Beyond the Baying Mob

What the Luddites Actually Teach Us About AI

There’s a peculiar theatre playing out on social media at the moment. On one side, technology enthusiasts dismiss any critique of artificial intelligence as “Luddite thinking,” wielding the term like a cudgel to silence dissent. On the other, a growing chorus of critics has embraced the label, often with a defiant fury that substitutes volume for substance. Watching these exchanges unfold, one is struck by how little either camp seems to understand about the historical movement they’re invoking, and how thoroughly both have reduced a complex political struggle to a simple binary: progress versus paranoia, innovation versus ignorance, the future versus the past.

This reduction serves no one. The tech evangelists get to dismiss legitimate concerns without engaging with them, whilst the self-proclaimed neo-Luddites often fall into the very trap their opponents have set, performing the role of the irrational technophobe rather than articulating a coherent alternative vision. The discourse degenerates into what the user of this space aptly called “simple invectives shouted to the baying mob,” a spectacle that generates heat but precious little light.

Yet there is something genuinely valuable to be recovered from the Luddite tradition, if we’re willing to look beyond the caricature. The historical Luddites were not what either side of our contemporary debate imagines them to be. Understanding who they actually were, what they actually fought for, and why their struggle ultimately failed offers us something far more useful than another rallying cry or another dismissive slogan. It offers us a way to think seriously about power, technology, and democratic agency in an age when those questions have never been more urgent.

The Fabricated Fools

The story most people carry in their heads about the Luddites is straightforward: they were simple-minded textile workers in early nineteenth-century England who, unable to adapt to technological change, smashed the machines that threatened their livelihoods in a futile rage against progress. They were ignorant, backward-looking, and ultimately ridiculous, crushed beneath the unstoppable wheel of industrial advancement. This narrative is so deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness that “Luddite” has become synonymous with technophobic fool.

This story is also largely fiction. It was constructed deliberately by the factory owners, the press, and the government of the time to delegitimise a political movement that posed a genuine threat to an emerging economic order. The real Luddites were skilled artisans, among the most educated and capable workers of their era. Framework knitters in Nottinghamshire, wool croppers in Yorkshire, cotton weavers in Lancashire. These were not interchangeable factory hands but elite craftspeople who had invested years in apprenticeships to master complex trades. Their knowledge of the machinery they worked with was intimate and sophisticated.

What’s more, they were not opposed to technology as such. This is perhaps the most important misunderstanding to correct. The Luddites’ targets were highly specific. They destroyed certain machines used in particular ways by particular employers, whilst leaving identical technology untouched when it was deployed differently. A framework knitter might smash the wide stocking frames used to produce cheap “cut-up” stockings with unskilled labour, whilst preserving the traditional frames that produced quality goods. Their violence was discriminating, not indiscriminate.

Their grievances were equally specific. They were protesting wage cuts, the replacement of skilled workers with untrained children, the degradation of product quality, and the erosion of customary labour practices that had provided them with economic security and dignity. They were fighting, in other words, not against machines but against a particular deployment of machines within a particular economic system. They were fighting against what we might now call a business model.

Before resorting to machine-breaking, they exhausted every peaceful avenue available to them. They petitioned Parliament repeatedly, asking for enforcement of existing labour regulations. They appealed to local magistrates to uphold customary standards. They attempted negotiation with mill owners, requesting minimum wages and basic protections. These efforts were systematically rebuffed. When Parliament repealed the last protective legislation in 1809 and the Combination Acts made worker organisation illegal, the artisans found themselves in an impossible position. The law had declared their traditional rights obsolete and their attempts to organise criminal. Machine-breaking became, in historian Eric Hobsbawm’s memorable phrase, “collective bargaining by riot,” a last-resort tactic when all legitimate channels had been closed.

The state’s response was telling. Thousands of troops were deployed to the textile regions, reportedly more than were fighting Napoleon on the Continent at the time. The Frame Breaking Act of 1812 made machine-breaking a capital offence, punishable by death. Mass trials followed, with dozens executed and many more transported to penal colonies. This overwhelming violence was not a measured response to property damage. It was the defence of a revolution, the forcible imposition of a new economic order over the resistance of the communities it was disrupting.

