Milk In The Machine

A new Luddite movement wants us to consider technology's dark side. What does that mean for mothers?

Last week I attended a fun launch party for Brian Merchant’s terrific new book about the Luddite movement, Blood In The Machine. The party was fun because, in homage to the machine-smashing Luddites, the event featured a big sledgehammer for crushing annoying pieces of technology.

People are probably most familiar with “Luddite” as a derogatory term for people who hate new technology. But the original Luddites of England’s First Industrial Revolution were more than technologically inept peasants, Merchant shows in his book. They were a politically conscious working-class movement that opposed not progress, but the use of technology to strip power from laborers, consolidate it under employers, and reduce the worker’s ability to earn a living or control the conditions of their work.

The Luddite movement has new relevance today with the rise of artificial intelligence and surveillance technologies, Merchant argues. And—like a hammer who views everything as a nail—I’m a blogger who writes about reproductive labor and wondered what insights the Luddites might have for mothers.

After all, mothers are generally unpaid for domestic labor. Can a machine threaten a job that’s seldom recognized as real work? Or is the degradation of care work part of a larger program to devalue labor, with or without technology?

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We owe some common conceptions of the “domestic sphere” (and with it, the division of unpaid domestic work from “real” waged work) to the Industrial Revolution. 

Textile work, traditionally the domain of women, traditionally carried at home, was some of the first to be automated. Merchant writes of Englishman William Lee, who invented the stocking frame in 1589: “Legend goes that Lee was upset that his wife spent more time knitting than with him, so he devised the stocking frame to speed up the process.”

Assuming Lee’s wife wasn’t just knitting to avoid him, the device probably saved her time and effort. Luddites aren’t opposed to those labor-saving developments. Instead, they’re opposed to employers who hoard these new technologies (the means of production, if you will) and use them to replace workers, to force workers into cramped factories, or to require workers to keep producing at higher rates for no increase in pay.

Queen Elizabeth, an unlikely Luddite ally, was among the first to predict those ill effects of automation when Lee tried to patent his stocking frame.

Merchant writes that “Queen Elizabeth refused to grant Lee a patent and left him with a foreboding rebuttal: ‘You aim high, Master Lee,’ she said, before expressing concern for the hand knitters his devices would affect. ‘Consider … what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.’”

But the tides of technology ultimately prevailed and Lee’s brother ended up obtaining a patent, laying the groundwork for future automation. That automated work would take place in large mills and factories, moving the locus of labor away from living spaces and small workshops, and insulating the home as the closed, domestic realm we recognize today. 

Again, women’s work was among the first casualties of this automation, as profitable work was purged from the home. Before that shift, working women “were not ‘house-cleaners or ‘housekeepers,’ but rather full-fledged and accomplished workers within the home-based economy,” Angela Davis writes in her 1981 essay “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework.” They made textiles and medicines, ran shops and worked as artisans.

“As industrialisation advanced, shifting economic production from the home to the factory, the importance of women’s domestic work suffered a systematic erosion,” Davis writes. ”Women were the losers in a double sense: as their traditional jobs were usurped by the burgeoning factories, the entire economy moved away from the home, leaving many women largely bereft of significant economic roles. By the middle of the nineteenth century the factory provided textiles, candles and soap. Even butter, bread and other food products began to be mass-produced.”

The shift into this new industrialist, capitalist economy was so seismic that it required a new way of thinking—one that would also have serious ramifications for women’s bodily autonomy. In her 2004 book Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici documents early rebellions against industrialization, predating the 19th century Luddite movement. 

“In the 16th and 17th centuries, the hatred for wage-labor was so intense that many proletarians preferred to risk the gallows, rather than submit to the new conditions of work,” Federici writes. This rebellion inspired an intellectual effort “aimed at radical transformation of the person, intended to eradicate in the proletariat any forms of behavior not conducive to the imposition of a stricter work-discipline.”

That project wasn’t just an abstract mode of thinking. Federici cites a legal crackdown on vice and “‘unproductive’ forms of sexuality” around this time, as well as an academic shift toward thinking of the body “by analogy with the machine,” designed for work. Women’s bodies were especially subject to that mechanical and “productivity”-obsessed model.

“A significant element in this context was the condemnation as maleficium [witchcraft] of abortion and contraception, which consigned the female body—the uterus reduced to a machine for the reproduction of labor—into the hands of the state and the medical profession,” Federici writes.

The era would see a rise in restrictive new laws in Europe—those that punished women suspected of abortions, and those that punished workers who damaged property, as the Luddites were soon to do.

So at the same moment that “the entire economy moved away from the home” due to automation (Davis), an industrial mindset was leading to criminalization of birth control, pushing women into the solidifying sphere of the home and limiting their full access to paid work.

