Read Hbomberguy’s short comic on the origins of the word Luddite

When I say the word “Luddite,” you probably picture someone stubbornly refusing to own a smartphone. At least that’s what I thought until I took a look at these first five pages of Harry “Hbomberguy” Brewis and Skutch’s comic short Mistakes at Launch: A Tour of Unfortunate Futures.

Error starting is the latest crowdfunding anthology from Iron Circus Comics, featuring over 300 pages of short comics by dozens of authors including Ryan North, Blue Delliquanti and Evan Dahm, all “telling tales of what could have been, but wasn’t: planned utopias in the Outer space, wild inventions, attempts to improve society, robotic pets and Armageddon predictions.”

In Brewis and Skutch’s short film The First Union, they tell the historical story of the Luddite, one of the earliest unions of the Industrial Age, and their (literally) legendary leader, Ned Ludd. Ludd was a character the Luddites adopted half-jokingly – and whom the titans of the English textile mills adopted as their ultimate villain. History was made by the victors, and today his name is synonymous with a stubborn and short-sighted refusal to embrace the new and innovative.

“We ended up getting the idea that some weirdos thought technology was evil and started hitting it with sticks,” Brewis, who penned the short comic, told Polygon via email, “which is so hilariously absurd that this mental image to a simple comparison is criticized — If you think it’s “bad” that we’ve stolen millions of artists and fed them into our computer so it can spit out similar art on command, you’re a crazy anti-progress person just like these guys.”

“‘These guys,'” Brewis said, “were relatively well-educated people for their time who rightly saw the end of their way of life and the new life that the people who created it held in store for their workers. The writings of the Luddites often look unexpectedly hopeful to the future – Maybe we can build a world where this technology means more to most people than a lifetime of poverty wages in a factory that wants to kill you.

“It’s oddly reassuring to see how little the playbook of powerful people has changed over the centuries,” wrote Skutch, whose art graces the pages of The First Union. “Your only tools are lies and violence.”

Both writers and artists agreed that the capitalist quest for automation with no respect for the worker continues today, just in different forms.

“The differences [between industrial automation and automation by machine learning] give me hope that modern artists are doing better than the Luddites,” Skutch said. “What is sold with digital art is less the finished product of a digital work of art and more the illusion of having created art. The Luddites fought the state for material goods that had important uses throughout the economy. AI sells the idea that anyone can get the credit people get for making art without having to put in the work of learning to draw […] Of course, the other lesson the Luddite taught us is that direct-action works and sledgehammers are surprisingly easy to come by.”

But Brewis notes that while sledgehammers can treat the symptom, they can’t treat the cause.

“We need the broader solutions offered at the time by the Luddites themselves, who were contemplating the potentially good outcome of the Industrial Revolution – a world where mass production works for everyone, not primarily the people who own the factories. Forgive me for reaching for the Fully Automatic Luxury Communism button, but it’s a very shiny button (and bright red, of course).

“In a world where most artists didn’t have to struggle to make ends meet because everyone’s basic needs were met (which isn’t remotely impossible), an AI doing something with your work as input, almost harmless, if not fascinating in itself. Until we fix the world around it, this stuff and all of its potential is doomed to be hated and recognized (rightfully) as a thief of the work people do to survive.”

You can read the rest of The First Union and over two dozen other stories in it Mistakes at Launch: A Tour of Unfortunate Futures. The anthology is now live on Backerkitand will remain so until March 9th at 8pm PST.