever? Look, absolutely, that sounds
based totally, Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
And so most of the time, people who see the
under these underlying issues still see the Luddites as like
at best, hopeless romantics who couldn't handle the changing of industry,
like like the whalers who lost their job when lighting
moved away from whale oil and towards petroleum, or the
coal miners and Apalachia currently facing the decline of their industry. Right,
(11:45):
And so it's this narrative of progress and these people
who are like tragically left behind. I don't buy that narrative.
I will present the industrial revolution not as a benign
or neutral thing, but instead the birth of capitalism and
industrial production that are again, I'm guessing, are going to
(12:06):
have irrevocable danger to all of humanity in the world.
They were not a tiny group doing an isolated rebellion.
I want to position them as revolutionists in the middle
of a decentralized global uprising in defense of the commons.
And did you know that it started with a comet
in the sky A most good things do, right, Yeah,
(12:30):
Like I think that the well, I guess there's the
Bible star thing. But I think overall, if you read
like classic works of literature, and there's like the Omen
of the comet in the sky. Yeah, the comet of
eighteen eleven, I think is where that comes from.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
For two hundred and sixty days, from March eighteen eleven
to January eighteen twelve, a massive comet held court in
the heavens. Its tail was stretched out for everyone to see,
everyone of the Rthern hemisphere. Yeah, the Great comment of
eighteen eleven. It found its way into the writings of
Tolstoy and Victor Hugo and William Blake. Tolstoy I wasn't
alive yet, but it ends up in his writings, sure,
(13:11):
and it was seen as a portent all over the
world by all kinds of uprisings. Mostly people were like,
you think the world's ending, and everyone's like, pretty sure, Yeah,
pretty sure, the world's ending.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
I think there's another thing psychologically going on here too.
And I just say this because of like how I
tend to interpret some of the things that I've experienced
in my life that I could see as supernatural or whatever,
which is that most people who recognize that like something
is fucked up and they need to do something about
all the fucked up shit are also like, but I
(13:42):
don't want to like die or you know, sacrifice my
life or whatever, and you're kind of looking for an
excuse that like, Okay, it's the time to act, and
anything that happens that's weird is like, well, shit, I
guess it was that, right, Like, that's as good as
I've been looking for an excuse to start, you know,
the process of fighting back. And I guess this commet's
(14:05):
as good as any.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Honestly, that makes a lot of sense to me because
it's like they knew it was a comet. Yeah, like
they had astronomy and stuff. You know, it still meant
a lot to them symbolically.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
And there were a lot of uprisings in eighteen eleven
and eighteen twelve, and some of them used very consciously
the language of defending the Commons. Some of them didn't,
but all of them, well, all the ones that I'm
going to talk about, were fighting for a way of
life that hadn't been defined by capitalism, colonialism, or the
great enclosures of the commons. To talk about the commons,
(14:41):
I talk about the commons reasonably often, but I think
this is like one of the more important concepts to understand,
where we're at now is in short, in a lot
of cultures, but most notably medieval England, because they managed
to export culture and language all over the world through
power process of domination. You had what was known as
the commons and the idea that most of the land
(15:02):
was just kind of publicly owned, like, well, why would
you own that. It's not your house or yard. Of course,
people can just go collect firewood, hunt gray's sheep, maybe
grow some potatoes. It's land. Use it like land, everyone
can use it. It's land. It's the commons. And then
(15:22):
you get the enclosure of the commons, which was the
privatization of it, which was literal and direct, and England
was carved up by stone fences, hedgerows and ditches dividing
everything up. I like, whenever you see like an old
movie and it's like medieval England and someone like runs
through a hedge along the side of the road, it
makes me feel like that couldn't be real, right, Yeah,
(15:45):
But that actually was. That was what was happening by
late medieval England.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Yeah, I guess the last gasp of it is here
out on the west coast, you have a shitload more
BLM land in Oregon and Washington and even big chunks
of California. You regularly find yourself in these vast tracks
of land that's just like, well, this is all of
ours right, Like it's it's still kind of the last
gasp of that attitude, I guess because white people haven't
(16:13):
been here as long.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah, no, totally. The public lands in the US are
a really interesting and BLM is like more directly just
used as like, huh, do whatever you want. Yeah, you know.
And so this enclosure started in the medieval period and
just kept ramping up through the nineteenth century. We've talked
(16:35):
a bunch about the seventeenth century anti enclosure rebels. If
people want to hear more about it, go listen to
the episode with the about the diggers, the levelers and
the ranters. And then the Industrial Revolution kicked off and
everything got more enclosurey by the end of the eighteenth century.
By like the seventeen nineties or so, things are really
fucking heated in this way. In the seventeen nineties there
(16:57):
are twenty five parliamentary enclosure acts in England. By eighteen
eleven there were one hundred and thirty three geez, and
the enclosure wasn't just of land. Everything suddenly had to
be discreete like with the tea in between the two
e's and regimented rivers became canals. Language became more codified.
You started getting like dictionaries and lexicons published, which overall,
(17:21):
like I'm not inherently against that. Right alongside of that,
press censorship went up. Yeah, class divisions became even more pronounced,
which I totally don't entirely understand because England's like one
of the most class divided places in the world. You know, Yeah,
they speak a different language from each other, you know.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
At this point, during the enclosure of the commons, the
word common takes on its negative connotations. Soldiers start living
in separate. They start living separate from everyone else, housed
in barracks. The prison industrial complex kicks in. Prisons are
being built everywhere. Prisoners are doing a lot of the
labor for building this infrastructure in England. England became famous
(18:04):
and actually mocked for building so many barracks and prisons,
Like what that was wrong with these people? The enclosure
also came for gender. To quote author Peter Liinbau quote,
the household became part of the system of enclosure. The
genders were separated by doctrine of the two spheres, the
private sphere for women and the public sphere for men.
(18:27):
The wife ceased to have a legal persona or existence. Yeah,
And prior to the Industrial Revolution, most manufacturing was done
by artisans working at home or in small workshops, which
is now called kind of disparagingly a cottage industry. Right,
these cottages became factories, and this was a way more
(18:49):
efficient way to speed up the process of destroying the
Earth's atmosphere, and it was also a substantial decreasing quality
of life for the individual producers. It also had like
some positive knock on a like if you ever read
about how long it took to make cloth back in
the day with yes and spinning and weaving, like that
was your life was?
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that that is. There's a really
good a historian who does like a blog kind of
analyzing myths about classical civilizations. He's did a multipiece one
on the Spartans, trying to talk about like how oppressed
the helots were. And one of the things he goes
into is if you are a woman and a family,
most of your life is making and maintaining clothing for
(19:31):
your family and not to have multiple outfits just to
be able because you're wearing them every day. They're getting
warned by outside work and when you're taxing you know,
half or what. Like, it's like eighty hours a week
for a lot of people for basically your whole life,
like maintaining forty to eighty hours a week, depending you know,
on a couple of things, maintaining and whatnot, clothing for
(19:52):
your family, like it is like a nightmare burden.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
No, yeah, I remember reading once that it was like
to make a square of linen was about a week's
worth of labor someone who knew what they were doing.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
There are very few people alive today who do anything
as hard as maintaining clothing for a family back in
like that period of time.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Yeah, yeah, no, And that's what's so frustrating, right He's like, well,
I love my dishwasher, right, yeah, yeah, it's great. Yeah
the time, I don't, and I didn't have one until
I was, you know, in my late thirties, right yeah,
but you know, and I was like, oh, I don't
mean one of those wash dishes that's meditative. I love that.
I just like rinse off my dishes, throw them in
(20:32):
the dishwasher, like, yeah, no it is, it's And this
is what's so frustrating, because yeah, it's very natural to
look at this and be like, well, I don't want
to go back to everyone having to hand weave everything, right.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Of course not, I would just freeze to death.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
The very first factories of the industrial Revolution were textile factories,
producing the cloth that got sent out to the various cottages.
So that was the first part to be industrialized. Yeah,
textile was big business in England, the largest industry in England.
A million people around ten percent of the country was
involved in the wool industry alone. Then cotton started coming
(21:09):
in from India in the US, and that was even
easier to work. You get your first textile machine, the
stocking frame, invented in fifteen eighty nine. People of all
genders wore stockings and not pants, and this was made
of knitted wool, and so this was a way of
automating or at least rapid incredibly speeding up that process.
The queen was like, if you patent that, it'll fuck
(21:32):
over all the poor people know, it'll trash her economy,
So she didn't let it be patented. And during the
chunks of the medieval period you have this thing in
England that you still see today where the crown is
seen as what protects the commoners from like poverty and
the non noble rich you know what later becomes the
(21:53):
capitalist class. But slowly, surely knitting was automated.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Makes sense to me, like the role of the because
if you're the queen or the king or whatever, you're
on top of your social hierarchy. Everyone below them is
constantly jockeying and fighting for power and influence, and the
primary way to do that is by finding new ways
to fuck over the poor, Whereas if you're on top,
you're not jockeying for power over the others, but you
(22:20):
do always have to keep an eye on like, are
the poor pissed off enough that they might kill us?
All right, so you're the only one that hit that
is really focused on that.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
No, you're right, that is such a good point. That
is where you're uh, yeah, that's that's uh.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
You're probably going too far yet, Yeah, but you know
what doesn't go too far except some of the ads
we've been getting lately occasionally handled yes, yes, the other.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Ads that aren't in support of genocidal regimes or becoming jailers.
Don't do either of those two things.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
But anything else that's being sold, you should buy it.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
And we're back.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
I feel bad Margaret because you said jailor, and I
forgot to immediately respond jailor. I hardly know her. That's
my bit. Yeah, a lot of stuff. It's a good bit.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
It's pretty original, it's great, it's great.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Sophie loves it. Sophie loves that. I do it. Anytime
someone says anything with an er at the end.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, that's Robert. I barely know air.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
That to see perfect it always does.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Don't encourge this magfi.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
Sorry.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Sorry.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
By the mid seventeen hundreds, you've got what's called a
spinning Jenny, which automates a lot of yarn spinning. The
inventors saw this machine smashed in front of him, and
he had the fleet town.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
I'm thinking back to when those local youths in Oakland
destroyed that self driving car the other week.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Oh hell yeah, I haven't seen this yet.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Lit it on fire. Yeah good.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
And it's not that the concept of a car that
drives itself is inherently bad, but within the system that
we live in. It's going to drive you to jail.
