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When they came for the Horse-Buggy manufacturers I said nothing, because I didn't make Horse Buggies. When they came for the secretary and typist I did nothing
by bruce511 2y ago
When they came for the Horse-Buggy manufacturers I said nothing, because I didn't make Horse Buggies.
When they came for the secretary and typist I did nothing because I'm not a secretary. (I did rename the position to Personal Assistant, but that's another story.)
When they came for the Filing Clerk, for the Coal Miner, for the bookkeeper, for the switchboard operator, for the elevator operator, I said nothing because that's just progress.
When they came for the farmer I cheered in the name of effeciency, when small family farms were subsumed into conglomerates I bowed to the alter of capitalism.
But now they're coming for the programmer? Burn the house down! Pough the ground with salt! Woe is me, the end us nigh....
- happytoexplain 2y agoThe Niemoller poem and the plight of luddites are used today as hideous strawmen. Anybody who feels their way of life or livelihood is threatened is going to fight. You can make a perfectly rational argument that it's an impossible fight, but it's irrational to expect humans in that situation not to fight. It's also pointlessly shitty to mock them, and to imply that the are somehow hypocrites for benefiting from, or not fighting against, similar past disruptions they had no stake in or weren't alive to experience. The disruption of livelihoods by developments in technology is not comparable to the topic of the original poem (ethnic cleansing). Every single person who fought against the changes you enumerated was right. And it was also right for every single one of those changes to come to pass. Two correct, rational, or inevitable things can be in conflict. The world isn't that simple. It's ridiculous and immoral to attack the very concept of acting in fundamental self interest.