In 1779 England, a young weaving apprentice named Ned Ludd was whipped by his master for disobedience. In righteous indignation, Ned picked up a hammer, smashed two knitting frames, and fled to Sherwood Forest. News of the incident spread, and whenever frames were sabotaged after that, people joked, “Ned Ludd did it”.
But Ned Ludd never actually existed. He is a legendary figure adopted 30 years later by the self-proclaimed “Luddites” — anti-technology rebels who rampaged across the country smashing machines during the early Industrial Revolution.
But that’s not entirely true either. The Luddites weren’t anti-technology. They were skilled textile workers more familiar with emerging technologies than their bosses. They were anti-tyranny. They were against the oppressive, authoritarian ways those bosses and the factory owners were using the technologies.
Also, the Luddites weren’t rioters; they were a strategic social movement that resorted to violence when a decade of going through proper channels failed. They fought against owners using unskilled workers, children, and migrants instead of experienced artisans. They fought against the resulting low wages and low quality. They fought against machines being used to stomp on laws and community.
The Luddites fought for living wages, quality goods, participatory decision-making, and self-determination. Because they weren’t just defending their personal livelihoods, but also a communal way of life marked by dignity and autonomy where workers labored at home and set their own hours.
Sound familiar?
I am a Luddite. I was raised in a Luddite household, even though my father supported us by writing NASA software starting in the late 1960s. I can find my way around machines, computers, and even back-end code better than most. But I’ve never lost sight of the fact that technology is a tool that should serve us — not the other way around. I’ve never forgotten that we don’t need any of the things we call “tech” today.
I’m not against technology. Like the Luddites, I’m against the way we’ve increasingly allowed machines to degrade our humanity. I’m against the ways we’ve allowed the word “tech” to be co-opted by Silicon Valley.
In the process, we forgot that computers — and even machines — are one small subset of tech. I’m a huge fan of fire, cooking, plant medicine, and midwifery. These are technologies. I love clean water, toilets, antibiotics, and vaccines — the tech most responsible for extending the human lifespan (no, not modern medicine). I absolutely adore anesthesia and painkillers. Horticulture and indigenous forest management? Calendars and maps? Dentistry? Yes please! All these are technologies.
But I am fervently anti-AI.
It’s not just because AI is the newest knitting frame, or that its Big Bosses are going to screw us even harder than the industrialists have been screwing workers ever since the original Luddites lost. It’s not even because of the horrifying amount of energy and water its data centers devour, the inevitable elimination of millions of jobs, or the impending burst of the AI economic bubble.
I’m against AI because our collective, reflexive jump onto its catastrophic bandwagon is another symptom of modernity’s diseased thinking. This diseased thinking is the real source of the metacrisis, and the looming problems with AI (and everything else) are mere manifestations.
To make it through the metacrisis and give our species any hope of survival, we must profoundly change our thinking. Because while AI might destroy us on its own, the mindset behind it is just as deadly. That mindset will outlive AI and continue to wreak havoc if we weather the massive changes AI will bring.
My five unusual reasons for being an Anti-AI Luddite therefore come from reoriented thinking that addresses some root causes of the crises that threaten our lives and livelihoods. Read the rest on Medium!
