{"id":23673,"date":"2026-10-13T08:08:36","date_gmt":"2026-10-13T06:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/djalil.chafai.net\/blog\/?p=23673"},"modified":"2026-10-13T18:43:44","modified_gmt":"2026-10-13T16:43:44","slug":"luddisms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/djalil.chafai.net\/blog\/2026\/10\/13\/luddisms\/","title":{"rendered":"Luddisms"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo<\/a>
A drawloom at the Mus\u00e9e des Arts et M\u00e9tiers in Paris. The museum boasts a magnificent collection of looms, and of machinery more generally. There is much here to ponder about the fate of mechanisation and automation, from Archimedes\u2019 screw to the computer, by way of the Pascaline, the loom and the steam engine.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This post is a ChatGPT-generated translation of the original French blog post Luddismes, published on this blog on the same day.<\/p>\n

Luddism.<\/strong> 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 Jos\u00e9 Bov\u00e9. Both the notion of progress and the label \u201cretrograde\u201d are political and reversible, relative rather than absolute. So what political and social turmoil accompanied prehistoric humans\u2019 taming of fire? Perhaps we should reread Roy Lewis\u2019s The Evolution Man, or How I Ate My Father<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Neo-Luddism.<\/strong> 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 (Comit\u00e9 liquidant ou d\u00e9tournant les ordinateurs<\/em>\u2014Committee 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\u2019s promotion of his work, and perhaps also by his non-Marxist Protestant outlook. Ellul also takes up the phrase \u201cthink globally, act locally\u201d in his conversations with Willem H. Vanderburg, published in 1981. This phrase, already attested in Ren\u00e9 Dubos\u2019s 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Neo-neo-Luddism.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

A personal note.<\/strong> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Related reading.<\/strong><\/p>\n