Neo-Luddism
Based on Wikipedia: Neo-Luddism
The Rebellion That Never Ended
In 1811, a group of English textile workers began smashing the new mechanical looms that threatened their livelihoods. They claimed to follow a mysterious figure named Ned Ludd—probably fictional—and their movement spread like wildfire across five counties. Within six years, the British government had deployed more soldiers to suppress these machine-breakers than Wellington had taken to fight Napoleon in the Iberian Peninsula.
The original Luddites lost. The machines won. The Industrial Revolution rolled forward.
But two centuries later, their name lives on—transformed into something broader, stranger, and perhaps more relevant than ever. Neo-Luddism isn't about smashing looms anymore. It's about asking a question that most of us are too busy scrolling to consider: What if the technological progress we've been promised isn't progress at all?
What Neo-Luddites Actually Believe
Let's clear something up first. When people call someone a "Luddite" today, they usually mean it as an insult—a dismissal of anyone who seems afraid of new technology, like your grandfather refusing to use email or your friend who still prints directions from MapQuest.
But neo-Luddism as a philosophy is something different entirely.
Where the original Luddites focused primarily on economics—they didn't want machines taking their jobs—modern neo-Luddites have expanded the critique. They question technology's effects on communities, on the environment, on human psychology, and on political freedom. They argue that we've developed a kind of collective blind spot: we assume that newer technology automatically means better lives, when the evidence for this claim is far from clear.
The movement demands something radical in our innovation-obsessed culture: the precautionary principle. This means that new technologies should be proven safe before widespread adoption, not after. We test drugs before releasing them to the public. Why don't we apply the same standard to social media algorithms, artificial intelligence systems, or genetic engineering?
A Manifesto for the Machine Age
In 1990, a writer and psychotherapist named Chellis Glendinning attempted to give this loose collection of ideas a coherent form. Her essay, "Notes towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto," tried to reclaim the Luddite label from being mere insult and transform it into a banner for conscious resistance.
Glendinning defined neo-Luddites as citizens who "question the predominant modern worldview, which preaches that unbridled technology represents progress." Notice that word: unbridled. She wasn't arguing against all technology—she was arguing against unexamined technology, against the assumption that every new invention is automatically worth having.
Her manifesto raised uncomfortable questions. Who actually creates new technologies, and what values do they embed in their creations? A surveillance camera serves the interests of those who install it, not necessarily those who walk beneath it. A labor-saving device might save labor for owners while eliminating jobs for workers. Technology, Glendinning argued, is never neutral. It always carries the biases and priorities of its creators.
She proposed something that would horrify most technologists: the systematic dismantling of certain categories of technology. Her list included electromagnetic technologies, nuclear technologies, chemical technologies, and genetic engineering. In their place, she advocated for technologies that are local in scale and promote social and political freedom.
The Strange Coalition
Who are these neo-Luddites, exactly? The answer might surprise you.
They include Amish and Mennonite communities, who have been practicing selective technology adoption for centuries. They include Quakers with their emphasis on simplicity. They include environmental activists from groups like Earth First!, who see technology as a primary driver of ecological destruction.
But they also include former tech industry workers who burned out and walked away. Parents who organized against smartphones for children. "Fallen-away yuppies" who once embraced the digital revolution and have since soured on its promises. University professors. Students. Farmers practicing traditional agriculture.
The movement has no central leadership, no membership cards, no headquarters. It exists as a loose network of people who have arrived at similar conclusions through very different paths. Some are religious traditionalists. Some are radical anarchists. Some are simply exhausted by the relentless pace of technological change and looking for an exit.
In April 1996, several dozen of these disparate thinkers gathered at a Quaker meeting hall in Barnesville, Ohio, for what they called the Second Neo-Luddite Congress. Five years later, a larger gathering called the "Teach-In on Technology and Globalization" convened at Hunter College in New York City, attempting to link technology criticism with the broader anti-globalization movement that was then at its peak.
The Philosophers Behind the Movement
Long before these gatherings, a handful of thinkers had been laying the intellectual groundwork for technology skepticism.
