#mcsweeney's

Is it still satire if it's true?

by Kate Tyndall

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as invested in keeping my job as the next weaver. When the boss brought in that big new power loom, I was pretty skeptical. He said once he got it up and running, we’d all be out of a job, so when the boys started talking about breaking into the factory after work and smashing the thing, I was on board.

Until, that is, I saw the funny tapestries it could make. There’s this one—sorry, I keep cracking up when I think about it. It’s a bowl of gruel, right? But it’s also a pirate! It’s called “Gruellino Piratino,” and… well, no, it doesn’t mean anything; it’s just a silly character. They’re calling it “Nottinghamian brain-rotte,” and there’s a bunch of them. They’ve got King George III with a ham for a face, “Georgione Hamone”—I nearly cried when I saw it. My kids, at least the ones who don’t have rickets, think it’s hilarious.

Of course, the industrial pollution bothers me, and all the coal dust in the air is making everybody sick. Not to mention, the new waterwheel they built to power the loom made the river undrinkable, and when the boss cut my hours in half, I couldn’t buy food anymore, which really made the whole rickets situation get out of hand. But that’s exactly the sort of time you need a laugh, right?

Just think of the benefits. Used to be, the wife had to run around all day keeping the kids entertained. Now she can just slap them in front of one of these funny new tapestries. They make these ones with silly cats on them, with big eyes, doing all kinds of stuff. They’re really cute. You have to watch out, though, because they churn out so many of these cat pictures that some of them are kind of messed up. Last week, Little Johanna, my youngest, was totally absorbed in one, and when I went to check it out, it was a picture of a daddy cat stabbing his baby. I took it back to the factory, but they told me they were generating them so fast that they couldn’t check any of the content they were actually producing. I know it seems irresponsible, but hey, it’s a small price to pay to keep the kids busy, right?

Am I worried about losing my job? Sure. It seems almost assured that eventually, my skilled craftsmanship and decades of experience will be replaced by a huge machine that churns out low-quality versions of what I used to painstakingly produce. Undoubtedly, this machine-slop will be cheaper to make, leading to the death of my craft and the loss of my knowledge, all so we can reflexively consume greater quantities of mass-produced garbage and keep the working class poor. I get why the Luddites are pissed, I really do. If these tapestries weren’t so darned funny, I’d be right there with them, bashing those machines to bits.

But I have to say, it all feels like a waste of time. I don’t have the firmest conceptual grasp, seeing as I’ve never learned to read, but I’m pretty sure technological progress is a law of nature, like gravity or death. The power loom, as we know, is inevitable, preordained by God, who works His miracles through the hands of rich and wise inventors. It’s foolish to resist it. We can’t possibly imagine a different social order—we just can’t! God decreed that George should be king and the power loom should replace handicraft, and anyone who says otherwise is just wasting their time.