Beautiful work, Carlo — as usual, there are multiple passages here worthy of restacking. The Luddites you describe feel like the mirror image of today’s artists, coders, and craftspeople watching their creative labor absorbed into systems they never consented to. It seems the enclosures just changed terrain: once the Commons were fields; now they’re datasets. What was a land grab is now a global scrape of the cultural archive.
Strange synchronicity—I published Beyond the Black Box the same day.
My piece looks at how the black-box monopolies of AI echo similar historical enclosures (via The Church and the printing press), and how we might still reclaim intelligence itself as a public good.
Grateful for your essay — it restores necessary nuance to a term (“Luddite”) that’s been flattened by the very forces it once resisted, and highlights the methods in desperate need of contemporary retrieval. Cheers, mate!
This essay succeeds admirably in rescuing the Luddites from caricature. The historical reconstruction is precise and revelatory: their struggle targeted not technology as such, but specific deployments of machinery that undermined wages, eroded craft autonomy, and degraded product quality. The connection to contemporary AI debates—where business models again seem to trump questions of social purpose—is both timely and necessary.
Yet the essay contains a striking methodological tension. It demands exactly the kind of differentiated analysis in its historical reconstruction that it then abandons in its framing narrative. The result is an argument that intermittently undermines its own intellectual rigor.
Consider the careful distinctions the essay draws: the Luddites destroyed *certain* machines used in *particular* ways by *specific* employers. They were not anti-technology but anti-exploitation. This is exemplary historical work—granular, context-sensitive, resistant to simplification.
But this precision dissolves in the broader frame. The “rapacious mill owners,” “complicit state,” and “moral economy under siege” narrative homogenizes what were surely more fractured social fields. Three dimensions reveal this flattening:
**The consumer perspective.** The treatment of cheap mass goods focuses almost exclusively on degradation—of quality, of dignity, of craft standards. What receives insufficient weight is that broader access to previously unaffordable goods represented a profound shift in material welfare. The “moral economy” thus risks appearing as the producer’s viewpoint presented as universal principle, rather than one legitimate interest among several.
**The craft elites’ market position.** As you note, the Luddites were highly skilled artisans defending hard-won privileges. One could describe their resistance as a conflict between two elite formations: guild-based versus industrial. The former held moral advantages, but also defended exclusionary practices that limited market access. This complexity—moral economy and market power intertwined—is historically more accurate than the simpler narrative of virtue resisting exploitation.
**The homogenization of actors.** The essay critiques online discourse for reducing complex struggles to “simple invectives shouted to the baying mob,” yet its own narrative frequently operates with monolithic categories: “the state,” “the manufacturers,” “the workers.” This flattens social fields that were internally fractured along lines of interest, geography, and market position—differentiations that shaped these conflicts as much as the binary opposition between capital and labor.
The claim that more troops were deployed against the Luddites than against Napoleon exemplifies the problem. Dramatically compelling, historically doubtful, the assertion circulates in activist literature as rhetorical ammunition. Such figures, when left unverified, give critics grounds to dismiss otherwise serious arguments. More fundamentally, they reflect the essay’s occasional preference for rhetorical force over analytical precision—exactly what it critiques in the “baying mob” discourse it opposes.
When transposing the Luddite framework to AI, the analysis is often compelling—particularly regarding power concentration and enclosure-like dynamics in data extraction. But here too, the balance tilts asymmetrically. The essay’s strength lies in asking *which* AI systems, deployed *how*, serve *whose* interests. That specificity would gain from recognizing genuine welfare effects—expanded access, inclusion, time savings, lower entry barriers—alongside genuine harms. Otherwise “the common good” functions as rhetorical placeholder rather than analytical principle.
The essay demonstrates convincingly that the Luddites made careful, contextual judgments about technology within economic systems. What’s missing is the application of that same standard to its own historical and contemporary analysis. The result oscillates between rigorous differentiation and schematic moralization—between the kind of thinking it advocates and the kind it critiques.
