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History Repeats Itself: Uber-Luddites Attack Hacks

By Rain Noe - January 15, 2014

in Tech

If you think these guys are scary, just imagine
if they all knew how to sew French cuffs

In 1829, a French tailor named Barthelemy Thimonnier invented the first French sewing machine. It was primitive, looking more like a big wooden drill press than anything, but it worked, and together with an engineer buddy he cranked out several dozen of them. They then set up the world's first clothing mass-manufacturing facility and won a contract to produce military uniforms.

Business ended quickly—and badly. In 1831 a gang of unemployed French tailors (arguably not the most frightening demographic by modern standards) stormed Thimonnier's factory, destroyed all the machines and burned the place to the ground.

The pissed-off French seamsters weren't unique in this, of course. Five decades earlier, over in England, a tradesman named Ned Ludd had reportedly smashed up a couple of primitive knitting machines that he felt were putting him out of work. Ludd's name gave rise to the term "Luddites," which was then synonymous with machine destroyers and nowadays means people who hate technology.Interestingly enough, the Thimonnier incident is now being repeated, in modern style, in France. Yesterday morning over a dozen taxi drivers reportedly attacked an Uber car on the highway, "smashing one window and slashing two tires... as well as defacing one side of the car with glue." And apparently this is becoming a thing—Uber claims there's been a dozen incidents of anti-Uber tire-slashing, egg-throwing and window-smashing spanning Paris and Lyon, as cabbies feel Uber's chipping away at their livelihood.

So where is this going? Thimonnier never recovered from having his factory torched, and eventually died penniless. Uber, on the other hand, is currently valued at north of $3 billion. So it doesn't look too good for the tire-iron-wielding cabbies.

*Fun fact: French workers used to wear a type of wooden clog known as a sabot. Bulky and tall, sabots were designed to keep the wearer's feet up and out of the mud in a pre-pavement era. Substantial as they were, the sabots became the perfect, readily-available machine-smashing instrument of choice, which gave rise to the terms sabotage and saboteur.

*Well, fun for saboteurs, not Thimonnier.

o

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Paul

10 years ago

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Not sure how a license is "free" if they are required to do business but are also artificially scarce, therefore making them extremely valuable. That's pretty close to the definition of a cartel.
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Zaps

10 years ago

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@Nando: technically, cab drivers don't need to pay for license either. Truth is, cab licenses are free, but but their number is limited in each region (maybe city, I'm not certain),and the waiting time is veeeery long (years), so it has become a thing among taxi drivers to resell their license once they retire, making it the subject of a speculation within the taxi-driver world (in a city like Paris, where the cab number is low in comparison with the population, a cab license can be sold for over 200.000 euros...).

So, cab drivers contract a debt to get their license (which are technically free), planning on re-selling it at the end of their career, in order not to lose money (or even go out with a bonus), they have constantly fought any initiative to raise the number of licenses available, making the situation unbearable for customers (high prices, poor service...), enters Uber (and others, like Snapcar), with good service and prices that compare to the existent and there you have it, the monopoly is challenged, which causes an uproar...
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Darshan R

10 years ago

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Imagine a day when machines will do all the work, and we can sit and sip our coffee. Make more machines!
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Nando

10 years ago

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I'm not well documented in the subject, but I think the problem with Uber is that they don't pay for licenses and whatnot (which traditional cabs do) so it's not simple technology aversion. I do not support the attacks, by the way.
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