The Moral Economy’s Last Stand

To understand what the Luddites were actually defending requires grasping a concept that has largely vanished from our economic imagination: what historian E.P. Thompson called the “moral economy.” This was not a formal ideology but a lived set of assumptions about how economic life should be organised. It held that there were limits to what could be done in pursuit of profit, that community needs took precedence over private gain, that there was such a thing as a “just price” and a “fair wage,” and that those with economic power had corresponding obligations to those without it.

This was not naive utopianism. The moral economy was enforced through a combination of law, custom, and community pressure. There were regulations governing apprenticeships, quality standards, and market practices. Guilds and traditional authorities had genuine power to restrain the most predatory economic behaviour. When prices for essential goods spiked during shortages, crowds would sometimes seize grain and sell it at what they considered a fair price, and local magistrates would often look the other way, recognising the legitimacy of the action.

The Industrial Revolution was not simply about new technology. It was about the systematic dismantling of this moral economy and its replacement with what the Luddites’ opponents championed as “free market” principles. The new factory owners argued that wages should be determined solely by supply and demand, that employers owed their workers nothing beyond the agreed wage, that quality standards were an interference with commerce, and that any regulation of business was an intolerable constraint on progress and prosperity.

The Luddites understood that they were witnessing not merely a technological shift but a fundamental transformation in the social contract. The machines were simply the most visible instruments of this change. When they smashed stocking frames, they were attacking symbols of a new world being imposed upon them without their consent, a world in which their skills, their communities, and their economic security counted for nothing against the logic of profit maximisation.

This is why the caricature of the Luddite as technophobe is not merely inaccurate but actively pernicious. It erases the political content of their struggle, transforming a coherent critique of economic power into a psychological deficiency. It suggests that their objections were born of ignorance rather than insight, emotion rather than analysis. Most insidiously, it implies that such objections are not merely wrong but literally ridiculous, unworthy of serious consideration. The very word “Luddite” becomes a thought-terminating cliché, a way to dismiss concerns about technology’s social consequences without having to address them.

The Modern Echoes

The parallels between the Luddites’ struggle and contemporary debates about artificial intelligence are not merely superficial. Both involve transformative technologies being deployed within economic systems that concentrate their benefits upward whilst distributing their costs downward. Both feature a rhetoric of inevitability deployed to foreclose democratic deliberation. Both pit claims about efficiency and progress against concerns about employment, autonomy, and quality. Both raise fundamental questions about who gets to decide our technological future and on what terms.

Consider the question of labour displacement. Just as the power loom threatened hand weavers, AI threatens to automate not only routine cognitive work but creative and analytical tasks that were previously considered uniquely human. The standard response echoes what the Luddites were told: yes, some jobs will disappear, but new ones will emerge, and the overall effect will be increased prosperity. This may even prove true in aggregate and over the long term. But “in aggregate and over the long term” offers little comfort to specific people losing specific livelihoods now, and the Luddites’ experience suggests that the transition costs of technological disruption fall disproportionately on those least equipped to bear them.

More fundamentally, the question is not whether AI will create new jobs but what kind of jobs they will be and how power will be distributed in the new economy. Will AI augment human capabilities, or will it primarily be used to monitor, control, and replace human workers? Will the productivity gains be shared broadly, or will they accrue almost entirely to capital owners? These are not technical questions but political ones, and the fact that they’re so rarely asked in those terms reflects how successfully the ideology of technological inevitability has colonised our thinking.

The parallels extend to concerns about quality. The Luddites fought against “cut-up” stockings, cheap goods that degraded standards and flooded markets. Today’s critics raise similar concerns about AI-generated content. Algorithmic systems trained on vast datasets of human creativity can now produce images, text, and music at scale and minimal cost. But can they produce good images, good text, good music? And what happens to our cultural landscape when authentic human creation is drowned out by an endless torrent of plausible but still algorithmic output?

The concern is not simply aesthetic. When AI writing tools generate bland, homogenised prose optimised for search engines rather than human readers, when AI art tools produce images that are technically impressive but creatively sterile, when the economics of content creation reward volume over quality, we risk a kind of cultural impoverishment analogous to what the Luddites warned about in textile manufacture. We may end up with more “content” but less meaning, more output but less originality, a glut of the mediocre crowding out the excellent.