The essay’s fundamental insight is correct: technology is not destiny, and the rhetoric of inevitability serves power. But that insight gains force from analytical precision, not from reproducing in inverse form the very simplifications one opposes. The “moral economy” becomes compelling not as nostalgic ideal but as complex, contested practice with real benefits and real limitations. The Luddites become instructive not as heroes defending virtue against evil but as skilled workers navigating impossible contradictions with imperfect tools.
Few voices manage to challenge both technophilia and moral panic with such conviction. This one nearly does. It would succeed fully by holding itself to the standard of differentiated, context-sensitive analysis it applies to the Luddites themselves.
Carlo and we readers are fortunate to have such a thoughtful analysis of this essay. I understand it in detail but the general thrust seems to be to ask for an equivalency between those who were executed and their executioners.
Sure, the state and their hired executioners also emerged from complex social fields, alike in complexity to the social fields of those they murdered. But I feel their positions in history are not equivalent, just as I feel the positions of the majority today are not equivalent to the oligarchs that are organizing to send masked men to grab us off the streets when they don't like what we say.
I recognize this sounds anti-intellectual for, of course, evil people are shaped by social forces that should not be "flattened" just as much those they enslave and torture and rob. But still . . . investigating those forces should not be used as a way to justify evil actions. To dismiss concepts like the state and the manufacturers as improperly flattening risks claiming no political action is justified.
I'm willing to believe I misread your subtext. It may just be my ideology speaking, as I am caught up in a social field that produces ideas like mine :)
Main take away: I was invigorated by your thoughtful, smart analysis.
Thank you for this thoughtful response—and for the opportunity to clarify what I fear was a significant misreading.
The concern you raise—that I’m asking for moral equivalency between those executed and their executioners—mistakes a methodological point for an ethical one. I want to distinguish carefully between two different claims:
**The epistemological claim:** Historical narratives impose coherence retrospectively. We organize events into intelligible patterns that the participants themselves did not experience as such. This is not a novel observation—historians have long recognized that causation becomes visible only after the fact, that “the state” or “the manufacturers” were far more internally fractured in the moment than they appear in retrospect. My comment simply noted that the essay, despite its excellent granular work on the Luddites themselves, occasionally flattens these surrounding forces in ways that make the conflict appear more binary than it was.
**The moral claim:** State violence against workers defending their livelihoods was unjust. Full stop. Nothing in my comment challenges this, and I regret if the phrasing suggested otherwise.
These are not the same claim. One can—and should—insist on more complete historical description without implying moral equivalence. When I noted that consumers gained access to previously unaffordable goods, I was not suggesting this justifies exploitation. I was pointing out that the essay invokes “the common good” while attending primarily to the producer’s perspective. A fuller accounting would acknowledge both the genuine losses (craft autonomy, wages, dignity) and the genuine gains (material access, affordability) without letting one cancel out the other.
Similarly, when I noted that the Luddites were skilled elites defending market positions, I was not diminishing their cause but enriching our understanding of it. Recognizing complexity is not the same as denying justice. The Luddites can be simultaneously defending legitimate interests *and* particular privileges. Historical actors are rarely simple.
This matters because imprecise historical argument gives critics easy grounds for dismissal. One minor but telling example: the claim that more troops were deployed against the Luddites than against Napoleon is technically accurate only for a brief moment at the beginning of the Peninsular War, but becomes deeply misleading when that temporal specificity is omitted. Such dramatic figures, when stripped of qualifying context, give critics easy grounds for dismissal while exemplifying precisely the kind of selective framing the essay otherwise resists.
You write that investigating the social forces shaping oppressors “should not be used as a way to justify evil actions.” Agreed entirely. But I made no such justification. Understanding is not excusing. Describing complexity is not endorsing outcomes. The demand for richer historical analysis does not imply moral agnosticism—it’s simply a recognition that oversimplified narratives, however well-intentioned, ultimately serve no one’s interests.
I appreciate that this discussion has remained civil. The distinction between methodological rigor and moral relativism is genuinely important, and I’m grateful for the chance to make it explicit.
