the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

1815:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

They never realized they would become the very representation of futile resistance to implacable, world-wrecking forces set in motion by the early generation of captains of industry. They were doing what they could to defend their autonomy, their skills, their common lands, their egalitarian village culture, their family nexus — their entire way of life — from enslavement. They didn’t realize that they were ultimately powerless to stop “progress,” and that the world was on its way to becoming one big planetary factory.

A hundred years later, with the spectacle of the widgets rolling off the line 24/7 . . . thousands upon thousands in a constant unending stream . . . couldn’t anyone’s imagination go to the place of seeing a world awash in surfeit? . . . what it would do to the people, what it would do to the planet?