This post is a ChatGPT-generated translation of the original French blog post Luddismes, published on this blog on the same day.
Luddism. Luddism was a movement of rebellion among textile workers that emerged in England in 1811, in the context of the Industrial Revolution. It forms part of a longer and more widespread history of the physical destruction of machines, typically weaving looms and knitting frames. The Luddites particularly targeted equipment whose use threatened their jobs, their pay and their status as skilled workers. Technological developments associated with mechanisation and automation upended the social order, with all the violence of capitalism, and paradoxically, in the end, fostered the development of European societies and improved the lot of the working classes, amid prolonged social and political turmoil. Machine-breakers have never disappeared; in their various guises, they have overlapped with anti-industrial and anarcho-primitivist movements, sometimes hostile to science. One could even include the volunteer destroyers of genetically modified crops associated with José Bové. Both the notion of progress and the label “retrograde” are political and reversible, relative rather than absolute. So what political and social turmoil accompanied prehistoric humans’ taming of fire? Perhaps we should reread Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man, or How I Ate My Father.
Neo-Luddism. This encompasses a range of movements critical of technology, challenging certain directions taken by industrial and technological society: nuclear power, chemistry, genetic engineering, television, computing, cars, and so on. Resistance to computerisation is a particular and important expression of this, associated with the rise of personal computing from the 1980s onwards. Some of its most radical supporters go so far as to destroy computers violently, as did the CLODO collective (Comité liquidant ou détournant les ordinateurs—Committee for Liquidating or Subverting Computers) in France, particularly in Toulouse, or to murder people with parcel bombs, as did Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber), a former mathematician who retreated to a cabin in Montana and became an anti-industrial terrorist. Many neo-Luddites wear clothes woven on looms, and may idealise the handloom in contrast to its computerised counterpart. Like Luddism, neo-Luddism overlaps with anti-industrial and anarcho-primitivist currents, as well as radical environmentalist movements. Neo-Luddism has its intellectual figures, starting with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of course, and including, for example, Jacques Ellul, the twentieth-century philosopher and critic of technological society, whose success in the United States of America was bolstered by Aldous Huxley’s promotion of his work, and perhaps also by his non-Marxist Protestant outlook. Ellul also takes up the phrase “think globally, act locally” in his conversations with Willem H. Vanderburg, published in 1981. This phrase, already attested in René Dubos’s work in 1977, appealed to supporters of the free software movement, which emerged around the same time. In 1990, the activist Chellis Glendinning proposed a programme for neo-Luddism in her Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto.
Neo-neo-Luddism. This seems to describe the various anti-artificial-intelligence movements, whether they reject it radically and in principle, or oppose the economic and social forms it takes. Many neo-neo-Luddites use computers, and may idealise local and sovereign computing in contrast to the commercial computing services of large international companies.
A personal note. Reflecting on resistance to change does not require treating every critique of technology as a rejection of change. Let us distinguish opposition to technologies from criticism of their uses. My generation was in its twenties when personal computing spread and the internet and the web developed. I still recall with emotion the arrival of GNU/Linux, Linus Torvalds’s disruptive pragmatism, and just as much the anarcho-libertarian idealism of Tim Berners-Lee, Richard Stallman, or the Debian project. Nowadays, the freedom that computing brings is being severely curtailed, caught in a pincer movement between commercialism and regulatory zeal.
Related reading.
- The National Archives
The Proclamation of Ned Ludd
Introduction and transcript of a proclamation dated 23 December 1811, catalogue reference HO 42/118. - Eric J. Hobsbawm
The Machine Breakers
Past & Present, no. 1, February 1952, pp. 57–70. - François Jarrige
Technocritiques. Du refus des machines à la contestation des technosciences [Critiques of Technology: From the Rejection of Machines to Challenges to Technoscience]
Paris: La Découverte, 2014. In French. - Steven E. Jones
Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism
New York and London: Routledge, 2006. - Robert C. Allen
Engels’ pause: Technical change, capital accumulation, and inequality in the British industrial revolution
Explorations in Economic History, vol. 46, no. 4, 2009, pp. 418–435. - Jacques Ellul
The Technological Society
Translated from the French by John Wilkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.
Originally published as La Technique ou l’Enjeu du siècle, Paris: Armand Colin, 1954. - Chellis Glendinning
Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto
1990. Text reproduced by The Anarchist Library. - Willy Gianinazzi
Penser global, agir local. Histoire d’une idée [“Think Globally, Act Locally: The History of an Idea”]
EcoRev’, no. 46, 2018/1, pp. 19–30. In French. - CLODO
CLODO Speaks
Interview first published in French in Terminal 19/84, October 1983.
Translated and introduced by Maxine Holz, Processed World, no. 10, February 1984. - Fabrice Drouelle
Le C.L.O.DO. ou la révolte contre l’informatisation de la société [“C.L.O.DO., or the Revolt against the Computerisation of Society”]
Affaires sensibles, France Inter, 16 September 2026. In French. - Federal Bureau of Investigation
Unabomber
Account of Theodore Kaczynski’s bombings, the investigation and his arrest. - Fabrice Drouelle
La traque d’Unabomber [“The Hunt for the Unabomber”]
Affaires sensibles, France Inter, 2 February 2021. In French. - Richard Stallman
The GNU Manifesto
1985. Version preserved and annotated by the GNU Project. - Debian Project
Debian Social Contract
Version 1.0, ratified on 5 July 1997. - CERN
The Birth of the Web
Historical account of the creation of the Web and the public release of its software. - Roy Lewis
The Evolution Man, or How I Ate My Father
New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Originally published as What We Did to Father, London: Hutchinson, 1960.