This is so cool! I so rarely encounter a deep thinker who also writes as clearly as you do. Almost like I'm talking to a superior intelligence.
So you have well foregrounded what was bothering me. The search for historical narratives that do not oversimplify seems to set us on a path toward endless revisions. After all, each new age will find new concepts and new ways to further complicate the past. We will never NOT have an oversimplified history of what was. The map is not the territory; the history is the not the past.
So, I think where we may disagree is in your conclusion that: ". . . oversimplified narratives, however well-intentioned, ultimately serve no one’s interests." But they do serve the interests of those who want to rally people to action.
"Oversimplified narratives" about, e.g. nondocumented immigrants, are serving the interests of many very powerful and rich people in the USA right now, and seem likely to continue to serve them until, perhaps, we are not a constitutional democracy any more.
In the face of emergencies, oversimplified narratives--e.g. that they are bad guys and we have the arc of history on our side--are required.
So really, Marc, all I was doing before and am doing now is expressing my own pain at having spent many years teaching and writing books trying always to do a better, deeper, more honest analysis, while meantime many of the people I grew up with (e.g. Mitch McConnell) headed off to positions of political power where, using their simplistic ideas, they initiated wars and encouraged the imprisonment of millions of people.
I don't know how to reconcile my taste and enjoyment of smart thinking like you and Carlo show here, and my wish to oppose today's executioners.
PS I don't expect you to solve my personal problem--but wanted to share, honestly, why I responded as I did.
Thank you for this honest and generous response—it helps me understand the real tension you’re grappling with.
I think we may be closer than it appears. The question isn’t whether simplification is inevitable (it is), but whether *strategic* simplification for political ends differs from the simplifications we rightly criticize. I would argue it doesn’t—or at least, that the difference is far smaller than we’d like to believe.
You contrast the pursuit of deeper analysis with political action based on simplistic ideas. But this may be a false opposition: simplified narratives don’t belong exclusively to one side. They’re the fuel that feeds polarization itself. Once we accept that “our” oversimplifications are justified because theirs are dangerous, we’ve entered a spiral where each side’s reductionism validates and amplifies the other’s. McConnell didn’t emerge from nowhere—he arose in a field already shaped by simplified, competing narratives.
The Greenpeace seal campaign wasn’t harmful despite being effective; it was harmful *because* it was so effective while operating at a level of abstraction that failed to account for the distinction between industrial seal hunting and Inuit subsistence practices. High effectiveness combined with insufficient nuance produces precisely the kind of collateral damage we should fear most: well-intentioned activists achieving their goals while devastating the communities they claimed to protect. The campaign succeeded brilliantly at the abstract level—collapsing the commercial market for seal products—while catastrophically failing at the concrete level where Inuit communities lived with the consequences. What made this possible was the distance between decision and consequence, between abstract goal and concrete reality.
This suggests a different path: political engagement that remains rooted in the local, in contexts where one is directly affected or accountable for consequences. Not because this is morally superior, but because it’s where our knowledge is most reliable and our responsibility most concrete. The abstract—“the state,” “the system,” “the manufacturers”—is where oversimplification becomes both easiest and most dangerous, and where the gap between intention and outcome widens most dramatically.
I don’t think this solves your dilemma entirely. But perhaps the question isn’t how to reconcile deep thinking with opposing executioners, but whether opposing them effectively requires the very precision we’re tempted to abandon in emergencies. Simplified narratives may mobilize people, but if that mobilization produces unintended devastation, we might ask what we’ve actually accomplished.
The expanding of your position to the importance of local knowledge in creating nuance seems really important to me. And I agree--having done a bunch of work on Indigenous knowledge over the years.
And your vision, I now see, is utopian, in the best way--not dreamy but looking for actual long-lasting well-being, not just political victories. Thanks for your thoughtfulness throughout this dialogue.