Women were increasingly consigned to the increasingly penniless role of raising the next generation of workers whose own labors would be devalued in their own right, on new factory floors where the fruits of skyrocketing productivity would flow overwhelmingly into the new bosses’ pockets.

One begins to sympathize with the smashers of power-looms.

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I don’t work in a textile factory. I work in a comfortable chair in front of my laptop (day job), and in a house with convenient appliances (mornings, evenings, weekends). Technology has been pretty good for me, personally.

But Luddites didn’t condemn technology writ-large. Only the shitty and exploitative stuff. In that spirit, Merchant’s book launch featured a “Luddite Tribunal,” in which a panel of tech and labor experts debated which modern devices to smash with a hammer. (An Amazon Ring doorbell, which facilitates surveillance of Amazon workers, was an easy vote for demolition. A laptop was harder, as the panel debated the computer’s liberatory potential.)

As the panel weighed various devices’ fates, I wondered whether any child-rearing hardware might deserve destruction by sledgehammer. If a Ring doorbell or a piece of creepy spyware might be used to surveil and control paid workers, what is the analog for unpaid domestic labor?

I recalled a device called the Owlet Smart Sock. The Owlet belongs to an emerging field of souped-up baby monitors that track infant biometrics and deliver the stats to parents via smartphone app. In the case of the Owlet, that means outfitting a baby with a wearable device that records their pulse and oxygen levels—a setup that can cause “more anxiety than relief,” especially when the device fails, the New York Times reported. 

And while I would smash an Owlet, no problem, I’m not immune to the promises of machine-assisted parenting. I even used one of the most-mocked baby-tech devices, a motorized bassinet called the Snoo that rocks and plays white noise sounds when your baby fusses. I’ll only apologize a little. The device genuinely made my nights easier.

But it came with a cost (besides the [redacted] monthly fee we paid to rent the device). With its detailed reports on my baby’s sleep habits, delivered to an app on my phone, the Snoo turned simple naps into something to be measured, optimized, and obsessed over. The ease of automation turned into a new kind of work.

One night, months after my baby was born, I went to see my favorite band in concert. It was my first evening away from my son, and I knew he was in great hands with my husband, who’d stayed home. That knowledge didn’t stop me from opening the Snoo app during the concert to check my baby’s status. Oh good, he was sleeping soundly. Oh no, actually he was stirring! No, false alarm, back to sleep.

What was I doing? What could I possibly hope to achieve by watching that app, besides ruining a concert for myself and everyone within a three-foot radius? The device had not freed me from work, but had brought it here to this concert hall, where I was performing it as a reflex, a suggestion from the little surveillance device I carried with me. Like a textile worker on a newfangled loom, I was performing arguably easier work, but more of it.

As we advance into an ever-automated age, where more workers (paid or un-) will take their orders from work-related smartphone apps, maybe motherhood can provide insights for new Luddites.

“Capitalism lives and grows by concealing certain kinds of work, refusing to pay for it, and pretending it’s not, in fact, work at all,” Astra Taylor writes in her 2018 essay “The Automation Charade.”

Domestic work is the most obvious example of concealed work. (Taylor notes in her essay that standards of housework have elevated with new domestic technologies, canceling out any effort those technologies might save.) But a new wave of automation has also stripped scores of laborers of employee status, rendering them permanent, underpaid “contractors” attached to automated apps like Uber and Instacart. 

The non-employee’s new precarity is offset with language about freedom, work ethic, grindset. App-based gig workers are told to love the flexibility of their contract work, and advised that this new freedom means they are essentially their own bosses, and that any financial shortcomings are of their own making. 

Motherhood is the ultimate example of this rhetoric, its unpaid nature recast as a “labor of love.” To suggest a paycheck or stipend for care work, a depressing number of people argue, is to lessen that love—to devalue motherhood, as if its labors haven’t already been materially devalued by centuries of efforts to make motherhood incompatible with a livable income.

Feminist thinkers like Federici and Davis have suggested escapes from this cycle of machine-driven devaluation.

Federici, a founder of the Wages for Housework movement, argues to pay caregivers for the work they perform. The system, Federici argues, would not only compensate mothers for their work, but would legitimize them as workers in a system that views them as less-than (and therefore unable to bargain or bring legitimate grievances).

Davis, in “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework,” takes a stance against the Wages for Housework movement, arguing that housework is inherently stultifying and should be eliminated wherever possible. Her essay envisions a publicly funded, high tech future in which automation might be liberatory, featuring super-efficient “teams of trained and well-paid workers, moving from dwelling to dwelling, engineering technologically advanced cleaning machinery.”

Neither of these proposals is incompatible with technological advancement. (Some techy fans of universal basic income have even taken up elements of the Wages For Housework platform, with mixed enthusiasm from the movement’s originators.)

Instead, they ask what a more equal future for mothers might look like. 

What would it mean to break the machinery of motherhood? What would it mean to fully reclaim it for our own?