The Majority Report had an excellent interview with this author Brian Merchant who wrote the book "Blood in the Machine" about the luddites. It is quite interesting that luddites were not against technology, they were against the owner class using machines to replace skilled workers with unskilled workers using mechanized systems for lower pay and taking all the profits.

The interview went for nearly an hour but is worth a watch. It starts at the 30 min mark. https://www.youtube.com/live/SOsFm5H_M3w?si=KNxbkNnziDdh0l7V

Alright fine, I'll be a Luddite now. Every time we 'upgrade' or 'make progress' it is really about controling the working class and circumventing a previous business model. Capital pays more and more for the inputs: fuel and technology, in order to justify their control. And then once they have it, they use progress to justify poor labor protections. They never use the predicted best solution, or even a compromise, they use the solution that offers them more power.

Absolutely. And I celebrate every act of sabotage, from people putting traffic cones on robotaxis to people shooting down drones flying over their land.

I love technological progress and am no Luddite but the technology that’s most visible to consumers rarely just makes everyone’s lives better. For every truly transformative tech like smartphones, there’s a dozen “disruptions” that just replace some previously functioning part of society with something shittier. (Like phone trees instead of a customer service agent. AirBnB causing rent to rise while breaking zoning laws. Generative A.I. has potential but so far, it’s mostly just automating content farms. Crypto wasn’t a real technological innovation but Silicon Valley VCs pretended it was.)

In a competitive market, even those shitty “innovations” would eventually translate into lower prices but we live in an age of weak enforcement of laws to create and foster competitive markets. Of course there’s a rise in pissed off consumers when all the upside goes to profits/shareholders.

the fact that i was paywalled trying to read this pretty much says all one needs to know about where such a sentiment could be coming from. HMMMMMMMM

The Luddites weren't wrong, their jobs were taken by technology.

https://archive.ph/FxLAg

Unpaywalled

I personally refer the term Butlerian Jihadist, especially when it comes to being against AI generated content.

Always make me laugh seeing these neo-luddites. They're cute as hell