The Luddites are back in fashion, but too many people still get them all wrong. This is what they really stood for, fought against, and why they matter now more than ever.
Well, you can count me as a Luddite in both senses, for two reasons. First, the idea that we could see AI used for good purposes and not to enhance the wealth and power of rich and powerful people and the dominance of rich and powerful countries, is fantasy. They've spent 40 years cementing themselves into power, and they've been very successful, including in the key project of dividing the 99% into two warring camps. One reason they're so adamant about rushing so many data centers into production ASAP, is that they need them to have constant universal surveillance of every one of us, which will be key to suppressing our revolt.
The other reason is the big picture, the long view: the reality that what lies ahead is contraction, because there simply is not enough energy and not enough mineable minerals, to support 8+ billion people in comfortable style. Either many of us conveniently exit (are there plans for that?) or we engage in a massive program of frugality and efficiency and equality--I'd vote for that but no one with power and wealth would--OR the rich live in enclaves of privilege and everyone else struggles for survival in hellish, deprived, polluted mega ghettoes. The latter is probably the most likely but it's not a long term solution as we are on a trajectory of unsustainability that leads to a world humans can't survive in some time before the turn of the next century. I think Sander's moratorium should be immediate and permanent. We have more than enough data centers already.
" ... the idea that we could see AI used for good purposes and not to enhance the wealth and power of rich and powerful people and the dominance of rich and powerful countries, is fantasy."
Amen! AI is an Alien Invasive species, infiltrating every aspect of our lives - even the folks who developed it admit they don't know how it works. It is now in the process of programming itself - we cannot control or "regulate" it - IMO the best thing to do is pull the plug, literally. It is gobbling up everything, land, energy, water, media, social and otherwise, education, entertainment, etc.
It used to be said that a picture is worth a thousand words - but not if its fake
I wonder if people have really come to grips with what this "technology" can do, is already doing and will only metastasize ....
Why are we promoting it instead of whacking away at it - what do we need this stuff for?
Don't fall for the marketing campaings and hype of AI bros and CEOs. It is not programming itself and their creators know how it works. They know it so well than they try to scare everyone to get their money before it crashes, as they cannot make it profitable.
The term "Luddite" has just lost all meaning that it could be just another buzzword like so many others that get used in our modern culture and what's even more hilarious is I would rather be a Luddite more than capable of my physical abilities as a creative then to simply fall into that trap of just following whatever herd comes along, chanting for the next religious craze that gets swooped into popularity.
At least with being a Luddite you can stay true to your own abilities rather than just get suckered into whatever nonsense gets thrown at you.
Great article, Brian. You should note the Industrial Revolution was a major factor of the "Age of Revolutions". "Workers of the world, unite!” is meaningless without millions of exploited factory workers. The situation of AI is different; it is not obvious what the millions of displaced knowledge workers will do. But the fundamental problem is similar: What will happen to the enormous wealth created by automation. I expect a rocky road ahead.
I am sure you will get to this in a later post, but the parallels we see in how the environment was privatized and polluted bear mentioning. 200+ years ago a family could forage and fish and hunt and garden for sustenance and recreation. The rise of the industrial class, allied with the old elite, allowed vast area of once public property to be set aside for private uses. Penalties were swift and harsh, enforced by private and state police. Intense and permanent toxic pollution of air, land, and water was rampant and unregulated; this was another immediate price paid by the underclass Luddites to support the wealth of the uppers.
Consider the effects of data centers on land use, noise pollution, energy use, carbon release, and water theft. Consider the private compounds, yachts, and islands of the global cabal we see today. Consider the Amazon warehouse and WalMart Supercenter. One long thread connects them all. Luddites believe technology should serve all equitably and its inventors and users should assume responsibility for negative effects -- instead of externalizing those costs to the detriment of the weakest.
Lastly, the industrialists responded to the Luddite threat with the greatest expansion of the state police authority and numbers in history, to protect the new wealthy and their assets. You can draw that parallel easily enough.
What strikes me is that the smear you're describing is now running, in a newly extreme form.
