American filmmaker George Lucas is one of the latest to indicate he’s open to AI in the movie industry.
In a recent interview, the director said resistance to the technology was “very much like sitting here saying: ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’”
The Guardian story was headlined: “George Lucas likens AI sceptics to luddites clinging to horses and carts.”
“Luddites” have sometimes stood in for enemies of progress: those destined to be swept aside in the forward march of history.
The label of “neo-Luddism” or “digital Luddite” is also being reclaimed by people concerned about labour conditions, society and democracy in an era of AI expansion twinned with personal profit.
Read more: Digital Luddites are rising. They want to democratise tech, not destroy it
But who exactly were the Luddites? They were a collective reaction to the traumas of the industrial revolution, in early industrial England.
Their legacy has been profound, as suggested by both negative and positive polemics related to them in intellectual and cultural commentary, art and literature and popular histories produced as digital technology continues to grow.
When trade unions were illegal
As the new political economy, fuelled by transatlantic slavery and colonial extraction, began to transform work practices in England and introduce new forms of mechanization, skilled artisans and weavers resisted. They sought to protect their livelihoods, their ways of life and their communities.
Trade unions were illegal and the workers did not have political representation. Co-operative societies did not yet exist and state welfare was a distant dream. The only alternative to acquiescence was what historian Eric Hobsbawm memorably called “collective bargaining by riot.”
Food riots, destroying machinery or setting fire to factories were in-your-face ways to get employers and local authorities to pay attention to their legitimate grievances.
When the English cartoonist Charles Williams depicted a veterinarian and a blacksmith violently attacking dandies on bicycles for undermining traditional horse-drawn transportation in 1819, the blacksmith’s smashing with a mallet was a clear reference to the spasm of machine-wrecking earlier in the decade.
Williams’s caricature came within a few years of the mass outbreak in Britain when the terms Luddism and Luddite became commonplace.
Famous episodes of Luddism
Historians agree that the most famous episode of Luddism began in 1811 in Nottinghamshire in the English Midlands.
A group of stocking weavers formed a secret organization, purportedly led by a certain Ned Ludd, a fictitious figure also styled as Captain, General or King Ludd.
In the context of widespread economic misery caused by the war against Napoleon, the weavers blamed new, wide-frame knitting machines for stealing their jobs, reducing their earnings and making a bad situation worse. In targeted attacks, they smashed more than 1,000 of the stocking frames, and the property destruction then spread to the textile weaving and spinning districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Fearing the revolutionary potential of this wave of violence — and that English plebeians might follow the French example and overthrow the old regime — the government cracked down hard. It sent in 12,000 troops to quell the riots, and members of Parliament voted overwhelmingly to make frame-breaking a hanging offence.
The ruling classes managed to restore order, despite sporadic outbreaks until 1816, punctuating their clampdown with exemplary hangings and sentences of transportation to Australia. Their determination to prevent revolution, protect property and enable unfettered economic expansion was patently clear.
So do the Luddites deserve such a bad rap? As a historian who has examined industrial-era English history, along with many others, I say: absolutely not.
The Luddites were not blindly lashing out but sending a message; to some extent at least, that message was heard. Along with the political radicals and the labour campaigners over the course of the 19th century, they took part in a prolonged struggle waged for rights, dignity and justice. That struggle partially succeeded, forcing the ruling classes to compromise rather than continuing to rely on brute force.
As historian E.P. Thompson famously put it in his book The Making of the English Working Class, the Luddites need to be rescued “from the enormous condescension of posterity.”
Luddites in verse, literature
One of the few aristocrats to express sympathy for the Luddites was the poet Lord Byron. In his maiden speech in the House of Lords, Byron lamented that “absolute want” and “unparalleled distress” had provoked the riots and, rather than compassion or an attempt to remedy wrongs, all the government could propose was “dragoons and executioners.”
A few months later, he penned a bitingly satirical poem in a London newspaper with a similar message:
“Some folks for certain have thought it was shocking,
When Famine appeals, and when Poverty groans,
That life should be valued at less than a stocking,
And breaking of frames lead to breaking of bones.”
Fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley reacted with similar rage. His 1813 poem Queen Mab, a paean to a utopian future, combined an attack on the state, organized religion and the soul-destroying capitalism of the new machine age.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of Percy and daughter of feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, was also inspired by Luddism in her writing of the 1818 novel Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein’s creation, the Monster, like Ned Ludd, only became violent and destructive when horrendously mistreated.
The message was clear: technological progress was not necessarily in itself evil, but if the outcome was a vicious zero-sum game of winners and losers, then industrial capitalism was deeply inhumane and resistance was inevitable.
These were just the earliest writers who reacted to the Luddites. Notable later novelists tilling the same furrow included Charlotte Brontë and Samuel Butler.
Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley, set in the Yorkshire textile district in 1811-12, combined sympathy for the plight of the workers with a criticism of violence and a call for paternalism from the mill owners.
Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, the ultimate Luddite fantasy, featured a society that outlawed machines and destroyed inventions to prevent them from taking over and enslaving humanity.
Not blindly lashing out
The Luddites may have partly lost the battle in Regency England; the state and the propertied classes may have prevailed.
But it’s a mistake to see them as no more than victims crushed by industrialization.
Caricatures of the Luddites as history’s losers are simply false. We have not stopped talking about them ever since.
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