The Luddites were not fighting technology but the enclosure of their future.

What if the questions were instead: What kinds of labor markets are being designed around AI? What is shaping the choices about adoption? Who has bargaining power in those decisions? How will the value created by as yet unfounded promises of productivity growth be distributed? Who has power and how is it wielded to promote certain interests and... See more

As artificial intelligence reconfigures every dimension of our societies—from labor markets to classrooms to newsrooms—we should remember the Luddites. Not as caricatures, but in the original sense: People who refuse to accept that the deployment of new technology should be dictated unilaterally by corporations or in cahoots with the government,... See more

To be a Luddite today is to refuse the fatalism of techno-inevitability and to demand that technology serve the many, not just the few. It is to assert that questions of labor, agency, and justice must come before speed, efficiency, and scale.