The target has never really changed: not technology, but anyone who would restrain how technology is used against people. In 1811 that person was called a criminal, to justify hanging him. For the two centuries since he's been called a backward technophobe, to justify ignoring him.
And last year, on his leaked Antichrist tapes, Peter Thiel gave the same smear its furthest form yet: he named the Luddite as the Antichrist:
"Someone like Greta or Eliezer," the "legionnaires of the Antichrist."
It's the identical move you trace, one turn of the screw further. Calling the restrainer backward says his resistance is stupid. Calling him the Antichrist says it's *evil* — the work of the lawless one, something a faithful person is obligated to fight.
That's why this version gets preached in churches and carried to the Vatican's doorstep instead of just argued in op-eds: it's the smear-on-anyone-who-would-restrain, upgraded from an economic insult to an eschatological one.
So the line runs straight from your clothworkers to the AI-safety researcher and the Pope who teaches that there are limits: same target, same elite interest, escalating weapon.
The Luddites were called criminals to justify breaking them; their descendants are being called the Antichrist to justify overriding even a Pope.
Great article and history of the Luddites Brian! So much of the discussion on AI takes place in a vacuum where the technology itself is fetishisied but you really go to the heart of the social relations at play.
You spend thousands of words rehabilitating the Luddites, but you carefully avoid the one question that actually matters:
"How were businesses supposed to compete against rivals using more productive machinery?"
You present the story as a moral struggle between greedy industrialists and virtuous workers. Reality was much simpler. The Luddites were skilled workers defending their economic position against innovations that threatened it.
You repeatedly frame profit as something suspicious, yet without profit there is no investment, no innovation, no industrialization and no increase in living standards.
A company is not a welfare program. Its purpose is not to guarantee a salary, preserve a trade or maintain a particular way of life. Its purpose is to produce goods and services that customers are willing to buy.
Your quality argument is equally problematic. If mechanized products were genuinely inferior, consumers were free to reject them. Why should producers, governments or guild-like organizations decide on their behalf?
The irony is that while criticizing concentrations of power, you implicitly defend restrictions designed to protect incumbent producers from competition and technological change. That is not social justice. It is rent-seeking.
The Luddites were not irrational technophobes. On that point we agree. They were rational people defending their own interests. The problem is that the interests of a specific profession and the interests of society are not always aligned.
Like many AI critics today, they were perfectly happy with technology until it threatened their income, their status and their vision of how the world should work.
"They were opposed to the way technology was being used against them."
Yes. And it brings the conversation about AI back to something nobody seems to be discussing:
Honesty.
So-called "AI writers" don't actually write. AI does the writing. That's a fact, and it means the person who didn't do the writing but puts their name on it is being dishonest. Why is a reader expected to respect that?
One cannot put their name on words they did not write and be offended when people don’t respect their integrity.
A reader would be upset if they picked up a book by Stephen King only to find out he didn’t write it.
A reader would be upset if they read an article by Maggie Haberman only to find out she didn’t write it.
I believe the reader has a right to know if the person who put their name on a piece of writing actually wrote it.
I don't mind if somebody uses generative AI. I just want them to credit the LLM that did the writing. I want them to be honest.
There’s a reason the people using AI don’t let the reader know their words were written by AI. They want to claim the title of "Writer" without doing the work, which is, writing. It's dishonest.
As these labs go public, people don't just get excluded from the table as workers and users. They get conscripted to it as owners. Index and retirement funds are required to buy the big AI companies once they qualify, so a pension ends up bankrolling the frontier with no vote on how fast it moves. The Luddites could at least put a hammer through the frame; the modern version funds it by rule and gets handed no lever at all.
It is worse: funds will bankroll the early investors before everyone realizes that it is economically not viable. AI providers cannot stop losing millions just by operating them.
Well, you can count me as a Luddite in both senses, for two reasons. First, the idea that we could see AI used for good purposes and not to enhance the wealth and power of rich and powerful people and the dominance of rich and powerful countries, is fantasy. They've spent 40 years cementing themselves into power, and they've been very successful, including in the key project of dividing the 99% into two warring camps. One reason they're so adamant about rushing so many data centers into production ASAP, is that they need them to have constant universal surveillance of every one of us, which will be key to suppressing our revolt.
