In 1811, a group of weavers smashed some looms. Skilled artisans, these weavers were deeply threatened by the invention of the first power looms in England. This new-fangled technology promised to automate portions of the weaving process, reducing both the amount of labor and the skill required to turn fiber into fabric. Not only did these power looms threaten to devalue the old-fashioned looms of these weavers, which were specialized, valuable machines in their own right, not only did the power loom promise to lower the cost of fabric production. The power loom threatened to devalue every ounce of skill and knowledge that the weavers owned. Therefore, a group of weavers, inspired by the myth of the revengeful apprentice Ed Ludd, gathered together and smashed them.
70 years later, a certain German Jew wrote about these Luddites. Karl Marx did not have kind things to say about them. In Capital, he says, “The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments […] a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.” These two sentences are kind of brutal. The heroic act of smashing the physical machinery of your oppression is transmuted into a short sighted hack job, unleashing a level of state repression that the Luddites neither expected nor could survive. Worse, they escalated the English class war at the very moment they obfuscated the aims and strategy of the working class, confusing the harms caused by capitalism’s re-organization of production with the machinery invented around the same time. “It took both time and experience”—a phrase that indexes some 30 years wasted by the Luddites, years spent navigating state repression and recalibrating strategy before a powerful labor movement could re-emerge.
And all of this conditions what follows. A few weeks ago, in New York City, there occurred a Summer of Ludd. A week-long series of social events, skill shares, teach-ins, and other festivities mostly in Tompkins Square and Maria Hernandez Parks, the Summer promised to gather and build a community of neo-Luddites. Instead of looms, however, these modern-day followers of good Ed aim against a broader set of technologies. The Luddite’s Guidebook, the print only calendar for the Summer of Ludd, articulates a critique of “Big Tech.” The short introduction to the event calendar rattles off a list of familiar boogeymen: algorithms, surveillance, AI, data centers. But it’s not quite clear what it means to reject these technologies. The introduction concludes with a set of guidelines: “In keeping with this ethos, we ask that you please: share this information offline […] keep phones & cameras stowed away.” Big Tech refers at once to hardware (physical phones, data centers) but also to a narrower set of software (social media, data collection). It is a social form and an economic landscape. It is a flexible and broad term, very unlike the narrow protest of the original Luddites against the power looms. To find out more about the neo-Luddites’ critique of technology and their rejection of it, I decided to attend one of their first events, a tea party held in Tompkins.
I got to Tompkins early, so I could check out their main table in the middle of the park. The folks seemed friendly enough. They gave me some free zines on how to get off of Spotify (in favor of Qobuzz), a few promotional stickers, and pointed me to where the tea party was being held. I could tell right away that this would be an interesting one. Upon the picnic blanket the crowd was gathering around, there was a single bottle of Arizona Iced Tea and a pathetically countable number of cups. It was clear that very few of us would be drinking any tea. But whatever. The tea of the event was less important to me than the party. I wanted to meet some new folks, make a friend or two, to learn about the organization and the group of people they attract.
A few minutes after the start time, we went around and shared our names and why we came to the event. The organizers, a cluster of college juniors and seniors in immaculately thrifted y2k outfits, went first. They blurted out repeatedly the same story of how they had all met at a library. They giggled at their own jokes. They forgot to say their names. The rest of crowd skewed just a little older. Mostly 20-somethings with a few young teenagers and a handful of other folks. One woman in her 60s passed around a flow chart detailing the evils of AI datacenters. A young man from Philly had grown up above a typewriter repair shop. The high schooler next to me had been put in touch with some pen-pals through a local Luddite Club. The group seemed as varied as the statements in the Guidebook. A grab bag of people interested in a particular aesthetic or a type of community or political resistance to one of a handful of different technologies. Just after we wrapped up our introductions, one of the organizers suggested that we all play a game. The group of us awkwardly shuffled over to an open spot and played a handful of different variations of tag as dictated by the organizers. After about 30 minutes of this, we all dispersed.
The tag of it all was truly absurd. It seemed like the organizers had misunderstood the draw of a tea party. To me, at least, what was exciting about was its open sociality. Meet a bunch of strangers without the mediation of algorithmic interests or anything else. Engage in the work of building community somewhat detached from digital technologies. Though I had fun, tag prevented all that. Running precluded talking. And the slow trickle of folks “needing to take a break” (read: leave to do something else) prevented any conversation in the aftermath. The draw of the tea party, for these organizers, seemed to be the performance of it. There is a whimsy in hosting a tea party with strangers, a whimsy intensified by asking them to join you in some tag. The purpose of the event was an aesthetic performance to the detriment of its social promise. I realized then that these organizers, in their immaculately thrifted y2k outfits, were not ideologically different than any other college kid in the city. Where others danced in Basement until dawn, where others hung around the city’s independent theaters like so many flies, these kids had bought a flip phone.
I think this is a real shame. Or at least, I think this is a worrisome beginnings of what should be a growing new movement. Critics of Marx often charge him with Prometheanism, the belief that technological advancement is necessary, even synonymous with, emancipatory politics. Defenders of the Luddites will claim that Marx wanted a fully automated luxury communism that will never arrive; they will claim that labor and employment are all we have. But I don’t see in Marx that naïve confidence in technology. Even when he critiques the Luddites in the quote I reproduced above, he doesn’t really condemn their tactics. He seems to respect the smashing of the looms, even as he harshly condemns the place of that tactic within the Luddite’s strategy. What Marx and I want is not a blind embrace of the iPhone, the LLM, the Cybertruck, but a sophisticated enough political analysis to join our critique of these technologies with a broader vision of what our society ought to be. I want to argue that we should push past the obfuscating abstraction of “Big Tech.” We need to think hard about how specific pieces of hardware (the smartphone, the data center) or software (the LLM, social media) impact our lives and block the development of emancipatory politics. From there, possibilities for technologies’ strategic rejection, redeployment, and reinvention are bound to emerge.
I believe that two kinds of Luddism emerge from Marx’s critique. Ed Ludd and his gang typify a weak version, a sharp rejection of technology that neither fully understands why new technology has led to greater economic precarity nor offers an alternative way forward. The historical Luddites could never have succeeded. Not because the power loom was an inevitable replacement for the labor of skilled weavers. But because their emphasis on the smashing inhibited their ability to articulate and work towards a future where weavers might benefit from technological innovation instead of suffering under it.
There is, however, a strong form of Luddism. Deleting Insta, buying a dumb phone, shopping at Rogue is not enough. A strong Luddism would approach the question of technology through a comprehensive strategic vision, asking how we might redeploy existing technology towards emancipatory ends in our own lives and exert political pressure to determine the future of tech development. There seems to be a real appetite for this sort of politics, as the tech industry invents increasingly shocking ways to isolate us and spoil our environments, as a mixture of exploitative hardware and software interleave our lives. The growth of the Luddite Clubs and the popularity of the Summer of Ludd demonstrate this hunger. I think a movement oriented around real community building could develop some real political power. Against the crisis of alienation, a strong Luddite movement might try to craft a collective critique of the technology that structures our present and a collective vision for the tech of the future.
But the Tompkins Luddites give that all up. In prioritizing a bit of aesthetic theater over social life, they consign themselves to weakness. A few days after the tea party, I found myself in the East Village with some time to kill. I decided to walk over to Tompkins and see what was happening. Many of the same organizers of the tea party were there, even some of the same Summer attendees. Not one of them recognized me. I remained a stranger in their midst. And I wonder, what would be the real community?