Hagen
One of the stories we have in the book is about that Apple Crush ad. There was that ad where they had all these instruments and drawing materials, et cetera, like all these art related things. on the hydraulic press, and then the hydraulic press crushes it. The piano keys shudder, the trumpet gets crushed, the paint gushes out, and at the end of the hydraulic press, there’s, the iPad.
BITM
And people hated it. They had to apologize for it.
Hagen
Yeah, they apologized—for an ad. So there’s this sense of, “yes, this is actually about transferring knowledge and skills into a tool so that you can pay people who use the tool less.” This is happening over and over again in capitalism. And we’re going to dismantle by force all of these things that you love and that create beautiful art.
It’s such a useful metaphor that they handed us. It was so beautifully clear that this is a way of bulldozing precisely the aspects of like human creative activity, which labor should be. Labor should be, you’re changing something in the world in accordance with your will. And that’s what it means to be alive as a human.
This is a good time to mention how we have been propagandized about the Luddites.
This is precisely the issue they had with the newindustrial tooling up they were facing, it wasn’t the tools, per se, that they objected to, but the de skilling and Disenfranchisement of the way those tools were being deployed by industrialists.
Being a luddite was and is about ownership of the tools and abuse by capitalists on skilled workers, and the disruption of our important knowledge base and skill sets.