Beautiful work, Carlo — as usual, there are multiple passages here worthy of restacking. The Luddites you describe feel like the mirror image of today’s artists, coders, and craftspeople watching their creative labor absorbed into systems they never consented to. It seems the enclosures just changed terrain: once the Commons were fields; now they’re datasets. What was a land grab is now a global scrape of the cultural archive.
Strange synchronicity—I published Beyond the Black Box the same day.
https://open.substack.com/pub/deadairhead/p/beyond-the-black-box?r=m81rp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
My piece looks at how the black-box monopolies of AI echo similar historical enclosures (via The Church and the printing press), and how we might still reclaim intelligence itself as a public good.
Grateful for your essay — it restores necessary nuance to a term (“Luddite”) that’s been flattened by the very forces it once resisted, and highlights the methods in desperate need of contemporary retrieval. Cheers, mate!
Might be my favourite piece of yours to date, Carlo!
The more I learnt about the Luddites the more I liked them....as you can probably tell.
I just had stereotypes in my head, not history, about them. Thanks so much for raising my consciousness.
This essay succeeds admirably in rescuing the Luddites from caricature. The historical reconstruction is precise and revelatory: their struggle targeted not technology as such, but specific deployments of machinery that undermined wages, eroded craft autonomy, and degraded product quality. The connection to contemporary AI debates—where business models again seem to trump questions of social purpose—is both timely and necessary.
Yet the essay contains a striking methodological tension. It demands exactly the kind of differentiated analysis in its historical reconstruction that it then abandons in its framing narrative. The result is an argument that intermittently undermines its own intellectual rigor.
Consider the careful distinctions the essay draws: the Luddites destroyed *certain* machines used in *particular* ways by *specific* employers. They were not anti-technology but anti-exploitation. This is exemplary historical work—granular, context-sensitive, resistant to simplification.
But this precision dissolves in the broader frame. The “rapacious mill owners,” “complicit state,” and “moral economy under siege” narrative homogenizes what were surely more fractured social fields. Three dimensions reveal this flattening:
**The consumer perspective.** The treatment of cheap mass goods focuses almost exclusively on degradation—of quality, of dignity, of craft standards. What receives insufficient weight is that broader access to previously unaffordable goods represented a profound shift in material welfare. The “moral economy” thus risks appearing as the producer’s viewpoint presented as universal principle, rather than one legitimate interest among several.
**The craft elites’ market position.** As you note, the Luddites were highly skilled artisans defending hard-won privileges. One could describe their resistance as a conflict between two elite formations: guild-based versus industrial. The former held moral advantages, but also defended exclusionary practices that limited market access. This complexity—moral economy and market power intertwined—is historically more accurate than the simpler narrative of virtue resisting exploitation.
**The homogenization of actors.** The essay critiques online discourse for reducing complex struggles to “simple invectives shouted to the baying mob,” yet its own narrative frequently operates with monolithic categories: “the state,” “the manufacturers,” “the workers.” This flattens social fields that were internally fractured along lines of interest, geography, and market position—differentiations that shaped these conflicts as much as the binary opposition between capital and labor.
The claim that more troops were deployed against the Luddites than against Napoleon exemplifies the problem. Dramatically compelling, historically doubtful, the assertion circulates in activist literature as rhetorical ammunition. Such figures, when left unverified, give critics grounds to dismiss otherwise serious arguments. More fundamentally, they reflect the essay’s occasional preference for rhetorical force over analytical precision—exactly what it critiques in the “baying mob” discourse it opposes.
When transposing the Luddite framework to AI, the analysis is often compelling—particularly regarding power concentration and enclosure-like dynamics in data extraction. But here too, the balance tilts asymmetrically. The essay’s strength lies in asking *which* AI systems, deployed *how*, serve *whose* interests. That specificity would gain from recognizing genuine welfare effects—expanded access, inclusion, time savings, lower entry barriers—alongside genuine harms. Otherwise “the common good” functions as rhetorical placeholder rather than analytical principle.
The essay demonstrates convincingly that the Luddites made careful, contextual judgments about technology within economic systems. What’s missing is the application of that same standard to its own historical and contemporary analysis. The result oscillates between rigorous differentiation and schematic moralization—between the kind of thinking it advocates and the kind it critiques.