The French philosopher Jacques Ellul published "The Technological Society" in 1964, and its influence ripples through neo-Luddite thought to this day. Ellul introduced a crucial concept: technique. He didn't mean just tools or machines. Technique, for Ellul, encompassed the entire system of organizational methods, procedures, and technologies oriented toward maximum rational efficiency.
The key word is maximum. Ellul argued that technique has its own momentum. Once a society commits to pursuing efficiency above all else, human concerns get subordinated. "The only thing that matters technically is yield, production," he wrote. "This yield can only be obtained by the total mobilization of human beings, body and soul."
Consider what this means in practice. A factory adopts new automation not because it benefits workers, but because it increases output per dollar spent. A social media platform optimizes for engagement not because engaged users are happier, but because engagement generates advertising revenue. A school adopts standardized testing not because it improves learning, but because it produces quantifiable metrics. In each case, technique—the pursuit of maximum efficiency—drives the decision, and human flourishing becomes, at best, a secondary consideration.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger took this critique in a more abstract direction. In his 1953 essay "The Question Concerning Technology," Heidegger argued that modern technology represents not just a collection of tools but an entire way of seeing the world. He called this perspective "standing-reserve"—a view that treats everything, including nature and human beings, as resources to be exploited.
Heidegger illustrated this with the example of a hydroelectric dam on the Rhine River. Before the dam, the Rhine was a natural wonder, an object of beauty and awe. After the dam, it becomes merely a supplier of power—a resource in waiting. The river hasn't physically disappeared, but our relationship to it has fundamentally changed. We no longer see it; we merely use it.
This technological worldview, Heidegger warned, leads to what he called "the abandonment of being"—a loss of wonder, a flattening of existence into mere resource management. And the most troubling part? We become so immersed in this worldview that we can no longer recognize what we've lost.
The Predictions
Neo-Luddites have developed a catalog of warnings about where unchecked technological development might lead. Reading through them feels a bit like reading a list of plot summaries for dystopian science fiction—except these are predictions about our actual future.
They warn of humans being replaced by computers, leading to mass unemployment and social breakdown. They warn of genetic decay as medical technology eliminates natural selection, allowing harmful mutations to accumulate in the human gene pool over generations. They warn of biological engineering creating designer babies and deepening inequality between those who can afford genetic enhancement and those who cannot.
They predict disasters caused by genetically modified organisms—crops that devastate ecosystems, engineered microbes that escape laboratories. They warn of nuclear warfare and biological weapons that could render the planet uninhabitable. They foresee control systems emerging through surveillance, propaganda, pharmacological manipulation, and psychological conditioning—a soft totalitarianism enabled by technology.
They anticipate a failure of human adaptation: rising rates of depression, anxiety, and other psychological disorders as people struggle to cope with a world changing faster than evolution prepared us for. They predict widening inequality, social alienation, the death of community, and environmental collapse.
Are these predictions paranoid fantasies? Some of them, certainly, have the flavor of apocalyptic thinking—the perennial human tendency to believe we're living in the end times. But others have aged disturbingly well. The warnings about surveillance and psychological manipulation, for instance, read differently after Cambridge Analytica and the revelations about social media's effects on teenage mental health.
The Dark Side
Every movement has its extremists, and neo-Luddism is no exception. In fact, it has produced one of the most infamous terrorists in American history.
Ted Kaczynski was a mathematics prodigy who entered Harvard at sixteen, earned a PhD from the University of Michigan, and became the youngest professor ever hired by the University of California, Berkeley. In 1969, at age twenty-six, he abruptly resigned his position and eventually retreated to a cabin in the Montana wilderness.
What happened next defies easy explanation. Kaczynski claimed he was radicalized when he discovered that a road had been built over a plateau near his cabin that he had considered beautiful. Whatever the truth of his psychology, between 1978 and 1995 he conducted a nationwide bombing campaign against universities and airlines—hence his FBI codename, UNABOM, later shortened to Unabomber. He killed three people and injured twenty-three others.
In 1995, Kaczynski demanded that major newspapers publish his 35,000-word manifesto, threatening to continue his attacks otherwise. The document, titled "Industrial Society and Its Future," opens with the line: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." It draws heavily on Ellul's critique of technique while advocating violent revolution against the technological system.
