Today, a Luddite is your grandparent who keeps looking at the screen rather than the camera when on Zoom, the Boomer who types in all-capital letters, the grouchy man who refuses to get a smart phone, the professor spewing invective against Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. The word implies curmudgeonly discomfort with modern technology, and thus reaffirms the assumption of our digital overlords that it’s a species of madness not to genuflect before the Altars of Silicon. But the Luddites weren’t simple-minded primitives who objected to technology out of ignorance; they were dedicated craftsmen in the looming guilds who despised the shoddy craftsmanship of the mechanized contraptions replacing them, and of those same machines robbing them of their livelihoods.
And so, the Luddites smashed the mechanical looms, they drove wooden shoes into the spokes of the contraptions, and brought hammers down upon the machines. Many of the Luddites were punished with the scaffold, and even more gallingly, the libel that has affixed itself to their name for two centuries… Rather than simply being hayseed rustics, these workers “had begun to suspect [that they] were merely cogs in the machinery of the industrial revolution… It was a role they chose to resist.”
For the secret of the Luddites was less that theirs was a rebellion against inanimate machines but one against those who owned said machines. Today, it is not ChatGPT-3 who is our enemy, at least not entirely, but those who serve to profit from it. The irony is that technologies themselves—simple rote tools—are largely neutral. It’s the way in which we organize our systems of production and consumption that makes all the difference.