We should all be Luddites

Luddites are having a bit of a moment. Brian Merchant's excellent Blood in the Machine is one of the more high-profile contemporary recountings of the struggle to wrest control from the narrative of technological inevitability and show how the story of technology can't be separated from the deployment capital against labor.

This article from the Brookings Institution by Courtney Radsch arguing we should all be Luddites is particularly well argued and lays out the case for ludditism for institutions that have been a bit wary of the idea, specifically journalists, educators, and policy folk.

The Luddites understood that mechanization wasn’t just an economic shift; it was a political one. The loss of control over their tools meant the loss of autonomy over their livelihoods. It meant more monitoring, less agency, and new precarity for laborers. It also meant alliances between business owners and the state that sentenced those who protested to death .

It's time to take "Luddite" back not as a pejorative but something to be proud of.

(Today's post comes courtesy of the wonderful writer and thinker Mandy Brown , who all right-thinking people should follow.)