we could choose to be
of course if you're a temporarily embarrassed billionaire like ptacek, you certainly don't want the workers doing this
The Luddites were of course correct, like most labour movements.
I've been hired to a fully distributed team only to have the company decide to force everyone to "return" to the office within a couple years despite the team never having been in any office in the first place; I've had managers promise me raises that don't appear, only for me to find out later that they never actually talked to their superiors about it like they claimed; I've seen teammates get hired and laid off six months later the same week that we have someone else we just hired join the team. None of this stuff is reasonable, and for some reason we collectively just throw up our hands and say there's nothing we can do, and then apparently some of us scoff and look down at lower-paid workers banding together to try to get a semblance of the advantages we take for granted in our industry because they're "stopping progress"? Even if I did accept the premise that workers collectively organizing to win rights affected "progress", there's no reason to assume there's no middle ground between the extremes of "no progress" and "full-throttle progress without regard for consequences". It's farcical.