It's going to drive you to jail. It's going to
take money from poor people and give all of it
to the same four guys who are already taking money
from poor people. Like that is the issue, exactly, and
(24:33):
that is what is happening here with industrialization. You're not
like a lot of people at this point are using
machines for their work, and they've found ways to be
skilled laborers using these machines.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
I know a lot of people who get wool, either
from their own animals or from other people's animals, and
spin it and use it to make clothing. And they
don't have to spend eighty hours a week to barely
maintain one guard because they use modern tools to do
all that. They just are all so artisans.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And so soon enough the spinning jenny
is attached to a water wheel, and then you get
the steam engine. And suddenly, because you have a steam engine,
you have way more coal mines, and then you have
to build canals to connect them all with convict labor,
and there's factories with smoke stacks all over the countryside,
and who worked the factories. Well, it's fucking England, so
(25:23):
it's children as young as six years old. Two thirds
of the workers in these early factories were children, especially
orphans hired out essentially slave labor, hired from orphanages and workhouses. Yeah,
and so people are like, oh, we don't like this,
And later people are like, oh, they clearly just hate
not working all the time. They're like, no, the smoke stacks,
(25:46):
the child slavery anyway.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Yeah, we don't really know what cancer is, but we're
pretty sure this is causing it.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, we shouldn't be breathing this. That's all I know.
So the comments are enclosed, and people start seeing their
way of life disappear, and their quality of life dropped dramatically,
and they didn't accept it. They fought back. Sometimes they
did it chaotically, sometimes they did it in an organized fashion.
And they did this all over the world. I hate
to give the US Revolution much credit. If you've heard
(26:14):
any other episode, it just me talking shit on the
US Revolution. But it really did change the world. And
this wave of republicanism spread over Europe, inspiring the French
Revolution soon after, and people started being like, hey, what
if we had like rights like what if? Like what
an idea? You know, And by seventeen ninety two you
(26:38):
have the London Corresponding Society, which is one of the
first working class organizations. It is basically a proto trade union.
It was started by a shoemaker and some buds. It
was open to everyone and it fought for democracy. So
the government passed the Combination Acts that made union organizing illegal.
And uh, one thing we've seen time and time again
(27:02):
is that if you make union organizing illegal, people don't
sit down and shut up. They start sabotaging things.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
Yes, yeah, you have you have you have taken the
option of them to fight without destroying your property or
your body. So they're going to do one of those
two things right and they usually even start with just property.
And the Lights are an absolute example of this. Yeah,
Thomas Hardy was the shoemaker that helped found that organization. Well,
(27:30):
I know the only cast for that guy if we're
making a movie about this. Oh, I don't know Tom Harwait.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Oh okay, I don't know any yep, Okay, that's an actor.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
That's mad Max and in Fury Road. Oh shit, yeah
yeah yeah, yeah, no, yeah, he can do this job.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Sure, I think sometimes people were like, oh, Margaret doesn't
any pop culture references. I watch a ton of movies
and TV. I'm just face blind and don't remember names.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
That's fine.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
So Thomas Hardy from Mad Max is saved by the
work of a man who is often called the first
anarchist in Western society, William Godwin. He comes way or
before Pruden, and he's.
Speaker 4 (28:09):
Way less of a dick.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Yeah, because there's this click of aristocracy around this time,
connected with the Romantic poets who are going to fight
hard and at personal expense and risk for the working class,
including fighting for the Luddites. One day, I'm going to
do this whole episode where I talk about William Godwin
and his wife Mary Wolstoncraft, who wrote one of the
foundational feminist books, and I had a kid named Mary
(28:32):
Shelley who invented science fiction, who married Percy Shelley, the
Romantic poet and upstart. But that'll be another episode. Although
most of those characters are going to come in today
because they're all part of the loved each shit in
some weird way. So Godwin puts pressure on is like
use of the fact.
Speaker 4 (28:49):
That he's like a rich bastard or whatever.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, yeah, to put pressure and be like, hey, maybe
don't hang a guy for starting a working men's association.
Maybe that's going to cause some trouble. People are fighting
back because people are always fighting back. And one of
the people who fought back was his kid who probably
didn't exist. And his name's Ned lud Ah. Yeah, he's
(29:11):
a Robin Hood figure, partly in that he probably didn't exist.
But it's seventeen seventy nine. According to most versions of
this story, You've got this kid named Edward Ludd who
lives in the Midlands in England, and he's apprentice. He's
learning the knitting frame, and he has a shitty boss
sometimes it's his dad, and he's not so sure that
(29:31):
doing the same repetitive motion his entire life is like
his best plan. And so he's a bit of a slacker.
So he's whipped for slacking. So he gets a big
old hammer, he smashes up the machine and he fucking
takes off to Sherwood Forest. Because this happens in fucking Nodingham.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yeah, I mean this is very familiar, though Sophie and
I have dealt with a very similar labor problem here
at cools out.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
Yeah, and that's why Garrison's not allowed a hammer anymore. Yeah,
and is only allowed is living in the forest. Yes,
that was happening before as well.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
But oh, okay, so young Garet disappears into legend or
is entirely made up and is sort of the paragon
of machine smashing. By eighteen oh two, you've got another
machine smashing that we can say isn't legend. There's been
a bunch of machine smashings before this. Oh, there's actually
this thing. It didn't make it in my script, but
I had this conversation with a friend of mine who's
like a historian. He knows a lot about like the
(30:25):
revolutions of eighteen forty eight and the birth of socialism
and all this stuff. And he was telling me about
how the old heads, the old Blood Heights, when they're
like showing up to the eighteen forty eight revolution and
they're like, ah, it's time to throw it down, it's
time to smash machines. And everyone from the eighteen forty
eight revolution is like, seize the machines. We're gonna seize
the machinery. And everyone from eighteen forty eight is like
that's what we said, smash it, and there's just a
(30:49):
culture difference, a generation gap, if you will. Eighteen o two,
there's another machine smashing that is not legend. Some folks
torched a whole less factory, doing nearly a million dollars
of damn in today's money. The owner claimed that an
apprentice had held him at gunpoint while his friends burned
the place. More power to that kid if it was true,
but it probably wasn't. Despite lack of evidence, the kid
(31:11):
was arrested, he refused to talk or confess, and he
was hanged on his nineteenth birthday Jesus Christ. Thousands of
people came to his funeral. They loved hanging. We'll talk
about it actually a little bit later. England loved hanging people.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah, And he died in early martyr of the war
against capitalism.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
More sabotage abound, and sometimes workers successfully won things like
not taking a pay cut and not being replaced by machines.
And this fight for the commons was happening all over
the world. It ties into all kinds of struggles. The
real MVP toolbreakers are the enslaved black people of North America.
(31:53):
Enslave people in the South broke their tools so much
that Southern tools weighed three times what northern tools did
because they had to make them so that people couldn't
break them.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Meanwhile, in eighteen eleven, with that comet in the sky,
the US saw the largest slave uprising in its history,
at least by numbers of participants. The eighteen eleven German
Coast Uprising, it said, hundreds of folks, including a lot
of Maroons, people who are already living free, who were
like leaving their Maroon communities to come put their lives
on the line free more people. They marched on New Orleans.
(32:28):
It didn't go well. Ninety five of them died.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
I meant, most trips to New Orleans don't go well. Right,
we can all be honest about that great city. But yeah,
a lot of people die. A lot of people die there.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah, they only killed two white people, and the slavers
put their heads on pikes and left them by the
side of the road and shit full.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
Yeah. Oh wow, Like, well, Roman that's pre medieval. That's okay,
I mean, it wasn't heads. But like when the Romans
defeated Spartacus's army, they crucified I mean presumably. I think
it was for miles and miles, like on the road
for miles leading to Rome. They just lighted it with
crucified bodies.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Now tell me how to open a PDF document.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
See, I was just thinking. I was like, well, I
really like having Robert on because because Robert's deep dives
of history are slightly temporally and geographically different than mine.
Mine lean a little bit more towards like Ireland and Norway,
or like Finland and you know dark ages, and yours
are a little bit more Grecian and Roman.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
I absolutely am one of those people who thinks about
the ancient Roman Empire every single day of my life.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah, but no, neither of us know how to know
anything useful.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Yeah, you yell at Garrison until they fix it.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
You can't.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Garrison's living in the forest. So now I yell at
my roommates. Oh true, True, he doesn't pay rent. He
just fixes my machine. Means when they break every day,
that's not a bad deal. It's a solid deal, I think.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Y Yeah, for everyone. So the same year eighteen eleven,
you've also got the Red Sticks, who've covered a bit
in the episode about negro Fort in Florida and they
are indigenous warriors fighting for their way of life. And
it's tied in with this indigenous man named Tokumsa, who
was trying to create a pan tribal alliance to drive
out all the white people and reclaim a way of
life best based on sharing things in common. He talked
(34:28):
specifically about this, saying that indigenous folks saw quote their
lands as common property of the whole. So one white
kid who is raised by the Osage at this time, Salta,
comes to speak, and later he wrote about it, and
he also wrote about the economy of those age people
at the time. He wrote, quote, all their various products
are in general distributed in proportion to the members of
(34:49):
each family concerned in their acquirement, though sometimes no distribution
takes place, but all draw as they want from the
supplying source as a common reservoir till it is exhausted.
Whenever a scarcity prevails, they reciprocally lend, or rather share
with each other their respective stores till they are all exhausted.
(35:09):
Oh that seems like a good way to live, No,
I know, right, it's just realizing that like a lot
of cultures all over the world, including a bunch of
European ones were doing this until capitalism and enclosure.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
It's this thing you obviously, you get a lot in
American culture and then European culture of like idolizing indigenous
peoples and like, no, they were not like angels, right, Like,
no one is. You know, they had their wars, they
had their war crimes. It's just that because for a
wide variety of reasons, they all tended to embrace the
idea that members of a community had responsibilities in common
(35:48):
to each other, which is like anethema to large aspects
of Western civilism, and particularly American Western civilization, like no,
you will you have no responsibilities, only only to get
ahead personally.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Yeah, yeah, which is wild because that is where the
tension is strongest, right, yeah, you have yeah, down in
South America. So the Napoleonic Wars are going on in Europe, right.