The other reason is the big picture, the long view: the reality that what lies ahead is contraction, because there simply is not enough energy and not enough mineable minerals, to support 8+ billion people in comfortable style. Either many of us conveniently exit (are there plans for that?) or we engage in a massive program of frugality and efficiency and equality--I'd vote for that but no one with power and wealth would--OR the rich live in enclaves of privilege and everyone else struggles for survival in hellish, deprived, polluted mega ghettoes. The latter is probably the most likely but it's not a long term solution as we are on a trajectory of unsustainability that leads to a world humans can't survive in some time before the turn of the next century. I think Sander's moratorium should be immediate and permanent. We have more than enough data centers already.
" ... the idea that we could see AI used for good purposes and not to enhance the wealth and power of rich and powerful people and the dominance of rich and powerful countries, is fantasy."
Amen! AI is an Alien Invasive species, infiltrating every aspect of our lives - even the folks who developed it admit they don't know how it works. It is now in the process of programming itself - we cannot control or "regulate" it - IMO the best thing to do is pull the plug, literally. It is gobbling up everything, land, energy, water, media, social and otherwise, education, entertainment, etc.
It used to be said that a picture is worth a thousand words - but not if its fake
I wonder if people have really come to grips with what this "technology" can do, is already doing and will only metastasize ....
Why are we promoting it instead of whacking away at it - what do we need this stuff for?
Hammers up!
and I say, amen to that!
Don't fall for the marketing campaings and hype of AI bros and CEOs. It is not programming itself and their creators know how it works. They know it so well than they try to scare everyone to get their money before it crashes, as they cannot make it profitable.
You know what's really funny out of all of this?
The term "Luddite" has just lost all meaning that it could be just another buzzword like so many others that get used in our modern culture and what's even more hilarious is I would rather be a Luddite more than capable of my physical abilities as a creative then to simply fall into that trap of just following whatever herd comes along, chanting for the next religious craze that gets swooped into popularity.
At least with being a Luddite you can stay true to your own abilities rather than just get suckered into whatever nonsense gets thrown at you.
My husband called me a Luddite (as a put down) after reading this I am happy to be called a Luddite.
Great article, Brian. You should note the Industrial Revolution was a major factor of the "Age of Revolutions". "Workers of the world, unite!” is meaningless without millions of exploited factory workers. The situation of AI is different; it is not obvious what the millions of displaced knowledge workers will do. But the fundamental problem is similar: What will happen to the enormous wealth created by automation. I expect a rocky road ahead.
Luddites of the world, Unite!
I am sure you will get to this in a later post, but the parallels we see in how the environment was privatized and polluted bear mentioning. 200+ years ago a family could forage and fish and hunt and garden for sustenance and recreation. The rise of the industrial class, allied with the old elite, allowed vast area of once public property to be set aside for private uses. Penalties were swift and harsh, enforced by private and state police. Intense and permanent toxic pollution of air, land, and water was rampant and unregulated; this was another immediate price paid by the underclass Luddites to support the wealth of the uppers.
Consider the effects of data centers on land use, noise pollution, energy use, carbon release, and water theft. Consider the private compounds, yachts, and islands of the global cabal we see today. Consider the Amazon warehouse and WalMart Supercenter. One long thread connects them all. Luddites believe technology should serve all equitably and its inventors and users should assume responsibility for negative effects -- instead of externalizing those costs to the detriment of the weakest.
Lastly, the industrialists responded to the Luddite threat with the greatest expansion of the state police authority and numbers in history, to protect the new wealthy and their assets. You can draw that parallel easily enough.
We are all Luddites. Own it.
What strikes me is that the smear you're describing is now running, in a newly extreme form.
The target has never really changed: not technology, but anyone who would restrain how technology is used against people. In 1811 that person was called a criminal, to justify hanging him. For the two centuries since he's been called a backward technophobe, to justify ignoring him.
And last year, on his leaked Antichrist tapes, Peter Thiel gave the same smear its furthest form yet: he named the Luddite as the Antichrist:
"Someone like Greta or Eliezer," the "legionnaires of the Antichrist."
