Against the Luddites

A more critical view of the Luddities. While I very much idealized their reactions towards the automations, their core ideals and actions of “destroying the machines” are never the answer we want to look for if we really want to pursue ways to harness new technologies for the better.

We have seen what happens when those who yearn for a return to the past are given power. When the Khmer Rouge seized Cambodia in 1975, they emptied the cities and drove the population into the rice fields in pursuit of an agrarian Year Zero. The scale of violence is incomparable to anything the Luddites had the power to do, but the ideological shape is the same. It is the simple call to smash the instruments of modernity, return to a simpler, purer social order. The Luddites wanted to restore the medieval craftsman; the Khmer Rouge wanted to restore the agrarian peasant. Both treated the people empowered by modernization as threats to be suppressed. The reactionary romanticism and the hatred of the leveling effects of new productive forces are the same impulse.