Napoleon invaded Portugal and Spain in eighteen oh eight. He
installs his brother as the king. This causes a crisis
in Latin American colonies, or rather opportunities for wars of independence.
(36:24):
And among the many factions involved in these struggles are
groups that were dismissed as hopelessly utopian for like not
being moderates, right, And these were groups of indigenous folks,
black folks, and European idealists fighting alongside one another to
maintain pastoralism and a culture of hunting to defend the
fucking commons. You have this first Republic of Venezuela that
(36:46):
only lasted from eighteen eleven to eighteen twelve, and Simon Boulevar,
who is the Great South America. In eighteen twelve, he
wrote this manifesto where he blames the failure of this
republic on quote certain worthy visionaries who, conceiving in their
minds some ethereal republic have sought to attain political perfection,
assuming the perfectibility of the human race.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
So I'm gonna have to know mull on that.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Okay, I don't know much about Boulevard much. I only know, like, yeah,
I have all these like holes in my history research
that I'm slowly filling. You know.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
From what I can tell, he was pretty rad. He
was also like a direct inspiration or at least his image,
and it was used by a lot of people who
sucked ass. Like that makes sense, yeah, one of those lots.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, I'm sure no right wing people have fought against
maternity like the light ice. And I point out all
these people too, because people tend to view the Luttites
is either these hopelessly isolated flash in the pan rebels,
or they tend to view them as like the smartest
(38:01):
and uniquely best rebels. The only people who could have
saved us. The English are the only people who could
figure out this whole rebellion thing. But their tactics and
some of their ideals came from the colonies, and at
least partly they came from Ireland. Much like all of
(38:21):
our sponsors, we are sponsored only by Irish companies. Any
of the following accents you should just assume that they
use a leprechaun as their logo.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
And you know, drink Guinness. If you have any water
in your house, throw it out, block your taps with
concrete and pure Guinness diet. Yeah, Breakfast to champions. Also
Guinness water balloons. Okay, it's nice out now, you know,
with global warming and the way to keep cool is
to fill water balloons up with any alcohol. I'm just
(38:55):
gonna go do a marathon with a camelback of Guinness.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Okay, true story. Today, Today I was I was trying
to look something up. I was looking up something about preparedness,
and I was I was thinking about how hard tack. Honey,
and liquor are the things that like last forever, right, Yeah,
And so I typed into Google Can you live off
of only liquor? And the answer that popped up was
the suicide in Crisis health hotline?
Speaker 3 (39:26):
That's fun.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
I was like, I don't know that.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
That's good. That's good stuff. You really you really don't.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
I drink for ritual purposes, that's my current line I do.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
I just do a lot of rituals. Yeah, you're very
spirit I'm a very spiritual kind of guy. One time
I had this ritual in San Francisco where we just
we poured two handles of tequila into a camelback and
then threw a bunch of lime popsicles in there, so
it just melted throughout the day and you could go
into stores with a camel back nobody notices.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
I saw this video on TikTok and I know how
to use it. Sorry. Olds of this person who was
going somewhere but didn't want to spend money on expensive drinks,
so she brought a glass purse and filled it up
with different layers of jello, like alcoholic jello.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
But you have to know, I'm sorry, you have to
stop first. Glass.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
So it was like it was, you know, I sorry,
this is it.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
You don't seem to know how to explain this.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
It was a bat so it was made out of
glass in the shape of a purse. I will send
it to you so you can what I'm sayings. And
then they didn't have to pay for drinks the whole night.
And it was in the and it was in a rainbow.
It was a rainbow jel, alcoholic jellow shots. That's what
it was with I was with them. But then they
(40:57):
decided in order to blendan said beverage, said said beverage
things so they don't get caught bringing in something like that.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Usually opaque containers would be one's first go to.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Well, a lot of a lot of like bigger places
make you bring clear bags.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Oh so interesting, So that was the part.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
They like put regular objects in it to make it
look more real. And then they put like fingernail clippers
in there, and I was I was like you, I
was like you, I appreciate the work.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
I appreciate people putting in the work. Yeah I was.
I appreciate too, but you lost.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Me with the fingernail clipperspectfully.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
I just had the leather jacket where the pockets went
straight into the lining, so I could fit an entire
six pack in the lining of my jacket. And I
was a ray thin nineteen year old, so it didn't
affect my silhouette.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
I bought from a place in Dublin, actually River Island.
They had this like pirate jacket was like a pea
coat that was slightly pirate styled enough that like it
looked neat, but not enough that you looked like you
were like going to a rin fair while wearing it.
And I had a friend tear out the lining and
replace it with twenty different kinds of pockets made out
of twenty different kinds of fabric, including it had two
(42:13):
pockets in the back, each of which could fit a
handle a liquor. So when I was living in India,
you can't take liquor on the subway to get to
like parties and stuff, I would just throw a couple
of handles in the back of my pirate jacket and like, yeah,
roll on out exactly.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
And so I hope that All of the ads are
for things that will destroy you, like glass, purses and liquor.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Here they go and we're back. Yeah, if anyone makes
bespoke coats. I missed my old pirate jacket and I
don't know where to get a new one. It may up.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
So in seventeen ninety eight to try to do a rising,
and we've mentioned it basically every episode.
Speaker 4 (43:04):
For the past year.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
Is this the Fenians?
Speaker 2 (43:06):
No, the Fenians are the eighteen fifty Ish ones. I think, yeah,
although actually now I'm not actually sure. I think this
is God. They kept having so many uprisings. This is
the one that I mostly remember as the one where
the Catholics and the Protestants were one hundred percent, were
very much together. And then after this, the way that
(43:26):
it was put down is that the Protestants were given.
Speaker 4 (43:28):
Special treatment by the English.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Yeah, and a ton of Irish people had to emigrate
as a result of this failed rising, and a fuck
ton of them ended up in these working class towns
in northern England. And the Irish had this traditional method
of solving certain problems, which is that you send a
threatening letter that says stop the shit or will kill you,
and then you swear an oath of secrecy and valor
(43:54):
to your friends at the pub. You put on a dress,
you paint your face to disguise it, and you go
break things or burning or kill people in the name
of these secret societies that have declared allegiance to folkloric
and mythic heroes. We covered this most extensively on the
Molly Maguire's episodes of Ribbon Men are another one of these.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
They really had it all figured out, I really did.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
And that's the Luddite style. And so they had King
lud And if you're going to have a king, it
should be a king who doesn't exist.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
Just saying absolutely Tolkien understood this more or less.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I know, I know this is sort of accidentally they
to anarchism. Yes, yeah, So there's two more side characters.
I want to cover, the poets if William Blake. I
love William Blake. My dog Rentrew is named after a
character from William Blake. Blake is like Godwin in this
(44:49):
proto anarchist tradition. He is a printmaker who does engravings
and on the side he writes weird fucking theological political
tracks and illustrated Strange Limited edition zines and and read
the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Speaker 4 (45:01):
You can't go wrong.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
He wrote a poem called Jerusalem in eighteen ten, the
year before the Luddite Rising, and it's basically about the
Luddite Rising, just a year before it happened. It is
a poem that is a call to arms to destroy
the dark Satanic mills and build heaven on earth in England,
and it ends with I will not cease from mental fight,
(45:25):
nor shall my sword sleep in my hand till we
occupy the commons to green and chill our baked lands.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
US.
Speaker 4 (45:32):
It isn't like factories.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
People used to be able to used to be better
at writing, like on a per cap at a basis,
good writers are still good writers. But man, yeah on
a bike.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Yeah, because even like we'll talk about a little bit later,
some of the like random working class Ludites also just
put out amazing prose, and other ones wrote amazing prose
that was like, oh, we're going to kill you right.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
Yeah, it's just cause you didn't have a lot else
to think about at night other than like, how can
I best describe my feelings? Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
There's a lot of fermented things and not a lot
of TV.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
So the next year the comic comes to the sky,
which the Ludites called a bright, flaming sword, which and
everyone knew it was a comment because they're smart, but
it was more than that to them. And let it
be Blake's sword that would not sleep in his hand
until we occupy the commons. Then you have Percy Shelley.
Percy Shelley is in that family of nobility who are
(46:32):
like trying to do good. His father's William Godwin, who
helps save the life of Tom Hardy. Percy wrote Ozy Mandaeis,
which is one of my favorite poems. His wife is
way cooler and more interesting than overall, and she's way
better remembered. She's Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein and
Frankenstein comes out in eighteen eighteen and is almost certainly
(46:53):
inspired by the Luddite rebellion and the war against machinery
in general. At the end of it, the monster says
to Frankenstein, you are my creator, but I am your master,
and so my like red strings connecting history board that
I keep in my mind at all times. It's basically
like well, the genre of science fiction exists because of
a working class people with hammers and matches who tried
(47:16):
to stop the industrial revolution.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
That actually makes complete sense. Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Percy's all right, or at least super interesting. They're
all Polly, they're all a polycule and like it just
kind of and like, I do love how this this
makes me appreciate the character of Miles O'Brien even more,
(47:39):
like a working class Irish union man in the future
of space.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Oh, totally totally. And so Percy's important part of the
story comes after the Luddites because it's stuff he writes
and publishes in eighteen twelve, so kind of in the
middle of it, and it's a it's a good way
to get a sense of what's going on and what
impact the Ladites had and some of the ideological framework
of the time. Also, he's vegetarian and sober. If you
(48:06):
need another XVX hero, there's just way more of them
in history than I expected. He is super young during
all of this, but he dies at twenty nine in
a boating accident, so he really crammed a lot of
living into those three decades. He's all about the rights
of the people and he's all about defending the Commons.
He wrote a manifesto called Declaration of Rights that starts
(48:27):
off government has no rights. It is a delegation from
several individuals for the purpose of securing their own and
he goes on to say the rights of man are
liberty and an equal participation in the commonage of nature.
Because again the commons man.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
I love the economy of his word usage.
Speaker 4 (48:46):
Totally.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
He gets everything that matters and said so succinctly.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Yeah, no, totally. And he's a strange poet guy. So
the first thing he does when he writes his manifesto
is he puts a copy into a bottle and throws
it into the sea. And then he takes another one
and he puts it in a hot air balloon and
like sets it up into the air. But he also
publishes it and distributes it based and the next the
next year, he writes a poem that becomes, according to
(49:12):
author Peter Liinbow, the Bible of the working class for
the next two generations. It's called Queen Mave and it
gets its name from the female warrior deity from Ireland,
mave M. It's spelled ma Ab, but I believe it's
pronounced mave cool. All the rebels at the time. The
smart ones anyway, are tying everything into colonialism. Folks used
(49:34):
Queen Mave to represent indigenous resistance in North America and Ireland,
as well as English resistance the enclosure of the Commons.
