Friday, July 24, 2009

Industrialization

In the early 1800s a group of British workers called the Luddites rebelled against industrialism by destroying the machines that were taking their jobs. However, profit triumphed over the wellbeing of the citizens and industrialism grew to what it is today. There have been two major consequences of the gradual replacement of the work of human hands with machine labor: the loss of a sense of community and the decline of the quality of goods. We humans can make good stuff, but instead we mass produce shit. Look around your room. How much of the stuff you have was made by a person? Who made your trash can? Who made your chair? Chances are most of the stuff you have was mass produced by machines. The industrial revolution has had grave consequences for society. Instead of buying something of handmade quality from the old woman down the street we are buying mass machine-produced shit; thereby forcing the old women of the world to take up meaningless jobs as cashiers and force us to live with inferior products while the wealthy get more money and therefore more influence and more power. There is no sense of community because we no longer need to talk to our neighbors.

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