[throwaway218649]

> Nobody really cared as the blacksmith, farm hand, or the secretary lost jobs.

I am not sure where you got that impression. The loss of blacksmith (and nailmaker, etc.) and farm hand jobs in 19th century England was a huge social issue (hundreds of thousands of people starved to death after being thrown out of work in England alone; over a million if you count the displacement that lead to the Irish famines), with regular government inquiries, newspaper coverage, and many, many books written about it.

In particular, there was a very famous book, called Capital, written by Karl Marx, that, among other things, points out that popular anti-automation anxiety goes back much farther than the Luddite movement:

> In the 17th century nearly all Europe experienced revolts of the work-people against the ribbon-loom, a machine for weaving ribbons and trimmings… Abbé Launcelloti, in a work that appeared in Venice in 1636, but which was written in 1579, says as follows: "Anthony Müller of Danzig saw about 50 years ago in that town, a very ingenious machine, which weaves 4 to 6 pieces at once. But the Mayor being apprehensive that this invention might throw a large number of workmen on the streets, caused the inventor to be secretly strangled or drowned." In Leyden, this machine was not used till 1629; there the riots of the ribbon-weavers at length compelled the Town Council to prohibit it… After making various decrees more or less prohibitive against this loom in 1632, 1639, etc., the States General of Holland at length permitted it to be used, under certain conditions, by the decree of the 15th December, 1661. It was also prohibited in Cologne in 1676, at the same time that its introduction into England was causing disturbances among the work-people. By an imperial Edict of 19th Feb., 1685, its use was forbidden throughout all Germany. In Hamburg it was burnt in public by order of the Senate. The Emperor Charles VI, on 9th Feb., 1719, renewed the edict of 1685, and not till 1765 was its use openly allowed in the Electorate of Saxony. This machine [the ribbon-loom], which shook Europe to its foundations, was in fact the precursor of the mule and power-loom, and of the industrial revolution of the 18th century… About 1630, a wind-sawmill, erected near London by a Dutchman, succumbed to the excesses of the populace. Even as late as the beginning of the 18th century, sawmills driven by water overcame the opposition of the people, supported as it was by Parliament, only with great difficulty. No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright's scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century [19th], chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used. [footnote: In old-fashioned manufactures the revolts of the workpeople against machinery, even to this day, occasionally assume a savage character, as in the case of the Sheffield file cutters in 1865].

From chapter 15 of volume I