And what's interesting is every now and then I hear
people say, and I sometimes find myself saying that the
you know, enclosure of the Commons is the English rich
colonizing the English poor. But this isn't my interpretation. This
is how the English royalties saw their work at the time.
(49:57):
There is this asshole John Sinclair, sorry, sir John Sinclair,
who wrote in eighteen oh three, let us not be
satisfied with the liberation of Egypt or the subjugation of Malta,
but let us subdue Finkley Commons. Let us conquer houndslow Heath,
let us compel at being forest to submit to the
yoke of improvement. Great, and yeah, it's just it's just colonization.
(50:24):
They're just doing it.
Speaker 3 (50:24):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeahs as they always do. You know,
I'm looking at just read a story the other day
about how under Biden we're looking at like building this
AI powered like border monitoring thing to like monitor all
movement on the border, and like, yeah, they'll put those
in cities if they can, if we let them, you know,
if we don't stop them.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
Yeah. And the people who claim to care about government
overreach are the people who really want them to exist. Yes, yes,
so Queen May of this poem, it talks about and
has like prose sections.
Speaker 4 (50:57):
And I only read part of it.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
For this, I have to admit, Queen may have talks
about the labor theory of value, about atheism, about free love,
about vegetarianism, and all the revolutionary shit. But like two
hundred years ago, and his atheism did not stop him
from giving a speech in favor of Catholic emancipation as
a matter of ending the oppression of the Irish people.
Speaker 4 (51:14):
He very much.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
She had a lot to say about ending the colonization
of Ireland and Shelley. In this poem he gets at
something that I think best captures the spirit of the Luddites.
And this is the most Tolkien thing I'm going to
read today. Power like a desolating pestilence pollutes whatever it touches,
and obedience bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth makes
(51:39):
slaves of men and of the human frame a mechanize automaton.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
I.
Speaker 3 (51:52):
Get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a line. I think
back to a lot of Charlie Chaplin line from The
Great Dictator describing he was describing the fascist of his day.
But I think about it a lot in context of
tech industry. People in AI machine men with machine minds
and machine hearts. Yeah, you were not machines, you were
(52:13):
not cattle.
Speaker 2 (52:15):
Yeah. That scene is so good. That is it really
is when you need to pick me up, watch that
scene from the Great Dictator and don't think too hard
about his personal life now.
Speaker 3 (52:27):
Or probably even a bad man can channel the mystic
from time to time. Yeah, totallys a flawed one. Yeah yeah,
I mean flawed people do it all. Yeah, not that
way ideally, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:43):
So the working class didn't just get its theory from
the rich educated folks on their side. They also were
generating it themselves. Among the Lutites were working class scholars.
They were like studying ancient Greek when they're coming home
from their shifts at the you know, factory and all
of that, and they're studying the modern proto socialism and
the proto.
Speaker 4 (53:02):
Anarchism that's going on. Either of those words are.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
Really doing anything at that point, and they're going to
do a lot of threatening and fighting and oath swearing
and being really cool. And we'll get to it all
on Wednesday, because that's the cool people did cool stuff.
Promise is that the first half is context.
Speaker 3 (53:23):
And that's my promise to everyone. I know about everything
any day, but Wednesday, I'll get to it Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
Yeah, exactly. Wednesdays the day when I do no Wait,
Thursdays the day I do all my work. Wait, no,
I work all the time. Wait a second, am I
like those people working in the.
Speaker 3 (53:39):
Factory, Sophie. Cut the feed, cut the feed.
Speaker 1 (53:42):
I'm just thinking of all the things that I'm waiting
for you to do, Robert.
Speaker 3 (53:45):
I would.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
But speaking of things that Robert does, Robert Evans, if
you would like to Is your podcast available in English
now as well?
Speaker 3 (53:56):
It is? It is, it is, It's actually always been
available in English. It's just my very strong Bostonian accent
is hard for some people to understand. I see, I see.
But yeah. You can listen to Behind the Bastards every
week Tuesday and Thursday, and you can find my novel
After the Revolution, just type after the Revolution Evans into
Google and it'll come up. Or you can go to
(54:17):
atrbook dot com and read it on the interwebs for free,
but it's also sold all the places that sell books.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
Oor'll type it into Google and bring up the crisis hotline.
Speaker 3 (54:27):
Yes, yes, it's not often necessary for my readers.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
And if you want to read more of what I write,
I write on substack every week. I write about preparedness,
I write about living in times of crisis, and some
of it is free, and then the more personal stuff
you have to pay me for, but half of it's free.
So what are you complaining about, Sophie, What do you got?
Speaker 1 (54:51):
I'd like to plug cool Zone Media's newest podcast, better
Offline and just follow out cool Zone Media because we're
gonna have a couple additional new shows coming soon this year.
Speaker 4 (55:03):
I'm so excited.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
I get really sad when I like I listen to
podcasts while I do all the manual work that I
like to do and or have to do. And sometimes
I run out of cool Zone Media podcasts for the week,
and I get sad and I look at other shows,
and some of them are good.
Speaker 1 (55:21):
But if I had told you there will be more.
Speaker 2 (55:24):
I'll be excited, oh cool, just as excited as you'll
be on Wednesday when you hear more about the people
breaking stuff.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
Bye cool People who did Cool Stuff is a production
of cool Zone Media. A more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on iHeartRadio, app A Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hello and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening,
there's people trying to do good things, and often those
people are trying to destroy technology. Well, at least that's
this week's rewind, because we are doing a rewind this
week because I had last week off, Imagine that, and I,
(00:25):
for some weird reason, am thinking about the ways that
people revolt against technology and how it's not actually usually
about like I just don't like the future or technology itself,
but instead about the way that technology is influencing culture
and economics. Because this week we're talking about the Ludites,
(00:46):
and this week we're going to include my favorite last
words of all time. Hello, and welcome to cool people
who built a militant, popular social movement in face of
your state depression and therefore splintered into a reformist wing
that failed, as well as a more clandestine wing that
also failed, but still changed the course of history. Your
weekly podcast that does exactly what it says in the
(01:09):
title almost every week. I'm your host, Margaret Kildrey. Well
with me today, as my guest is do I get
this right? Robert Avon's host of the podcast derrier les Salude. Yeah,
podcast that focuses on all the bad people in French history.
I get that right, Yeah, all of that's perfect. I
continue to be amazed that the Apple people let that
(01:31):
title into the into iTunes or whatever tunes.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
They use these days. But I guess they knew brilliance
when they saw it.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, clearly because they didn't well or they were you know,
just actually spoke French and didn't realize that derriere had
a different meaning in English. M Oh, yeah, that's so
that's probably what happened.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
What are we hearing about today, magpie?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Well, you ever had a piece of technology that you
just couldn't stand, one that made you, dare I say
it feel like a bit of a luddite?
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Yes, everything that is more recent than about twenty twelve,
with the exception what I'll say, this shows you how
badly Star Trek the next generation hacked my brain. Anything
that's like a cool screen, like a folding screen or
a transparent screen, I'm still on board with. I love
a cool screen. I can't get past that part of
growing up on TNG. But yeah, self driving cars, no,
(02:29):
thank you AI anything, No fucking thank you. I can't
even really good on board with the tiktoks.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I know, I'm like annoyed that I'm so actively annoyed
that they're trying to ban it. Yeah, I also don't
want to use it. But what I do want to
do is remember to do the rest of my introduction,
including introducing our producer, Sophie Hi.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Sophie Hi, Robert doesn't know how to use most technology,
but yet knows how to report on it. It's really
fun for me.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, his business, he's kind of impressive.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I can't even tell you the amount of times I
explained things to him and went but you started as
a tech tourtalist.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
What are you talking about?
Speaker 1 (03:12):
How could you not do basic human thing in Roberts,
I don't know. Let me tell you about something nobody
has ever heard of and explain it perfectly.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I mean, some of it is that like Abe Simpson saying,
it'll happen to you, because like my dad was an
early adopter. He like didn't have a ton of money
and he spent all of it on computers, you know.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yeah, yeah, that was my dad as well. Actually, yeah,
or more than more than he should have. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
and uh and no doesn't I mean, you know whatever
I mean. But I'm starting to hit that point myself.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
I was like explaining computer things to my dad and
now I'm like, you know, one of my friends like
takes the remote away from me while I'm trying to
navigate the YouTube menu, and it's like, give it to me, Grandma.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Hyah. Garrison gives me no end of shit because I
love having motions smoothing on. Well's the most boomer thing
I've ever said.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yeah, it's really upsetting. None of us would be anywhere
with technology without our wonderful editor. And who is he?
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Danel? That was a really good transition.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
It's almost like I'm a professional.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Weird.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, someone should actually pay you at this point, That's.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
What I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, we should get on that. Daniel is our audio editor.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
Everyone says saying hi to Daniel.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Hi, Danel, Hi, Daniel Hy Daniel. Our theme musical is
written for us by unwoman. All right, so follow up question.
You have the technology that makes you feel like a
bit of a lud eite. What's your take on industrial
revolution and its consequences for humanity?
Speaker 3 (04:49):
You know, consequences is such a big word, and to
be honest, I don't think you can. Really. We're still
waiting to see are we going to pull out of
this climate tail spin that we are currently in before
it it kills everything of value on the planet. And uh,
I think the question, I think until we get the
final answer to that, we won't be able to say
for sure because there's obviously there's a lot of horrible downsides,
(05:12):
you know, yeah, fucking sweatshops and industrial war and shit.
But there's also like labor saving devices. There's god knows
how many people have had a chance to explore themselves art, creativity,
just spend more time, you know, with their family because
of labor saving devices. So I'm going to I'm going
to say, like the this is still a neck and
(05:32):
neck fight right now, Like we'll see, we'll see who
hits the finish line first.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Okay, I I feel like one team called climate change
is pulled out ahead.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
It's yes, yes, look is that? Is that? Is that
the best odds you're gonna get right now? Yes?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah? But yeah, but I would I would put words
in your mouth and say that appropriate technology is a
beautiful thing and a worthwhile thing.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Yeah, it certainly can be.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
And so sometimes people assume that to be a luttite
is to be against all technology, and that the people
fighting against the Industrial Revolution were against the idea of
making life better. And today we're going to talk about them.
