Following Pynchon’s Consideration of Luddism, some thoughts:
One interesting aspect not raised by Pynchon, which seems topical of this moment, are the crossovers between the Inclosures Acts and the Luddites: the Inclosures (~1650-1900) legislated against the commons to privatise, removing traditional, ambiguous, negotiated folk rights of land usage with structured, unambiguous legal titles. While the Luddites strove against newly mechanised, quantifiable production processes, rewarding the controllers of standardised machinery. The Luddites were perhaps an inevitability after the enclosures act, dispossessing families with access to materials and land to find labour in cities and become the waged and labourers, dispossessed of communal historic capital; the Luddites are perhaps a response to the further displacement of the already dispossessed. Both movements are foundational to modernity, of increasingly concentrated ownership and wealth with greater power over, and reduced senses of obligation to, those dispossessed to their benefit. As Gates buys up farmland and Musk colonises space, with Altman hollowing out the linguistic and creative classes - perhaps the last forms of cognitive-dextrous labour - the metaphors are clear.
Pynchon anticipated the exponential rise of computational power and concentration of ownership that put us here and now; perhaps not quite anticipating the scope, granularity and pervasiveness of power concentration when he wrote his piece; even the massive increase in online storage - and its extractivist filling with human writing, discourse, thoughts, creativity - as a source to plunder for LLM training, as a further enclosure, with the LLMs birthed forming the contemporary work-unit framing of middle-management administrative labour it would displace.
Even as populations have been pushed away from the physical into reconstructing communities in virtual spaces, online territories have gone through their own voluntary enclosures, as communal spaces have consolidated and been consumed by the allure and inevitability of acquisition. There are no Ludds today; even Mythos, the Anthropic model capable of finding holes in platform security to bring them down, is birthed into capture at the service of simpatico platforms in Anthropic’s enclosure, or merely toyed with in platformised Discord groups by platform-weaving, pretender-to-the-throne Ludds. The Master’s tools, etc. We are born into these enclosures of convenience, the cognitive and infrastructural burden to surmount them expensive and demanding. We have enough soma slop to accept the shackles. Mythos cannot exist without its platform infrastructural enclosure, or the legal system it can circumvent to turn the commons of the internet into a consumable facsimile, displacing the expertise that inadvertently liberated its knowledge capital for only $5 per million tokens: the displacement of the human, the datacentralisation of cognitive and creative labour, is the 40 year realisation of the line from Inclosures to Ludd to Pynchon to GPT.