Today, calling someone a Luddite is an easy dismissal. It’s shorthand for being afraid of change, resistant to progress, unwilling to adapt. The word gets thrown around casually, especially in technology circles, where skepticism is often treated as a moral failing rather than a rational response.
That’s unfortunate, because the history behind the term is far more interesting—and far more relevant—than the insult suggests.
The name comes from Ned Ludd, a figure who supposedly emerged in Nottinghamshire in 1811 during protests against mechanized textile equipment. According to reports at the time, Ludd was a shadowy leader—sometimes called Captain Ludd, sometimes General or King—who moved from industrial town to industrial town, inspiring workers to resist the machines that were taking their jobs.
Government forces took him seriously. There were sightings. Descriptions. Rumors of nighttime drills and unseen armies. One militiaman even claimed to have seen him carrying a pike, pale-faced and ghostlike.
And yet, Ned Ludd never existed.
He was an organizing myth. A symbol. A shared story that gave coherence to fear and anger that were already there.
What did exist were thousands of skilled textile workers whose livelihoods were evaporating almost overnight. These weren’t people who hated tools or innovation. They were craftsmen who had spent years honing skills that suddenly no longer mattered. The machines didn’t just make cloth faster—they broke wage agreements, undermined labor norms, and shifted power decisively toward factory owners.
Calling the Luddites “anti-technology” misses the point. They weren’t fighting progress. They were fighting a version of progress that arrived without regard for the people it displaced.
They sensed, correctly, that once labor loses leverage, it rarely gets it back.
The movement didn’t last long. Parliament criminalized machine breaking. Armed troops were deployed. Capital and political power aligned. The protests were fragmented, reactive, and ultimately no match for the momentum of industrial capitalism. History rolled forward, and the Luddites were left behind—reduced to a cautionary tale told by the winners.
Fast forward to now.
The machines are back, and this time they’re smarter.
Automation is no longer confined to manual labor or factory floors. It’s coming for administrative work, analysis, coordination, judgment-heavy tasks that were once considered safely human. Models write, reason, diagnose, and decide. Agents don’t sleep. Systems scale without asking for raises.
The economic logic hasn’t changed. People want cheaper goods and services. Companies want higher margins. Automation delivers both, so it keeps winning—not because anyone is especially malicious, but because incentives are doing exactly what incentives always do.
What’s changed is the scope.
We’re not just talking about job loss. We’re talking about the erosion of work as the primary structure around which adult life is organized. And culturally, we are wildly unprepared for that shift.
You can already see what happens when a community loses its economic foundation. The coal industry in the United States offers a preview. As renewables, storage, and efficiency improved, coal collapsed. Jobs disappeared. Towns hollowed out. Addiction rose. Political anger filled the vacuum. It wasn’t a failure of individual resilience. It was a failure to manage transition at a systems level.
AI and automation are poised to replicate that pattern across entire sectors of the economy, only faster and at a much larger scale. In many cases, companies are explicitly rewarded for removing humans from the loop. The human cost is treated as an externality.
Some people will adapt. Many won’t. And the burden will fall hardest on those who already have the least room to maneuver.
At the height of the Great Depression, unemployment in the U.S. reached around 23 percent. The country eventually recovered in part because people went back to work, supported by public spending and industrial expansion. That safety valve doesn’t exist in the same way this time. If nearly half of current jobs are vulnerable to automation, as some studies suggest, there won’t be a familiar labor market waiting on the other side.
What’s truly destabilizing isn’t just job loss. It’s the concentration of wealth, the weakening of competition, and the slow unraveling of the social fabric that depends on people feeling useful, needed, and capable of contributing.
This is where the Luddites still have something to teach us.
They weren’t wrong about the danger. They were wrong about timing and leverage. They reacted when the system had already locked into place, when power had consolidated and alternatives had narrowed.
We’re earlier in the curve now. That matters.
We don’t need to smash machines. But we do need to be honest about what they’re doing to the economic and cultural foundations we rely on. We need to start asking harder questions about what replaces work as a source of meaning, how abundance gets distributed without destroying incentive structures, and what responsibilities builders have when the systems they create reshape society.
If we avoid those conversations, they won’t disappear. They’ll just arrive later, louder, and under far worse conditions.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it has a habit of punishing people who ignore its lessons.
The Luddites are remembered as a footnote.
We still have a chance to be remembered differently.