We're going to talk about the Lunites. Hell, yeah, you
know much about the Luddites. I know that they were
skilled workers, mainly in the garment industry, like weaving and
(06:24):
like that, which is just having done one part of that,
like shearing the animal part of it. It's the whole.
Like the amount of human labor before we developed the
machines we've developed was titanic. And my understanding is a
lot of them did not like that these machines were
coming in, at least certain types of the machines that
came in to automate this process, because they turned it
(06:46):
from a skilled trade where people, the people doing it
were valuable and had some leverage because you needed it
done and only a certain number of people knew how
to do it to something that where they were all
just kind of slotted in like little machines themselves, right,
And they viewed it as like reducing the dignity and
of labor, among other problems, yeah, I would say that
(07:08):
that's a good overall look at the Luddites and what
they were doing is that they were opposed to what
the machines were doing, rather than like that thing has
too many spinning wheels.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Yeah. The issue isn't I don't like machines because they
do things better. It's I don't like the way these
machines are being used to turn us into machines. Right.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
And also, interestingly, a lot of people are really proud
of their work, and some of these machines, not all
of them, but some of these machines were absolutely turning
out junk. We're turning out inferior quality work.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Oh. Interesting, I wonder if that's going to ever happen again.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Yeah, no, I'm not sure. I actually don't think that
this has any reflection. This is a very in the past,
no modern Okay, well I'll just get into it.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
In eighteen eleven, during the middle of the Industrial Revolution,
a bunch of textile workers in northern England came together
to fight against the mechanization of their industry. Labor organizing
had been outlawed, so this didn't stop them. They formed
a secret society and they went about smashing machines with hammers,
burning down factories, and occasionally shooting back at the owners
(08:17):
who were shooting and killing them on a regular basis.
A bunch of them were men wearing dresses.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Love to see it, I mean it's efficient, it is. Yeah,
all that room to move, you know. I go hiking
all the time in long skirts and people are like,
what are you doing? That's gonna catch on things? And
it's just like, I've been doing this for a very
long time. When you're doing a lot of hallucinogens, you
learn the best way to do certain things. And that's
(08:45):
how I realized that the most efficient kind of dress
was like a slightly longer than ankle length skirt. Yeah,
like dress in terms of clothing, Yeah, that's totally stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yeah, the maxi skirt. This is the finest thing. It's
pajamas you can wear all day.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
It's easy to make too. I used to make my
own skirts.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, yeah, that's actually the only thing I used to
be able to sew.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Yeah, I'm not a great se just that.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
So these ludites pushed England right to the brink of
outright revolution. The other thing that I didn't realize coming
into this was just how big of a deal the
Luodite Rebellion was. The government decided to declare its loyalty
with the owners and not the people. Soldiers put down
the uprising quite violently. A bunch of people were hanged,
(09:33):
a bunch of people were deported to Australia, and the
lud eight Rebellion was quelled. Its songs and its name
live on, though mostly sadly are quite horribly misrepresented. Yeah,
there's a few mainstream of it narratives available about our friends,
the Luddites. The first, of course, is the simplistic version.
Some people didn't like technology, so they smashed up machines
because they hated change. Sure, and then if you're going
(09:55):
galaxy brain chart, Next up is the more historically informed one.
The Luddite and hate technology is a concept. They hated
the automation of their jobs that robbed them of employment,
like kind of like cashier's matt itself checkout lines or something. Sure,
you can keep going higher up you get to kind
of you know, It's not that the Luddites had one
job in a factory and suddenly had a different job
(10:15):
in a factory so that they didn't have a factory
job at all. They had a job as an artisan,
right yeah. And the ludite rebellion is positioned in the
midst of the Industrial Revolution, and it was a revolt
by those used to artisans, skilled labor and a life
with some level of dignity and as you pointed out,
some level of bargaining power, right yeah. And from this
(10:36):
point of view, it is a revolt against the modern world,
is a revolt against what future friend of the Pod
Woiam Blake, only seven years earlier had called the dark
satanic mills of industry that were cropping up.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
M okay, but that kind of makes them sound cool too.
I know.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
This is one of the problems when you hang out
mostly in history books from like the early eighteen hundreds,
a lot of people saying really cool stuff are framing
it theologically, and so they're like confusing my like metal
head conception of what makes something cool, you know.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Yeah, yeah, Because I if like somebody was like, hey,
I've opened up like an occult themed like wool clothes shop,
could I would you donate some of your wool to
the dark Satanic loom or whatever? Look, absolutely, that sounds
based totally, Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
And so most of the time, people who see the
under these underlying issues still see the Luddites as like
at best, hopeless romantics who couldn't handle the changing of industry,
like like the whalers who lost their job when lighting
moved away from whale oil and towards petroleum, or the
coal miners and Apalachia currently facing the decline of their industry. Right,
(11:45):
And so it's this narrative of progress and these people
who are like tragically left behind. I don't buy that narrative.
I will present the industrial revolution not as a benign
or neutral thing, but instead the birth of capitalism and
industrial production that are again, I'm guessing, are going to
(12:06):
have irrevocable danger to all of humanity in the world.
They were not a tiny group doing an isolated rebellion.
I want to position them as revolutionists in the middle
of a decentralized global uprising in defense of the commons.
And did you know that it started with a comet
in the sky A most good things do, right, Yeah,
(12:30):
Like I think that the well, I guess there's the
Bible star thing. But I think overall, if you read
like classic works of literature, and there's like the Omen
of the comet in the sky. Yeah, the comet of
eighteen eleven, I think is where that comes from.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
For two hundred and sixty days, from March eighteen eleven
to January eighteen twelve, a massive comet held court in
the heavens. Its tail was stretched out for everyone to see,
everyone of the Rthern hemisphere. Yeah, the Great comment of
eighteen eleven. It found its way into the writings of
Tolstoy and Victor Hugo and William Blake. Tolstoy I wasn't
alive yet, but it ends up in his writings, sure,
(13:11):
and it was seen as a portent all over the
world by all kinds of uprisings. Mostly people were like,
you think the world's ending, and everyone's like, pretty sure, Yeah,
pretty sure, the world's ending.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
I think there's another thing psychologically going on here too.
And I just say this because of like how I
tend to interpret some of the things that I've experienced
in my life that I could see as supernatural or whatever,
which is that most people who recognize that like something
is fucked up and they need to do something about
all the fucked up shit are also like, but I
(13:42):
don't want to like die or you know, sacrifice my
life or whatever, and you're kind of looking for an
excuse that like, Okay, it's the time to act, and
anything that happens that's weird is like, well, shit, I
guess it was that, right, Like, that's as good as
I've been looking for an excuse to start, you know,
the process of fighting back. And I guess this commet's
(14:05):
as good as any.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Honestly, that makes a lot of sense to me because
it's like they knew it was a comet. Yeah, like
they had astronomy and stuff. You know, it still meant
a lot to them symbolically.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
And there were a lot of uprisings in eighteen eleven
and eighteen twelve, and some of them used very consciously
the language of defending the Commons. Some of them didn't,
but all of them, well, all the ones that I'm
going to talk about, were fighting for a way of
life that hadn't been defined by capitalism, colonialism, or the
great enclosures of the commons. To talk about the commons,
(14:41):
I talk about the commons reasonably often, but I think
this is like one of the more important concepts to understand,
where we're at now is in short, in a lot
of cultures, but most notably medieval England, because they managed
to export culture and language all over the world through
power process of domination. You had what was known as
the commons and the idea that most of the land
(15:02):
was just kind of publicly owned, like, well, why would
you own that. It's not your house or yard. Of course,
people can just go collect firewood, hunt gray's sheep, maybe
grow some potatoes. It's land. Use it like land, everyone
can use it. It's land. It's the commons. And then
(15:22):
you get the enclosure of the commons, which was the
privatization of it, which was literal and direct, and England
was carved up by stone fences, hedgerows and ditches dividing
everything up. I like, whenever you see like an old
movie and it's like medieval England and someone like runs
through a hedge along the side of the road, it
makes me feel like that couldn't be real, right, Yeah,
(15:45):
But that actually was. That was what was happening by
late medieval England.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Yeah, I guess the last gasp of it is here
out on the west coast, you have a shitload more
BLM land in Oregon and Washington and even big chunks
of California. You regularly find yourself in these vast tracks
of land that's just like, well, this is all of
ours right, Like it's it's still kind of the last
gasp of that attitude, I guess because white people haven't
(16:13):
been here as long.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah, no, totally. The public lands in the US are
a really interesting and BLM is like more directly just
used as like, huh, do whatever you want. Yeah, you know.
And so this enclosure started in the medieval period and
just kept ramping up through the nineteenth century. We've talked
(16:35):
a bunch about the seventeenth century anti enclosure rebels. If
people want to hear more about it, go listen to
the episode with the about the diggers, the levelers and
the ranters. And then the Industrial Revolution kicked off and
everything got more enclosurey by the end of the eighteenth century.
By like the seventeen nineties or so, things are really
fucking heated in this way. In the seventeen nineties there
(16:57):
are twenty five parliamentary enclosure acts in England. By eighteen
eleven there were one hundred and thirty three geez, and
the enclosure wasn't just of land. Everything suddenly had to
be discreete like with the tea in between the two
e's and regimented rivers became canals. Language became more codified.
You started getting like dictionaries and lexicons published, which overall,
(17:21):
like I'm not inherently against that. Right alongside of that,
press censorship went up. Yeah, class divisions became even more pronounced,
which I totally don't entirely understand because England's like one
of the most class divided places in the world. You know, Yeah,
they speak a different language from each other, you know.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
At this point, during the enclosure of the commons, the
word common takes on its negative connotations. Soldiers start living
in separate. They start living separate from everyone else, housed
in barracks. The prison industrial complex kicks in. Prisons are
being built everywhere. Prisoners are doing a lot of the
labor for building this infrastructure in England. England became famous
(18:04):
and actually mocked for building so many barracks and prisons,
Like what that was wrong with these people? The enclosure
also came for gender. To quote author Peter Liinbau quote,
the household became part of the system of enclosure. The
genders were separated by doctrine of the two spheres, the
private sphere for women and the public sphere for men.