The essay’s fundamental insight is correct: technology is not destiny, and the rhetoric of inevitability serves power. But that insight gains force from analytical precision, not from reproducing in inverse form the very simplifications one opposes. The “moral economy” becomes compelling not as nostalgic ideal but as complex, contested practice with real benefits and real limitations. The Luddites become instructive not as heroes defending virtue against evil but as skilled workers navigating impossible contradictions with imperfect tools.
Few voices manage to challenge both technophilia and moral panic with such conviction. This one nearly does. It would succeed fully by holding itself to the standard of differentiated, context-sensitive analysis it applies to the Luddites themselves.
Carlo and we readers are fortunate to have such a thoughtful analysis of this essay. I understand it in detail but the general thrust seems to be to ask for an equivalency between those who were executed and their executioners.
Sure, the state and their hired executioners also emerged from complex social fields, alike in complexity to the social fields of those they murdered. But I feel their positions in history are not equivalent, just as I feel the positions of the majority today are not equivalent to the oligarchs that are organizing to send masked men to grab us off the streets when they don't like what we say.
I recognize this sounds anti-intellectual for, of course, evil people are shaped by social forces that should not be "flattened" just as much those they enslave and torture and rob. But still . . . investigating those forces should not be used as a way to justify evil actions. To dismiss concepts like the state and the manufacturers as improperly flattening risks claiming no political action is justified.
I'm willing to believe I misread your subtext. It may just be my ideology speaking, as I am caught up in a social field that produces ideas like mine :)
Main take away: I was invigorated by your thoughtful, smart analysis.
Thank you for this thoughtful response—and for the opportunity to clarify what I fear was a significant misreading.
The concern you raise—that I’m asking for moral equivalency between those executed and their executioners—mistakes a methodological point for an ethical one. I want to distinguish carefully between two different claims:
**The epistemological claim:** Historical narratives impose coherence retrospectively. We organize events into intelligible patterns that the participants themselves did not experience as such. This is not a novel observation—historians have long recognized that causation becomes visible only after the fact, that “the state” or “the manufacturers” were far more internally fractured in the moment than they appear in retrospect. My comment simply noted that the essay, despite its excellent granular work on the Luddites themselves, occasionally flattens these surrounding forces in ways that make the conflict appear more binary than it was.
**The moral claim:** State violence against workers defending their livelihoods was unjust. Full stop. Nothing in my comment challenges this, and I regret if the phrasing suggested otherwise.
These are not the same claim. One can—and should—insist on more complete historical description without implying moral equivalence. When I noted that consumers gained access to previously unaffordable goods, I was not suggesting this justifies exploitation. I was pointing out that the essay invokes “the common good” while attending primarily to the producer’s perspective. A fuller accounting would acknowledge both the genuine losses (craft autonomy, wages, dignity) and the genuine gains (material access, affordability) without letting one cancel out the other.
Similarly, when I noted that the Luddites were skilled elites defending market positions, I was not diminishing their cause but enriching our understanding of it. Recognizing complexity is not the same as denying justice. The Luddites can be simultaneously defending legitimate interests *and* particular privileges. Historical actors are rarely simple.
This matters because imprecise historical argument gives critics easy grounds for dismissal. One minor but telling example: the claim that more troops were deployed against the Luddites than against Napoleon is technically accurate only for a brief moment at the beginning of the Peninsular War, but becomes deeply misleading when that temporal specificity is omitted. Such dramatic figures, when stripped of qualifying context, give critics easy grounds for dismissal while exemplifying precisely the kind of selective framing the essay otherwise resists.
You write that investigating the social forces shaping oppressors “should not be used as a way to justify evil actions.” Agreed entirely. But I made no such justification. Understanding is not excusing. Describing complexity is not endorsing outcomes. The demand for richer historical analysis does not imply moral agnosticism—it’s simply a recognition that oversimplified narratives, however well-intentioned, ultimately serve no one’s interests.