Then there’s the question of data, which represents perhaps the most direct parallel to the Luddites’ concerns. The argument that AI models are trained on “stolen” copyrighted material without permission or compensation is not merely a legal technicality. It’s a dispute about enclosure of the commons. Just as eighteenth-century landowners seized common lands that had been collectively used for generations, today’s technology corporations are harvesting the collective cultural production of the internet to build proprietary AI systems that they then sell back to the public. This represents a massive, uncompensated transfer of value from the many to the few, and the fact that it happens through servers rather than fences makes it no less an act of appropriation.

The Discourse We Deserve

Yet acknowledging these parallels does not mean that the contemporary “Luddite” position, as it’s often articulated online, offers a useful response. Too often, the critique devolves into exactly what the caricature suggests: a blanket rejection of AI technology driven more by fear and anger than by careful analysis. The discourse becomes dominated by worst-case scenarios and apocalyptic warnings, generating outrage but offering little in the way of concrete alternatives or actionable demands.

Part of the problem is the platform itself. Social media rewards provocation over nuance, certainty over complexity. The algorithm favours hot takes that generate engagement, which means that measured analysis struggles to compete with inflammatory rhetoric. In this environment, “Luddite” becomes just another identity to perform, another team to join in the endless online culture war between technophiles and technophobes.

This performative Luddism typically takes a few familiar forms. There’s the apocalyptic warning, predicting imminent catastrophe if AI development continues unchecked. There’s the simple invective, denouncing tech companies and their leaders as evil or greedy. There’s the call to arms, demanding that “we” rise up and smash the machines (or their digital equivalent). There’s the conspiracy theory, suggesting that AI is a deliberate plot by elites to enslave humanity. What’s largely absent is the kind of careful, specific analysis that characterised the actual Luddite movement: which technologies, deployed how, by whom, with what effects on which communities?

This matters because crude anti-AI rhetoric plays directly into the hands of those who would dismiss all concerns about the technology as irrational fear-mongering. When critics demand that AI development simply stop, without distinguishing between beneficial and harmful applications, they make it easy for proponents to paint them as backwards-looking technophobes. When they resort to personal attacks on AI researchers rather than substantive critiques of business models and regulatory frameworks, they cede the moral and intellectual high ground. When they traffic in catastrophic scenarios without empirical grounding, they undermine the credibility of more measured concerns about bias, displacement, and power concentration.

The real Luddites were not opposed to all mechanisation. They made careful distinctions between machines used in ways that protected workers’ interests and machines used in ways that harmed them. They had specific, articulable demands: enforce existing quality standards, maintain customary wages, allow workers to organise collectively. They understood that the problem was not the stocking frame as such but the economic system within which it was being deployed.

Contemporary AI critique needs to recover this specificity. Rather than demanding that AI development cease entirely, we should be asking: which applications of AI genuinely improve human welfare, and which primarily serve to concentrate power and profit? What regulatory frameworks could ensure that AI development serves broad social interests rather than narrow private ones? How can we structure labour markets and social policy to ensure that productivity gains are shared rather than captured entirely by capital? What forms of collective organisation might give workers genuine voice in how AI is deployed in their industries?

A Politics of Refusal, Not Rage

The most valuable legacy of the Luddite movement is not their tactics but their fundamental insight: technology is not destiny. The specific form that technological change takes, the purposes to which new tools are put, the distribution of their benefits and costs are all matters of human choice, shaped by power relations and political decisions. The rhetoric of technological inevitability is an ideology, not a description of reality. It serves the interests of those who profit from the current trajectory by making alternatives seem impossible or irrational.

This insight grounds what some scholars have called a “politics of refusal,” the assertion of a right to say no to technologies deployed on unacceptable terms. This is not technophobia but democratic agency. It’s the claim that communities should have meaningful input into decisions that fundamentally reshape their lives, that efficiency and profit are not the only values that matter, that progress is not whatever maximises shareholder returns.

What might such a politics look like in practice? It would begin by rejecting both crude technophilia and crude technophobia in favour of specific, contextual analysis. It would ask not “is AI good or bad?” but “which AI systems, deployed how, serve whose interests, with what effects on which communities?” It would distinguish between AI used to enhance human capabilities and AI used primarily to monitor, control, or replace human workers. It would support beneficial applications whilst opposing harmful ones.