It's the identical move you trace, one turn of the screw further. Calling the restrainer backward says his resistance is stupid. Calling him the Antichrist says it's *evil* — the work of the lawless one, something a faithful person is obligated to fight.
That's why this version gets preached in churches and carried to the Vatican's doorstep instead of just argued in op-eds: it's the smear-on-anyone-who-would-restrain, upgraded from an economic insult to an eschatological one.
So the line runs straight from your clothworkers to the AI-safety researcher and the Pope who teaches that there are limits: same target, same elite interest, escalating weapon.
The Luddites were called criminals to justify breaking them; their descendants are being called the Antichrist to justify overriding even a Pope.
I wrote that part up here if it's useful: https://theramm.transparencycascade.org/p/the-antichrist-as-luddite
This piece is the ground I was standing on without fully knowing it. Thank you for it.
The attack on our humanity. The demeaning of understanding. The diminishing of intelligence by trumpeting an artificial substitute.
Luddite doesn’t really do it… “ai” is transhumanist.. and thus anti human
If there’s one thing history tells us, it’s that we never learn from history.
Reading it now. Recovered history that's insanely relevant.
Got me fired up man. Thanks for the history lesson.
Great article and history of the Luddites Brian! So much of the discussion on AI takes place in a vacuum where the technology itself is fetishisied but you really go to the heart of the social relations at play.
🔥🔥🔥🔥
So excited to catch you possibly at the Luddite meetup in NYC, I think it's gonna be a fantastic series of events
You spend thousands of words rehabilitating the Luddites, but you carefully avoid the one question that actually matters:
"How were businesses supposed to compete against rivals using more productive machinery?"
You present the story as a moral struggle between greedy industrialists and virtuous workers. Reality was much simpler. The Luddites were skilled workers defending their economic position against innovations that threatened it.
You repeatedly frame profit as something suspicious, yet without profit there is no investment, no innovation, no industrialization and no increase in living standards.
A company is not a welfare program. Its purpose is not to guarantee a salary, preserve a trade or maintain a particular way of life. Its purpose is to produce goods and services that customers are willing to buy.
Your quality argument is equally problematic. If mechanized products were genuinely inferior, consumers were free to reject them. Why should producers, governments or guild-like organizations decide on their behalf?
The irony is that while criticizing concentrations of power, you implicitly defend restrictions designed to protect incumbent producers from competition and technological change. That is not social justice. It is rent-seeking.
The Luddites were not irrational technophobes. On that point we agree. They were rational people defending their own interests. The problem is that the interests of a specific profession and the interests of society are not always aligned.
Like many AI critics today, they were perfectly happy with technology until it threatened their income, their status and their vision of how the world should work.
"They were opposed to the way technology was being used against them."
Yes. And it brings the conversation about AI back to something nobody seems to be discussing:
Honesty.
So-called "AI writers" don't actually write. AI does the writing. That's a fact, and it means the person who didn't do the writing but puts their name on it is being dishonest. Why is a reader expected to respect that?
One cannot put their name on words they did not write and be offended when people don’t respect their integrity.
A reader would be upset if they picked up a book by Stephen King only to find out he didn’t write it.
A reader would be upset if they read an article by Maggie Haberman only to find out she didn’t write it.
I believe the reader has a right to know if the person who put their name on a piece of writing actually wrote it.
I don't mind if somebody uses generative AI. I just want them to credit the LLM that did the writing. I want them to be honest.
There’s a reason the people using AI don’t let the reader know their words were written by AI. They want to claim the title of "Writer" without doing the work, which is, writing. It's dishonest.
As these labs go public, people don't just get excluded from the table as workers and users. They get conscripted to it as owners. Index and retirement funds are required to buy the big AI companies once they qualify, so a pension ends up bankrolling the frontier with no vote on how fast it moves. The Luddites could at least put a hammer through the frame; the modern version funds it by rule and gets handed no lever at all.
It is worse: funds will bankroll the early investors before everyone realizes that it is economically not viable. AI providers cannot stop losing millions just by operating them.