(18:27):
The wife ceased to have a legal persona or existence. Yeah,
And prior to the Industrial Revolution, most manufacturing was done
by artisans working at home or in small workshops, which
is now called kind of disparagingly a cottage industry. Right,
these cottages became factories, and this was a way more
(18:49):
efficient way to speed up the process of destroying the
Earth's atmosphere, and it was also a substantial decreasing quality
of life for the individual producers. It also had like
some positive knock on a like if you ever read
about how long it took to make cloth back in
the day with yes and spinning and weaving, like that
was your life was?
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that that is. There's a really
good a historian who does like a blog kind of
analyzing myths about classical civilizations. He's did a multipiece one
on the Spartans, trying to talk about like how oppressed
the helots were. And one of the things he goes
into is if you are a woman and a family,
most of your life is making and maintaining clothing for
(19:31):
your family and not to have multiple outfits just to
be able because you're wearing them every day. They're getting
warned by outside work and when you're taxing you know,
half or what. Like, it's like eighty hours a week
for a lot of people for basically your whole life,
like maintaining forty to eighty hours a week, depending you know,
on a couple of things, maintaining and whatnot, clothing for
(19:52):
your family, like it is like a nightmare burden.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
No, yeah, I remember reading once that it was like
to make a square of linen was about a week's
worth of labor someone who knew what they were doing.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
There are very few people alive today who do anything
as hard as maintaining clothing for a family back in
like that period of time.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Yeah, yeah, no, And that's what's so frustrating, right He's like, well,
I love my dishwasher, right, yeah, yeah, it's great. Yeah
the time, I don't, and I didn't have one until
I was, you know, in my late thirties, right yeah,
but you know, and I was like, oh, I don't
mean one of those wash dishes that's meditative. I love that.
I just like rinse off my dishes, throw them in
(20:32):
the dishwasher, like, yeah, no it is, it's And this
is what's so frustrating, because yeah, it's very natural to
look at this and be like, well, I don't want
to go back to everyone having to hand weave everything, right.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Of course not, I would just freeze to death.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
The very first factories of the industrial Revolution were textile factories,
producing the cloth that got sent out to the various cottages.
So that was the first part to be industrialized. Yeah,
textile was big business in England, the largest industry in England.
A million people around ten percent of the country was
involved in the wool industry alone. Then cotton started coming
(21:09):
in from India in the US, and that was even
easier to work. You get your first textile machine, the
stocking frame, invented in fifteen eighty nine. People of all
genders wore stockings and not pants, and this was made
of knitted wool, and so this was a way of
automating or at least rapid incredibly speeding up that process.
The queen was like, if you patent that, it'll fuck
(21:32):
over all the poor people know, it'll trash her economy,
So she didn't let it be patented. And during the
chunks of the medieval period you have this thing in
England that you still see today where the crown is
seen as what protects the commoners from like poverty and
the non noble rich you know what later becomes the
(21:53):
capitalist class. But slowly, surely knitting was automated.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Makes sense to me, like the role of the because
if you're the queen or the king or whatever, you're
on top of your social hierarchy. Everyone below them is
constantly jockeying and fighting for power and influence, and the
primary way to do that is by finding new ways
to fuck over the poor, Whereas if you're on top,
you're not jockeying for power over the others, but you
(22:20):
do always have to keep an eye on like, are
the poor pissed off enough that they might kill us?
All right, so you're the only one that hit that
is really focused on that.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
No, you're right, that is such a good point. That
is where you're uh, yeah, that's that's uh.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
You're probably going too far yet, Yeah, but you know
what doesn't go too far except some of the ads
we've been getting lately occasionally handled yes, yes, the other.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Ads that aren't in support of genocidal regimes or becoming jailers.
Don't do either of those two things.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
But anything else that's being sold, you should buy it.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
And we're back.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
I feel bad Margaret because you said jailor, and I
forgot to immediately respond jailor. I hardly know her. That's
my bit. Yeah, a lot of stuff. It's a good bit.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
It's pretty original, it's great, it's great.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Sophie loves it. Sophie loves that. I do it. Anytime
someone says anything with an er at the end.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, that's Robert. I barely know air.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
That to see perfect it always does.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Don't encourge this magfi.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
Sorry.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Sorry.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
By the mid seventeen hundreds, you've got what's called a
spinning Jenny, which automates a lot of yarn spinning. The
inventors saw this machine smashed in front of him, and
he had the fleet town.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
I'm thinking back to when those local youths in Oakland
destroyed that self driving car the other week.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Oh hell yeah, I haven't seen this yet.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Lit it on fire. Yeah good.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
And it's not that the concept of a car that
drives itself is inherently bad, but within the system that
we live in. It's going to drive you to jail.
It's going to drive you to jail. It's going to
take money from poor people and give all of it
to the same four guys who are already taking money
from poor people. Like that is the issue, exactly, and
(24:33):
that is what is happening here with industrialization. You're not
like a lot of people at this point are using
machines for their work, and they've found ways to be
skilled laborers using these machines.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
I know a lot of people who get wool, either
from their own animals or from other people's animals, and
spin it and use it to make clothing. And they
don't have to spend eighty hours a week to barely
maintain one guard because they use modern tools to do
all that. They just are all so artisans.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And so soon enough the spinning jenny
is attached to a water wheel, and then you get
the steam engine. And suddenly, because you have a steam engine,
you have way more coal mines, and then you have
to build canals to connect them all with convict labor,
and there's factories with smoke stacks all over the countryside,
and who worked the factories. Well, it's fucking England, so
(25:23):
it's children as young as six years old. Two thirds
of the workers in these early factories were children, especially
orphans hired out essentially slave labor, hired from orphanages and workhouses. Yeah,
and so people are like, oh, we don't like this,
And later people are like, oh, they clearly just hate
not working all the time. They're like, no, the smoke stacks,
(25:46):
the child slavery anyway.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Yeah, we don't really know what cancer is, but we're
pretty sure this is causing it.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, we shouldn't be breathing this. That's all I know.
So the comments are enclosed, and people start seeing their
way of life disappear, and their quality of life dropped dramatically,
and they didn't accept it. They fought back. Sometimes they
did it chaotically, sometimes they did it in an organized fashion.
And they did this all over the world. I hate
to give the US Revolution much credit. If you've heard
(26:14):
any other episode, it just me talking shit on the
US Revolution. But it really did change the world. And
this wave of republicanism spread over Europe, inspiring the French
Revolution soon after, and people started being like, hey, what
if we had like rights like what if? Like what
an idea? You know, And by seventeen ninety two you
(26:38):
have the London Corresponding Society, which is one of the
first working class organizations. It is basically a proto trade union.
It was started by a shoemaker and some buds. It
was open to everyone and it fought for democracy. So
the government passed the Combination Acts that made union organizing illegal.
And uh, one thing we've seen time and time again
(27:02):
is that if you make union organizing illegal, people don't
sit down and shut up. They start sabotaging things.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
Yes, yeah, you have you have you have taken the
option of them to fight without destroying your property or
your body. So they're going to do one of those
two things right and they usually even start with just property.
And the Lights are an absolute example of this. Yeah,
Thomas Hardy was the shoemaker that helped found that organization. Well,
(27:30):
I know the only cast for that guy if we're
making a movie about this. Oh, I don't know Tom Harwait.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Oh okay, I don't know any yep, Okay, that's an actor.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
That's mad Max and in Fury Road. Oh shit, yeah
yeah yeah, yeah, no, yeah, he can do this job.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Sure, I think sometimes people were like, oh, Margaret doesn't
any pop culture references. I watch a ton of movies
and TV. I'm just face blind and don't remember names.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
That's fine.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
So Thomas Hardy from Mad Max is saved by the
work of a man who is often called the first
anarchist in Western society, William Godwin. He comes way or
before Pruden, and he's.
Speaker 4 (28:09):
Way less of a dick.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Yeah, because there's this click of aristocracy around this time,
connected with the Romantic poets who are going to fight
hard and at personal expense and risk for the working class,
including fighting for the Luddites. One day, I'm going to
do this whole episode where I talk about William Godwin
and his wife Mary Wolstoncraft, who wrote one of the
foundational feminist books, and I had a kid named Mary
(28:32):
Shelley who invented science fiction, who married Percy Shelley, the
Romantic poet and upstart. But that'll be another episode. Although
most of those characters are going to come in today
because they're all part of the loved each shit in
some weird way. So Godwin puts pressure on is like
use of the fact.
Speaker 4 (28:49):
That he's like a rich bastard or whatever.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, yeah, to put pressure and be like, hey, maybe
don't hang a guy for starting a working men's association.
Maybe that's going to cause some trouble. People are fighting
back because people are always fighting back. And one of
the people who fought back was his kid who probably
didn't exist. And his name's Ned lud Ah. Yeah, he's
(29:11):
a Robin Hood figure, partly in that he probably didn't exist.
But it's seventeen seventy nine. According to most versions of
this story, You've got this kid named Edward Ludd who
lives in the Midlands in England, and he's apprentice. He's
learning the knitting frame, and he has a shitty boss
sometimes it's his dad, and he's not so sure that
(29:31):
doing the same repetitive motion his entire life is like
his best plan. And so he's a bit of a slacker.
So he's whipped for slacking. So he gets a big
old hammer, he smashes up the machine and he fucking
takes off to Sherwood Forest. Because this happens in fucking Nodingham.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yeah, I mean this is very familiar, though Sophie and
I have dealt with a very similar labor problem here
at cools out.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
Yeah, and that's why Garrison's not allowed a hammer anymore. Yeah,
and is only allowed is living in the forest. Yes,
that was happening before as well.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
But oh, okay, so young Garet disappears into legend or
is entirely made up and is sort of the paragon
of machine smashing. By eighteen oh two, you've got another
machine smashing that we can say isn't legend. There's been
a bunch of machine smashings before this. Oh, there's actually
this thing. It didn't make it in my script, but
I had this conversation with a friend of mine who's
like a historian. He knows a lot about like the
(30:25):
revolutions of eighteen forty eight and the birth of socialism
and all this stuff. And he was telling me about
how the old heads, the old Blood Heights, when they're
like showing up to the eighteen forty eight revolution and
they're like, ah, it's time to throw it down, it's
time to smash machines. And everyone from the eighteen forty
eight revolution is like, seize the machines. We're gonna seize
the machinery. And everyone from eighteen forty eight is like
that's what we said, smash it, and there's just a
(30:49):
culture difference, a generation gap, if you will. Eighteen o two,
there's another machine smashing that is not legend. Some folks
torched a whole less factory, doing nearly a million dollars
of damn in today's money. The owner claimed that an
apprentice had held him at gunpoint while his friends burned
the place. More power to that kid if it was true,
but it probably wasn't. Despite lack of evidence, the kid
(31:11):
was arrested, he refused to talk or confess, and he
was hanged on his nineteenth birthday Jesus Christ. Thousands of
people came to his funeral. They loved hanging. We'll talk
about it actually a little bit later. England loved hanging people.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah, And he died in early martyr of the war
against capitalism.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
More sabotage abound, and sometimes workers successfully won things like
not taking a pay cut and not being replaced by machines.