I appreciate that this discussion has remained civil. The distinction between methodological rigor and moral relativism is genuinely important, and I’m grateful for the chance to make it explicit.
This is so cool! I so rarely encounter a deep thinker who also writes as clearly as you do. Almost like I'm talking to a superior intelligence.
So you have well foregrounded what was bothering me. The search for historical narratives that do not oversimplify seems to set us on a path toward endless revisions. After all, each new age will find new concepts and new ways to further complicate the past. We will never NOT have an oversimplified history of what was. The map is not the territory; the history is the not the past.
So, I think where we may disagree is in your conclusion that: ". . . oversimplified narratives, however well-intentioned, ultimately serve no one’s interests." But they do serve the interests of those who want to rally people to action.
"Oversimplified narratives" about, e.g. nondocumented immigrants, are serving the interests of many very powerful and rich people in the USA right now, and seem likely to continue to serve them until, perhaps, we are not a constitutional democracy any more.
In the face of emergencies, oversimplified narratives--e.g. that they are bad guys and we have the arc of history on our side--are required.
So really, Marc, all I was doing before and am doing now is expressing my own pain at having spent many years teaching and writing books trying always to do a better, deeper, more honest analysis, while meantime many of the people I grew up with (e.g. Mitch McConnell) headed off to positions of political power where, using their simplistic ideas, they initiated wars and encouraged the imprisonment of millions of people.
I don't know how to reconcile my taste and enjoyment of smart thinking like you and Carlo show here, and my wish to oppose today's executioners.
PS I don't expect you to solve my personal problem--but wanted to share, honestly, why I responded as I did.
Thank you for this honest and generous response—it helps me understand the real tension you’re grappling with.
I think we may be closer than it appears. The question isn’t whether simplification is inevitable (it is), but whether *strategic* simplification for political ends differs from the simplifications we rightly criticize. I would argue it doesn’t—or at least, that the difference is far smaller than we’d like to believe.
You contrast the pursuit of deeper analysis with political action based on simplistic ideas. But this may be a false opposition: simplified narratives don’t belong exclusively to one side. They’re the fuel that feeds polarization itself. Once we accept that “our” oversimplifications are justified because theirs are dangerous, we’ve entered a spiral where each side’s reductionism validates and amplifies the other’s. McConnell didn’t emerge from nowhere—he arose in a field already shaped by simplified, competing narratives.
The Greenpeace seal campaign wasn’t harmful despite being effective; it was harmful *because* it was so effective while operating at a level of abstraction that failed to account for the distinction between industrial seal hunting and Inuit subsistence practices. High effectiveness combined with insufficient nuance produces precisely the kind of collateral damage we should fear most: well-intentioned activists achieving their goals while devastating the communities they claimed to protect. The campaign succeeded brilliantly at the abstract level—collapsing the commercial market for seal products—while catastrophically failing at the concrete level where Inuit communities lived with the consequences. What made this possible was the distance between decision and consequence, between abstract goal and concrete reality.
This suggests a different path: political engagement that remains rooted in the local, in contexts where one is directly affected or accountable for consequences. Not because this is morally superior, but because it’s where our knowledge is most reliable and our responsibility most concrete. The abstract—“the state,” “the system,” “the manufacturers”—is where oversimplification becomes both easiest and most dangerous, and where the gap between intention and outcome widens most dramatically.
I don’t think this solves your dilemma entirely. But perhaps the question isn’t how to reconcile deep thinking with opposing executioners, but whether opposing them effectively requires the very precision we’re tempted to abandon in emergencies. Simplified narratives may mobilize people, but if that mobilization produces unintended devastation, we might ask what we’ve actually accomplished.
The expanding of your position to the importance of local knowledge in creating nuance seems really important to me. And I agree--having done a bunch of work on Indigenous knowledge over the years.
And your vision, I now see, is utopian, in the best way--not dreamy but looking for actual long-lasting well-being, not just political victories. Thanks for your thoughtfulness throughout this dialogue.