It would demand genuine transparency about how AI systems work and what data they’re trained on, not as a matter of intellectual curiosity but as a prerequisite for democratic accountability. It would insist that workers and communities affected by AI deployment have genuine voice in decisions about adoption, not merely consultation after the fact. It would push for regulatory frameworks that ensure AI development serves broad social interests rather than narrow private ones.

It would advocate for new economic arrangements that ensure productivity gains are broadly shared rather than entirely captured by capital. This might involve strengthened labour organisation, reformed intellectual property laws, public options for key AI services, or novel approaches like data cooperatives that give individuals collective bargaining power over their information. The specific mechanisms matter less than the underlying principle: that technological change should improve lives broadly rather than concentrating wealth and power ever more narrowly.

Crucially, it would maintain the distinction between critiquing specific deployments of technology within specific economic systems and rejecting technological change as such. The Luddites were not opposed to mechanisation. They were opposed to mechanisation deployed to drive down wages, replace skilled workers with untrained children, and flood markets with shoddy goods. They would likely have welcomed machines that enhanced their capabilities, improved working conditions, and raised quality standards, had any such machines been on offer within their economic system.

This is not a call for complacency. The trajectory of AI development under current conditions is genuinely concerning, and there’s nothing inevitable about a positive outcome. But neither is catastrophe inevitable. The future remains to be made, and it will be shaped by the political choices we make and the power relations we’re willing to challenge. The question is not whether to accept or reject AI as such but what kind of AI future we want to build and what we’re willing to do to build it.

Beyond the Caricature

The historical Luddites failed. The factory system they opposed became the economic foundation of the modern world. The moral economy they defended was systematically dismantled and replaced with market relations. The communities they fought to protect were transformed beyond recognition. From a certain perspective, this vindicates those who called them fools resisting inevitable progress.

But this perspective is too narrow. The Luddites lost the immediate battle, but many of their concerns were eventually vindicated. The factory system they opposed did indeed produce widespread immiseration and social dislocation. The moral economy they defended, stripped of its paternalist elements, reemerged in the form of labour law, safety regulations, quality standards, and social insurance. The right to organise collectively that the Combination Acts denied was eventually recognised and enshrined in law. The questions they raised about the human costs of technological change, about the proper relationship between efficiency and dignity, about who should control the means of production and on what terms, remain as urgent and unresolved today as they were two centuries ago.

Their legacy is not their tactics or even their specific demands but their fundamental insistence that communities have a right to shape their technological future, that progress must be judged by its effects on human flourishing rather than abstract metrics of productivity, that the present order is not natural or inevitable but constructed and thus subject to reconstruction. This insistence is not backwards-looking nostalgia but a necessary precondition for any democratic politics worthy of the name.

The discourse we have about AI at the moment is not worthy of this legacy. The tech enthusiasts who dismiss all criticism as Luddite thinking reveal their own ignorance about the movement they invoke. The online critics who embrace the label without understanding what it actually meant reduce a sophisticated political struggle to a tribal identifier. Both sides contribute to a degraded conversation dominated by slogans and outrage rather than careful analysis and constructive alternatives.

We can do better. We can recover what was actually valuable in the Luddite tradition whilst avoiding both the romanticisation that treats them as heroes and the caricature that treats them as fools. We can ask hard questions about power, distribution, and democratic agency without resorting to apocalyptic warnings or simplistic invective. We can distinguish between technologies that genuinely serve human needs and technologies deployed primarily to serve capital accumulation. We can imagine and fight for futures that harness the genuine potential of AI whilst avoiding its worst possibilities.

This requires moving beyond the theatre of online outrage to the harder work of analysis, organisation, and political struggle. It means building coalitions, not just mobs. It means making specific demands, not just expressing general opposition. It means distinguishing carefully between what we’re fighting against and what we’re fighting for. The Luddites, for all their failures, understood this. Their struggle was specific, targeted, and embedded in concrete demands for fair treatment within their communities. They deserve to be remembered accurately, not as technophobic fools but as workers who fought for dignity and autonomy against a system that offered them neither. And they deserve successors who are worthy of the name.