And this fight for the commons was happening all over
the world. It ties into all kinds of struggles. The
real MVP toolbreakers are the enslaved black people of North America.
(31:53):
Enslave people in the South broke their tools so much
that Southern tools weighed three times what northern tools did
because they had to make them so that people couldn't
break them.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Meanwhile, in eighteen eleven, with that comet in the sky,
the US saw the largest slave uprising in its history,
at least by numbers of participants. The eighteen eleven German
Coast Uprising, it said, hundreds of folks, including a lot
of Maroons, people who are already living free, who were
like leaving their Maroon communities to come put their lives
on the line free more people. They marched on New Orleans.
(32:28):
It didn't go well. Ninety five of them died.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
I meant, most trips to New Orleans don't go well. Right,
we can all be honest about that great city. But yeah,
a lot of people die. A lot of people die there.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah, they only killed two white people, and the slavers
put their heads on pikes and left them by the
side of the road and shit full.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
Yeah. Oh wow, Like, well, Roman that's pre medieval. That's okay,
I mean, it wasn't heads. But like when the Romans
defeated Spartacus's army, they crucified I mean presumably. I think
it was for miles and miles, like on the road
for miles leading to Rome. They just lighted it with
crucified bodies.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Now tell me how to open a PDF document.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
See, I was just thinking. I was like, well, I
really like having Robert on because because Robert's deep dives
of history are slightly temporally and geographically different than mine.
Mine lean a little bit more towards like Ireland and Norway,
or like Finland and you know dark ages, and yours
are a little bit more Grecian and Roman.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
I absolutely am one of those people who thinks about
the ancient Roman Empire every single day of my life.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah, but no, neither of us know how to know
anything useful.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Yeah, you yell at Garrison until they fix it.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
You can't.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Garrison's living in the forest. So now I yell at
my roommates. Oh true, True, he doesn't pay rent. He
just fixes my machine. Means when they break every day,
that's not a bad deal. It's a solid deal, I think.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Y Yeah, for everyone. So the same year eighteen eleven,
you've also got the Red Sticks, who've covered a bit
in the episode about negro Fort in Florida and they
are indigenous warriors fighting for their way of life. And
it's tied in with this indigenous man named Tokumsa, who
was trying to create a pan tribal alliance to drive
out all the white people and reclaim a way of
life best based on sharing things in common. He talked
(34:28):
specifically about this, saying that indigenous folks saw quote their
lands as common property of the whole. So one white
kid who is raised by the Osage at this time, Salta,
comes to speak, and later he wrote about it, and
he also wrote about the economy of those age people
at the time. He wrote, quote, all their various products
are in general distributed in proportion to the members of
(34:49):
each family concerned in their acquirement, though sometimes no distribution
takes place, but all draw as they want from the
supplying source as a common reservoir till it is exhausted.
Whenever a scarcity prevails, they reciprocally lend, or rather share
with each other their respective stores till they are all exhausted.
(35:09):
Oh that seems like a good way to live, No,
I know, right, it's just realizing that like a lot
of cultures all over the world, including a bunch of
European ones were doing this until capitalism and enclosure.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
It's this thing you obviously, you get a lot in
American culture and then European culture of like idolizing indigenous
peoples and like, no, they were not like angels, right, Like,
no one is. You know, they had their wars, they
had their war crimes. It's just that because for a
wide variety of reasons, they all tended to embrace the
idea that members of a community had responsibilities in common
(35:48):
to each other, which is like anethema to large aspects
of Western civilism, and particularly American Western civilization, like no,
you will you have no responsibilities, only only to get
ahead personally.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Yeah, yeah, which is wild because that is where the
tension is strongest, right, yeah, you have yeah, down in
South America. So the Napoleonic Wars are going on in Europe, right.
Napoleon invaded Portugal and Spain in eighteen oh eight. He
installs his brother as the king. This causes a crisis
in Latin American colonies, or rather opportunities for wars of independence.
(36:24):
And among the many factions involved in these struggles are
groups that were dismissed as hopelessly utopian for like not
being moderates, right, And these were groups of indigenous folks,
black folks, and European idealists fighting alongside one another to
maintain pastoralism and a culture of hunting to defend the
fucking commons. You have this first Republic of Venezuela that
(36:46):
only lasted from eighteen eleven to eighteen twelve, and Simon Boulevar,
who is the Great South America. In eighteen twelve, he
wrote this manifesto where he blames the failure of this
republic on quote certain worthy visionaries who, conceiving in their
minds some ethereal republic have sought to attain political perfection,
assuming the perfectibility of the human race.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
So I'm gonna have to know mull on that.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Okay, I don't know much about Boulevard much. I only know, like, yeah,
I have all these like holes in my history research
that I'm slowly filling. You know.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
From what I can tell, he was pretty rad. He
was also like a direct inspiration or at least his image,
and it was used by a lot of people who
sucked ass. Like that makes sense, yeah, one of those lots.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, I'm sure no right wing people have fought against
maternity like the light ice. And I point out all
these people too, because people tend to view the Luttites
is either these hopelessly isolated flash in the pan rebels,
or they tend to view them as like the smartest
(38:01):
and uniquely best rebels. The only people who could have
saved us. The English are the only people who could
figure out this whole rebellion thing. But their tactics and
some of their ideals came from the colonies, and at
least partly they came from Ireland. Much like all of
(38:21):
our sponsors, we are sponsored only by Irish companies. Any
of the following accents you should just assume that they
use a leprechaun as their logo.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
And you know, drink Guinness. If you have any water
in your house, throw it out, block your taps with
concrete and pure Guinness diet. Yeah, Breakfast to champions. Also
Guinness water balloons. Okay, it's nice out now, you know,
with global warming and the way to keep cool is
to fill water balloons up with any alcohol. I'm just
(38:55):
gonna go do a marathon with a camelback of Guinness.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Okay, true story. Today, Today I was I was trying
to look something up. I was looking up something about preparedness,
and I was I was thinking about how hard tack. Honey,
and liquor are the things that like last forever, right, Yeah,
And so I typed into Google Can you live off
of only liquor? And the answer that popped up was
the suicide in Crisis health hotline?
Speaker 3 (39:26):
That's fun.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
I was like, I don't know that.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
That's good. That's good stuff. You really you really don't.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
I drink for ritual purposes, that's my current line I do.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
I just do a lot of rituals. Yeah, you're very
spirit I'm a very spiritual kind of guy. One time
I had this ritual in San Francisco where we just
we poured two handles of tequila into a camelback and
then threw a bunch of lime popsicles in there, so
it just melted throughout the day and you could go
into stores with a camel back nobody notices.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
I saw this video on TikTok and I know how
to use it. Sorry. Olds of this person who was
going somewhere but didn't want to spend money on expensive drinks,
so she brought a glass purse and filled it up
with different layers of jello, like alcoholic jello.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
But you have to know, I'm sorry, you have to
stop first. Glass.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
So it was like it was, you know, I sorry,
this is it.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
You don't seem to know how to explain this.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
It was a bat so it was made out of
glass in the shape of a purse. I will send
it to you so you can what I'm sayings. And
then they didn't have to pay for drinks the whole night.
And it was in the and it was in a rainbow.
It was a rainbow jel, alcoholic jellow shots. That's what
it was with I was with them. But then they
(40:57):
decided in order to blendan said beverage, said said beverage
things so they don't get caught bringing in something like that.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Usually opaque containers would be one's first go to.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Well, a lot of a lot of like bigger places
make you bring clear bags.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Oh so interesting, So that was the part.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
They like put regular objects in it to make it
look more real. And then they put like fingernail clippers
in there, and I was I was like you, I
was like you, I appreciate the work.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
I appreciate people putting in the work. Yeah I was.
I appreciate too, but you lost.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Me with the fingernail clipperspectfully.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
I just had the leather jacket where the pockets went
straight into the lining, so I could fit an entire
six pack in the lining of my jacket. And I
was a ray thin nineteen year old, so it didn't
affect my silhouette.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
I bought from a place in Dublin, actually River Island.
They had this like pirate jacket was like a pea
coat that was slightly pirate styled enough that like it
looked neat, but not enough that you looked like you
were like going to a rin fair while wearing it.
And I had a friend tear out the lining and
replace it with twenty different kinds of pockets made out
of twenty different kinds of fabric, including it had two
(42:13):
pockets in the back, each of which could fit a
handle a liquor. So when I was living in India,
you can't take liquor on the subway to get to
like parties and stuff, I would just throw a couple
of handles in the back of my pirate jacket and like, yeah,
roll on out exactly.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
And so I hope that All of the ads are
for things that will destroy you, like glass, purses and liquor.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Here they go and we're back. Yeah, if anyone makes
bespoke coats. I missed my old pirate jacket and I
don't know where to get a new one. It may up.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
So in seventeen ninety eight to try to do a rising,
and we've mentioned it basically every episode.
Speaker 4 (43:04):
For the past year.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
Is this the Fenians?
Speaker 2 (43:06):
No, the Fenians are the eighteen fifty Ish ones. I think, yeah,
although actually now I'm not actually sure. I think this
is God. They kept having so many uprisings. This is
the one that I mostly remember as the one where
the Catholics and the Protestants were one hundred percent, were
very much together. And then after this, the way that
(43:26):
it was put down is that the Protestants were given.