Kaczynski's manifesto presented violence as potentially necessary but not politically motivated in the traditional sense. "The kind of revolution we have in mind will not necessarily involve an armed uprising against any government," he wrote. "Its focus will be on technology and economics, not politics."
He was captured in 1996 after his brother recognized his writing style and alerted the FBI. He died in federal prison in 2023.
Other incidents have followed. In May 2012, an anarchist group in Italy shot an executive at a nuclear energy company, claiming credit in a statement that invoked neo-Luddite themes: "Science in centuries past promised us a golden age, but it is pushing us towards self destruction and slavery." In Mexico, a group calling itself Individualists Tending to the Wild bombed a technology institute in 2011, targeting researchers working on nanotechnology and computer science.
Mainstream neo-Luddite thinkers have consistently rejected violence. Kirkpatrick Sale, often considered a founder of the movement alongside Glendinning, helped define the manifesto of the Second Luddite Congress, which explicitly renounced violent action. The vast majority of people who identify with neo-Luddite ideas express their resistance through lifestyle choices—using fewer devices, living simply, advocating for precautionary regulation—not through bombs.
The Models for Another Way
What would a neo-Luddite society actually look like? The movement points to several real-world examples.
The Amish are perhaps the most visible case study. Contrary to popular belief, the Amish don't reject all technology. They evaluate each new technology through a careful process, asking whether it will strengthen or weaken their community bonds. They rejected cars not because cars are inherently evil, but because cars make it too easy to leave the community—to commute to distant jobs, to shop in distant stores, to form relationships with distant people. A horse and buggy, by contrast, keeps life local.
This selective approach produces some results that seem paradoxical to outsiders. Many Amish communities accept some electricity but reject connections to the public grid, which would tie them to the broader technological system. Some use cell phones for business purposes but prohibit them in homes. The point isn't to maximize efficiency or convenience—it's to preserve a particular way of life.
Neo-Luddites also point to the Chipko movement in India and Nepal. Beginning in the 1970s, villagers—primarily women—physically embraced trees to prevent commercial logging, their bodies serving as shields between forests and chain saws. The movement achieved remarkable success in protecting forests while becoming a symbol of resistance to industrial development imposed from outside traditional communities.
Both examples share a common thread: communities choosing their own relationship with technology rather than having one imposed upon them. The Amish didn't reject modernity because someone told them to; they developed their own criteria for evaluation. The Chipko villagers didn't protest logging on abstract environmental grounds; they protected the forests that sustained their way of life.
The Question That Won't Go Away
Most people will never join an Amish community or embrace trees to stop logging. But the questions neo-Luddism raises aren't going anywhere.
Consider artificial intelligence. As systems capable of generating text, images, and code become more sophisticated, we're being asked to make profound decisions about the future of human work and creativity—often without any democratic input whatsoever. The precautionary principle that neo-Luddites advocate would suggest slowing down, studying the implications, and proving safety before deployment. Instead, we're running a vast uncontrolled experiment on ourselves.
Or consider social media. The platforms were built to maximize engagement, and they succeeded spectacularly—only for us to discover, years later, that maximized engagement correlates with increased anxiety, depression, and political polarization. Ellul would not have been surprised. Technique pursues its own logic; human flourishing is someone else's department.
The neo-Luddite critique doesn't require you to smash your smartphone or move to a cabin in Montana. It simply asks you to question assumptions that most of us have absorbed so thoroughly we no longer recognize them as assumptions. Is newer automatically better? Is efficiency the highest value? Who benefits when we adopt this particular technology, and who bears the costs? What are we giving up that we might not even be able to name?
These are uncomfortable questions. They interrupt the narrative of progress that most of us were raised on. They suggest that the future we've been promised might not be the future we actually want.
The original Luddites were defeated by military force and economic inevitability. Their name became a synonym for futile resistance. But their heirs are still here, still asking their inconvenient questions, still insisting that we can choose our relationship with technology rather than simply accepting whatever gets invented next.
Maybe that's not futile at all. Maybe it's the most important conversation we're not having.