A couple of hundred years ago, textile workers smashed stocking frames, burned factories, and clashed with police to protest the changes being wrought by what the essayist Thomas Carlyle later described as the new Mechanical Age.
They were afraid of losing their jobs in an economy with no social safety net. It's now clear that their enemy wasn't the new technology; it was a political and economic system which left the have-nots struggling for survival. But they didn't blame the Industrial Revolution, they blamed the face of the Industrial Revolution: the machine.
With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, you'd think that we would have learned a lesson. Think again.
Over the last few months, a building inchoate rage against the technology industry has exploded into public view. In Paris and Lyon earlier this month, striking cab drivers attacked Uber cars to protest the launch of the private-car service in France. Rude Baguette, a French tech news site,reported tires slashed, car windows shattered, and vehicles being pelted with eggs. Closer to home, the Bay Area -- home to Silicon Valley and San Francisco -- has been pulled into a rancorous dispute over tech-driven gentrification and the responsibilities wealthy companies ought to shoulder to ameliorate the resulting social dislocations caused, in great degree, by their increasing prosperity.
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