For Context
The Luddites weren’t technophobes. Let’s get that out the way. They weren’t afraid of machines in the abstract – they were afraid of being replaced, discarded, and starved by them. And frankly, I think that’s fair.
The story begins in the early 1800s, in the smoky belly of England’s Industrial Revolution. Skilled textile workers, mostly in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, found their livelihoods under siege. Newfangled machines – wide stocking frames, spinning jennies, mechanical looms – were being installed not to aid the workers, but to undercut them. To churn out cheap goods with cheap labour, often using unskilled hands. Children, even.
Enter the legend of Ned Ludd, the so-called “idiot boy” from Leicestershire, who supposedly smashed a stocking frame in a fit of rage. Whether he existed or not is beside the point – he became a banner, a ghost, a symbol. “King Ludd” or “General Ludd.” The patron saint of the angry working class. His name was scrawled on manifestos and nailed to factory doors.
From 1811 to around 1816, gangs of disaffected workers – Luddites, as they became known – took up hammers and stormed the factories by night, breaking frames and burning mills. They were methodical, targeted, and often principled. Contrary to popular myth, they didn’t go around torching everything for fun. They were protesting the destruction of skilled labour, the collapse of wages, and the sheer inhumanity of being made obsolete by a bit of gear and greed.
The government, of course, reacted with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. They sent in thousands of troops – more than were fighting Napoleon at the time – and passed laws making frame-breaking a capital offence. Men were hanged. Others transported to Australia. The rebellion was crushed, but the warning lingered.
Now, they’ve been reduced to a footnote. A punchline. “Luddite” today means technophobe – someone who can’t work the Wi-Fi or who types with one finger. But the original Luddites weren’t idiots. They were canaries in the coalmine. They saw what happens when technology serves capital, not community.
And looking at the state of things – AI-generated everything, warehouse workers tracked like cattle, deepfakes, dating apps, and devices that listen while we sleep – I sometimes think we could do with a few more hammers.
They said Ned Ludd was an idiot boy.
That all he could do was wreck and destroy.
But perhaps it’s no idiocy to rage at the thing that eats you.
Ned Ludd, whoever he was – and it’s likely he never was at all – became the patron ghost of a generation betrayed. A stocking-weaver’s son, perhaps, or a figure of fantasy whispered into being in the taverns of Nottinghamshire, Ludd was said to have struck down a frame with a hammer, not out of madness but out of grief. Out of watching his trade, his pride, and his place in the world reduced to clatter and coin. In the years that followed, others took up his mantle – black-faced men with rough hands and stronger hearts – and waged a war not against progress, but against its cost.
Not progress. But dispossession.
And now? I look at the youths of today – our own “idiot boys,” and I say that kindly, for I recognise something sacred in the fool – and I see another generation being crushed beneath the gears. Not by looms this time, but by algorithms, predictive models, and little dopamine-snack rectangles that blink and chirp in their pockets.
They do not smash machines. They marry them.
They do not gather with hammers. They hunch, necks bent, over screens, swiping right on life, scrolling endlessly through curated despair and influencer delusions. The machine does not steal their wages – it steals their sense of reality. Their attention is commodified. Their souls are up for auction on TikTok.
When the Luddites rose, they knew what they had lost. They had skills. Meaning. A link in a chain that ran from sheep to stocking, from land to loom. Today’s young people often don’t know what they’ve lost because they never had it to begin with. Their grandparents had jobs for life, houses, perhaps even a holiday or two in Rhyl. Now we tell kids to monetise their hobbies and rent their futures.
And when they resist – when they mutter, or meme, or quietly delete their accounts – we call them lazy, fragile, ungrateful. Just as they called Ned an idiot. Just as they scoffed at the men who broke frames to feed families.
We’ve automated everything but dignity.
Now, I’m not calling for a mass AI smashathon – tempting though it may be to lob a hammer at the smug synthetic voice chirping “How can I help you today?” But I am saying this: technology is not neutral. It reflects its makers. And right now, it reflects a world obsessed with efficiency, extraction, surveillance, and scale. Not love. Not beauty. Not human mess or meaning.
Ned Ludd’s kids live on. They are the ones turning their phones off. They are the ones planting gardens and learning old crafts and asking whether the ‘future’ we’re promised is actually worth arriving at. They are the ones who feel haunted. Because they are.
And perhaps, like Ned, they are not idiots. Perhaps they are prophets.
Because if a boy smashing a loom in 1779 can birth a movement – maybe, just maybe – a girl deleting her Instagram in 2025 can too.
Let the servers tremble.
There’s an irony as I sit here with my computer, so why not cheer me up and Buy Me a Coffee
Wording 