Speaker 4 (43:28):
Special treatment by the English.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Yeah, and a ton of Irish people had to emigrate
as a result of this failed rising, and a fuck
ton of them ended up in these working class towns
in northern England. And the Irish had this traditional method
of solving certain problems, which is that you send a
threatening letter that says stop the shit or will kill you,
and then you swear an oath of secrecy and valor
(43:54):
to your friends at the pub. You put on a dress,
you paint your face to disguise it, and you go
break things or burning or kill people in the name
of these secret societies that have declared allegiance to folkloric
and mythic heroes. We covered this most extensively on the
Molly Maguire's episodes of Ribbon Men are another one of these.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
They really had it all figured out, I really did.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
And that's the Luddite style. And so they had King
lud And if you're going to have a king, it
should be a king who doesn't exist.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
Just saying absolutely Tolkien understood this more or less.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I know, I know this is sort of accidentally they
to anarchism. Yes, yeah, So there's two more side characters.
I want to cover, the poets if William Blake. I
love William Blake. My dog Rentrew is named after a
character from William Blake. Blake is like Godwin in this
(44:49):
proto anarchist tradition. He is a printmaker who does engravings
and on the side he writes weird fucking theological political
tracks and illustrated Strange Limited edition zines and and read
the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Speaker 4 (45:01):
You can't go wrong.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
He wrote a poem called Jerusalem in eighteen ten, the
year before the Luddite Rising, and it's basically about the
Luddite Rising, just a year before it happened. It is
a poem that is a call to arms to destroy
the dark Satanic mills and build heaven on earth in England,
and it ends with I will not cease from mental fight,
(45:25):
nor shall my sword sleep in my hand till we
occupy the commons to green and chill our baked lands.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
US.
Speaker 4 (45:32):
It isn't like factories.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
People used to be able to used to be better
at writing, like on a per cap at a basis,
good writers are still good writers. But man, yeah on
a bike.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Yeah, because even like we'll talk about a little bit later,
some of the like random working class Ludites also just
put out amazing prose, and other ones wrote amazing prose
that was like, oh, we're going to kill you right.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
Yeah, it's just cause you didn't have a lot else
to think about at night other than like, how can
I best describe my feelings? Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
There's a lot of fermented things and not a lot
of TV.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
So the next year the comic comes to the sky,
which the Ludites called a bright, flaming sword, which and
everyone knew it was a comment because they're smart, but
it was more than that to them. And let it
be Blake's sword that would not sleep in his hand
until we occupy the commons. Then you have Percy Shelley.
Percy Shelley is in that family of nobility who are
(46:32):
like trying to do good. His father's William Godwin, who
helps save the life of Tom Hardy. Percy wrote Ozy Mandaeis,
which is one of my favorite poems. His wife is
way cooler and more interesting than overall, and she's way
better remembered. She's Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein and
Frankenstein comes out in eighteen eighteen and is almost certainly
(46:53):
inspired by the Luddite rebellion and the war against machinery
in general. At the end of it, the monster says
to Frankenstein, you are my creator, but I am your master,
and so my like red strings connecting history board that
I keep in my mind at all times. It's basically
like well, the genre of science fiction exists because of
a working class people with hammers and matches who tried
(47:16):
to stop the industrial revolution.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
That actually makes complete sense. Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Percy's all right, or at least super interesting. They're
all Polly, they're all a polycule and like it just
kind of and like, I do love how this this
makes me appreciate the character of Miles O'Brien even more,
(47:39):
like a working class Irish union man in the future
of space.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Oh, totally totally. And so Percy's important part of the
story comes after the Luddites because it's stuff he writes
and publishes in eighteen twelve, so kind of in the
middle of it, and it's a it's a good way
to get a sense of what's going on and what
impact the Ladites had and some of the ideological framework
of the time. Also, he's vegetarian and sober. If you
(48:06):
need another XVX hero, there's just way more of them
in history than I expected. He is super young during
all of this, but he dies at twenty nine in
a boating accident, so he really crammed a lot of
living into those three decades. He's all about the rights
of the people and he's all about defending the Commons.
He wrote a manifesto called Declaration of Rights that starts
(48:27):
off government has no rights. It is a delegation from
several individuals for the purpose of securing their own and
he goes on to say the rights of man are
liberty and an equal participation in the commonage of nature.
Because again the commons man.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
I love the economy of his word usage.
Speaker 4 (48:46):
Totally.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
He gets everything that matters and said so succinctly.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Yeah, no, totally. And he's a strange poet guy. So
the first thing he does when he writes his manifesto
is he puts a copy into a bottle and throws
it into the sea. And then he takes another one
and he puts it in a hot air balloon and
like sets it up into the air. But he also
publishes it and distributes it based and the next the
next year, he writes a poem that becomes, according to
(49:12):
author Peter Liinbow, the Bible of the working class for
the next two generations. It's called Queen Mave and it
gets its name from the female warrior deity from Ireland,
mave M. It's spelled ma Ab, but I believe it's
pronounced mave cool. All the rebels at the time. The
smart ones anyway, are tying everything into colonialism. Folks used
(49:34):
Queen Mave to represent indigenous resistance in North America and Ireland,
as well as English resistance the enclosure of the Commons.
And what's interesting is every now and then I hear
people say, and I sometimes find myself saying that the
you know, enclosure of the Commons is the English rich
colonizing the English poor. But this isn't my interpretation. This
is how the English royalties saw their work at the time.
(49:57):
There is this asshole John Sinclair, sorry, sir John Sinclair,
who wrote in eighteen oh three, let us not be
satisfied with the liberation of Egypt or the subjugation of Malta,
but let us subdue Finkley Commons. Let us conquer houndslow Heath,
let us compel at being forest to submit to the
yoke of improvement. Great, and yeah, it's just it's just colonization.
(50:24):
They're just doing it.
Speaker 3 (50:24):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeahs as they always do. You know,
I'm looking at just read a story the other day
about how under Biden we're looking at like building this
AI powered like border monitoring thing to like monitor all
movement on the border, and like, yeah, they'll put those
in cities if they can, if we let them, you know,
if we don't stop them.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
Yeah. And the people who claim to care about government
overreach are the people who really want them to exist. Yes, yes,
so Queen May of this poem, it talks about and
has like prose sections.
Speaker 4 (50:57):
And I only read part of it.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
For this, I have to admit, Queen may have talks
about the labor theory of value, about atheism, about free love,
about vegetarianism, and all the revolutionary shit. But like two
hundred years ago, and his atheism did not stop him
from giving a speech in favor of Catholic emancipation as
a matter of ending the oppression of the Irish people.
Speaker 4 (51:14):
He very much.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
She had a lot to say about ending the colonization
of Ireland and Shelley. In this poem he gets at
something that I think best captures the spirit of the Luddites.
And this is the most Tolkien thing I'm going to
read today. Power like a desolating pestilence pollutes whatever it touches,
and obedience bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth makes
(51:39):
slaves of men and of the human frame a mechanize automaton.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
I.
Speaker 3 (51:52):
Get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a line. I think
back to a lot of Charlie Chaplin line from The
Great Dictator describing he was describing the fascist of his day.
But I think about it a lot in context of
tech industry. People in AI machine men with machine minds
and machine hearts. Yeah, you were not machines, you were
(52:13):
not cattle.
Speaker 2 (52:15):
Yeah. That scene is so good. That is it really
is when you need to pick me up, watch that
scene from the Great Dictator and don't think too hard
about his personal life now.
Speaker 3 (52:27):
Or probably even a bad man can channel the mystic
from time to time. Yeah, totallys a flawed one. Yeah yeah,
I mean flawed people do it all. Yeah, not that
way ideally, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:43):
So the working class didn't just get its theory from
the rich educated folks on their side. They also were
generating it themselves. Among the Lutites were working class scholars.
They were like studying ancient Greek when they're coming home
from their shifts at the you know, factory and all
of that, and they're studying the modern proto socialism and
the proto.
Speaker 4 (53:02):
Anarchism that's going on. Either of those words are.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
Really doing anything at that point, and they're going to
do a lot of threatening and fighting and oath swearing
and being really cool. And we'll get to it all
on Wednesday, because that's the cool people did cool stuff.
Promise is that the first half is context.
Speaker 3 (53:23):
And that's my promise to everyone. I know about everything
any day, but Wednesday, I'll get to it Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
Yeah, exactly. Wednesdays the day when I do no Wait,
Thursdays the day I do all my work. Wait, no,
I work all the time. Wait a second, am I
like those people working in the.
Speaker 3 (53:39):
Factory, Sophie. Cut the feed, cut the feed.
Speaker 1 (53:42):
I'm just thinking of all the things that I'm waiting
for you to do, Robert.
Speaker 3 (53:45):
I would.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
But speaking of things that Robert does, Robert Evans, if
you would like to Is your podcast available in English
now as well?
Speaker 3 (53:56):
It is? It is, it is, It's actually always been
available in English. It's just my very strong Bostonian accent
is hard for some people to understand. I see, I see.
But yeah. You can listen to Behind the Bastards every
week Tuesday and Thursday, and you can find my novel
After the Revolution, just type after the Revolution Evans into
Google and it'll come up. Or you can go to
(54:17):
atrbook dot com and read it on the interwebs for free,
but it's also sold all the places that sell books.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
Oor'll type it into Google and bring up the crisis hotline.
Speaker 3 (54:27):
Yes, yes, it's not often necessary for my readers.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
And if you want to read more of what I write,
I write on substack every week. I write about preparedness,
I write about living in times of crisis, and some
of it is free, and then the more personal stuff
you have to pay me for, but half of it's free.
So what are you complaining about, Sophie, What do you got?
Speaker 1 (54:51):
I'd like to plug cool Zone Media's newest podcast, better
Offline and just follow out cool Zone Media because we're
gonna have a couple additional new shows coming soon this year.
Speaker 4 (55:03):
I'm so excited.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
I get really sad when I like I listen to
podcasts while I do all the manual work that I
like to do and or have to do. And sometimes
I run out of cool Zone Media podcasts for the week,
and I get sad and I look at other shows,
and some of them are good.
Speaker 1 (55:21):
But if I had told you there will be more.
Speaker 2 (55:24):
I'll be excited, oh cool, just as excited as you'll
be on Wednesday when you hear more about the people
breaking stuff.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
Bye cool People who did Cool Stuff is a production
of cool Zone Media. A more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on iHeartRadio, app A Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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