Of Luddites, Fascists and Futurism

by Jack R. Johnson 05.2021

Percy Shelley contended, many years ago, that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  That’s probably not true, but they can certainly cause problems. Take the wild-eyed Italian poet Filippo Marinetti: his Futurist Manifesto helped pave the way for Mussolini and the Fascist movement that would sweep Europe in the decades to come, leaving millions dead in its wake.

A great fan of drinking and high speed sports cars, Marinetti opened his Manifesto with a description of a race car accident in which he flips into a ditch because he is forced to break for much slower, tottering bicyclists. After he finished railing at the bicyclists, Marinetti used the crash as an emblem of what was wrong with his culture, and argued vehemently that nothing should impede his race to the future. Originally written in 1909, the manifesto was meant to cleanse the culture of a world order that by the turn of the century had exhausted itself. It starts there, with a love of new technology, but tends towards a much darker place; toward masculine aggression, and violence.

“Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber,” Marinetti wrote. “We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.”

Then, he turns up the rhetoric.

“We want to glorify war - the only hygiene for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.”

And louder still…

“We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.”

With a few alterations, our slightly addled Marinetti could be swaddled in the clothing of the Proud Boys.  His infantile love of technology is no less compelling than his utter disregard for anything that smacks of mediation or consideration for others.

“We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed,” according to Marinetti. “A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.” 

If this extravagance seems vaguely familiar, we might recall that Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX fame, burnt through 90 million dollars to literarily explode one of his Tesla automobiles into orbit. Rose Eveleth of Wired magazine makes the case that the difference between Musk and Musk-wannabes and the dark dreams of Marinetti from a previous century are very slight, indeed.

“If Marinetti could have lived to see Elon Musk launch a red Tesla to space, he would likely have been beside himself with joy,” wrote Eveleth.

She continued, “But Musk and his colleagues should heed the warning that the Italian Futurist movement provides. This love of disruption and progress at all costs led Marinetti and his fellow artists to construct what some called ‘a church of speed and violence.’” 

There’s also an equivalent and frightening thread of anti-history that runs through Marinetti’s discourse and our contemporary technologists and ‘futurists’ of today. No less a figure than Henry Ford declaimed with brute simplicity: “History is Bunk!” The cofounder of Waymo, Anthony Levandowski, opined on the value of history for Wired: “The only thing that matters is the future. I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.”

That’s both incredibly arrogant, and naïve. If Levandowski  or Ford had only studied a bit of history, they might have realized that the love of technology, efficiency and ‘progress’ divorced from context and compassion, led to the worst dystopic nightmares of the last century; and may well do so again.

Indeed, even beyond the obvious technical advancement necessary to develop the weapons of mass death we’ve unleashed since Marinetti penned his angry manifesto (nuclear bombs, anthrax, nerve gas, napalm, etc…), we might recall the history of IBM’s more conventional work on the Nazi census. It presents a chilling lesson for even superficially benign technical improvements. In service of the Nazi regime, IBM’s German subsidiary customized its Hollerith punch card systems to allow the government to classify, track, and sort people based on categories like “Jewish.”  In fact, the numbers tattooed on the arms of many Nazi prisoners were their Hollerith codes, which allowed them to be neatly accounted for in the database. Of course, this goes without mentioning Bayer chemical (formally, IG Farben), which provided the Zyklon B gas used in the extermination camps.

Certainly, technology provides enormous human benefits, as well, but these benefits can be a double-edged sword, as the examples above illustrate. In South Africa, a similar situation occurred when IBM was again asked to help systemize their hated ‘passbooks’. Without irony, IBM built an identity registration program named the ‘Book of Life’. According to the Nation, “This system provided pretext for stop-and-frisk-style police domination and harassment and for managing an exploitable, racialized labor force.” Such programs based on demographic profiles are now in the hands of almost every major corporation on Earth. 

Another, perhaps more immediate concern, is the displacement of the labor force itself. If the goal for fascists is national glory through war and an unfettered future of technological advancement—that, not incidentally, could also make the upper strata extremely rich—it often comes at the cost of a decent living for those with much greater concern for their own existence in the present. This has been a concern of labor since the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution. 

For example, the infamous Luddites of the 17th century, often ridiculed for their refusal to accept technological advancements, were wisely considering the negative impacts the ‘advanced technology’ of the day was having on their lives. They rebelled and were viciously put down—just as Marinetti would have desired.

Yet, despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices of the day: to provide for fair pay, apprenticeship programs, quality products and a decent amount of time off. The influential historian E.J. Hobshawm called their protests, "collective bargaining by riot." 

At heart, their fight was not really about technology, at all. The Luddites were happy to use machinery—indeed, weavers had used smaller frames for decades. What galled them was the new logic of industrial capitalism, where the productivity gains from new technology enriched only the machines’ owners and were not shared with the workers. 

Like the Luddites of yore, the people that work our systems today are often under paid, especially when considering the enormous wealth that is aggregated at the top of the technological pyramid. Amazon workers packaging gifts from across the oceans barely earn more than minimum wage themselves—and in some documented cases wear diapers to amend bathroom breaks—while Jeff Bezos, sitting atop this technological pyramid, is one of the richest men on Earth. A gig worker catching Uber calls has no retirement, no healthcare, and if something should happen to his vehicle, he won’t be able to survive at his ‘gig.’ This gig economy has become so pervasive that economist have coined a new term for all the folks dependent on it—the “precariat”, a conflation of precarious and proletariat.

Unfortunately, this isn’t confined to app-based ‘gig’ workers either. As Meredith Whittaker notes, “Across all job categories, workers are being hired, surveilled, controlled, and assessed by opaque algorithmic systems tuned to maximize employers’ objectives. A start-up called Argyle is even creating a kind of worker credit score by aggregating employment data across jobs. The company sells this information to businesses for use in hiring, along with other data that is also sold to insurers and lenders.”

When you consider the blight of international workers who spend lifetimes constructing chips for phones they would never be able to actually afford, being surveilled by the very same chip technology they are suffering to produce, the system in place today is far worse than what the Luddites rebelled against over a century ago.

And, just as the Luddites, we’re living through another period of technical upheaval. The question we need to put to technology lovers and futurists of today is how are they going to react when their technological advancements displace hundreds of thousands of workers, and under pay thousands if not millions more? Will they react with paranoid surveillance and violent suppression of revolt? Will they ignore or imprison the thousands of workers with no jobs and no social safety net? In short, will they follow the dictates of Fascism? Or will they finally begin to share equally in the benefits of our technological revolution? We know the answer Marinetti and his Futurist Manifesto would have offered—it led to two bloody world wars, and millions of deaths. Let us hope our current crop of technophiles and futurists begin to read and appreciate their history—and maybe even learn from it.