#luddite — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #luddite, aggregated by home.social.
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#luddite #nedluddwasright #nedludd #solarpunk
youtu.be/BMewz8ZvM5A General Ned Ludd, was quite literally the Robin Hood of the labor movement until we were told to laugh at him as anti-technology. He was likely fake, just like Robin Hood, who stood up against labor abuse and exploitation masked by technology. The story is that he lost his trade as a weaver and was forced to take a job by the owner class that pushed him out of business with their mechanical looms. He fell behind in production and was beaten for it, a common office motivational tactic back in the day and something our ownership class would bring back if they thought they could get away with it. In anger, he smashed the looms and ran away to Sherwood Forest. This story rippled through the workers who used to own their own lives but were now effectively owned by the owner class. They began smashing looms and other labor-exploitative technologies and writing up their exact reasons for doing so, signing their letters General Ludd.
Of course, because Britain was not a democracy, the government did its best to crack down on labor rights activists, and it became a never-ending struggle, or the final conflict, as the Second Internationale put it, as all wars are effectively waged by the ruling/owner class, but they send us all to die in it.
Over time, Unions and democracy began taming technology to be more balanced between labor extraction and actually beneficial to the workers. It was always more of a truce than anything else, labor being extracted but overall new technology benefiting mankind overall as an acceptable tradeoff. Meanwhile, the Luddites were just a footnote in history of idiots who were anti-technology, which was never the case
Then Web 2.0 came around. It went into overdrive, creating the gig economy overnight, using monopolistic practices, destroying unions and other labor-protective jobs overnight, and replacing them with digital serfs living paycheck to paycheck in a job that can change the terms of service overnight.
Then came Ensh*ttification, where humankind became an annoying problem to deal with in terms of technology instead of what technology was designed to serve, and it became a data-extractive tool for the rich and powerful, squeezing everything we were worth and destroying the planet in the process. Just like last time, democracy, unions, and community are the only ways to at least partially seize the means of production, as Marx put it, the entire concept and point of socialism, so that it serves us and not an owner class trying to squeeze everything out of us, including our lives.
General Ludd needs to make a comeback as a folk hero and not as the laughing stock the propaganda made him. He was never against technology, but technology was used as slavery with extra steps. Robin Hood was a hero for the feudal world that no longer exists. Ned Ludd is his industrial-age counterpart. Luddite groups have started popping up on college campuses, where people learn how to use technology instead of technology using them. Examples of technology that doesn't use you are Linux(operating system) and mastodon(social media), both open source and and and owned by we the people, not a single person is made richer by you using it, its just there created and maintained by thousands of volunteers to make your life richer and as a thumb in the eye to big tech if people decide to but the extra mindful effort to shift over.
Solarpunk is another form of this, which you can see in my solarpunkUSA YouTube channel. That will require us to use old, modern, and future technologies to make a technology community instead of a rent-seeking-centric one, cutting the waste, allowing us to spend half as much, and not have to work at BS jobs that provide no benefit to humanity, just the rich. -
computer crashed last night... I lost all photos and documents... worked ok today but something seems to have stopped me copying from you tube...
sometimes I hate computers... I tend to be a bit of a #Luddite.. I will get my son will check it out at the weekend...
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My reasons for avoiding LLMs at all costs and why I don’t trust the work of anyone who uses them.
#AI #Luddite #Writing https://www.davidtoddmccarty.com/how-i-learned-to-hate-ai/
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A messy illustration of chaos - the original painting by Hugo Vogel was likely helped by colour of flames. Chaos - people objecting to being put out of work by new technology.
#vintageEngraving #luddite #destructionOfPresses #earlyPrinting #fobo #GIMP
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I'm reading Thomas Dekeyser's "Techno-Negative" (h/t to my friend Anna for this).
https://www.thomasdekeyser.com/techno-negative
Here is Thomas talking to @parismarx on #TechWontSaveUs:
https://techwontsave.us/episode/337_tech_refusal_has_a_very_long_history_w_thomas_dekeyser
Also check out his documentary "Machine in Flames:" https://youtu.be/qGVMu5OPu7E
The full #Luddite package. It's a perfect time now to be #technonegative, that's for sure.
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These look delightful, @tg might even approve of them
cf The Last Quiet Thing
https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing
(As a #luddite who thinks technology should help us rather than make us serve them, these seem like tech-the-good-parts to me - though note I have not tried them)
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How the #Amish Let #Technology in Without Letting It Take Over
After three years studying the community, I came to see that the real question isn't what technology can do, but what it asks us to give up.
By: Lindsay Ems, July 27, 2026
Excerpt: "I first began studying the Amish in 2012 as a doctoral researcher of media studies at Indiana University, located within a few hours of settlements in Elkhart, LaGrange, and Daviess counties. Going into the project, I knew what most everyone else did: that the Amish prized simple living, communal values, and religious discipline, while resisting certain technologies such as cars, TV, and electricity. In my initial conversations with Amish leaders, they told me that they were worried that new technology might diminish the sense of purpose people in their communities feel. They worried that new communication tools, such as smartphones and social media, would disrupt rituals, traditions, and their established communication patterns. Above all, they wanted to preserve their shared culture in which each person felt spiritually connected to their neighbors and the #NaturalWorld."
[...]
"In Joe’s settlement, the #BlackBoxPhone was developed in response to a very specific social problem: Roughly 100 crews left the settlement daily for their construction jobs and needed a way to communicate while away from home. At the same time, several ministers believed that the cell phones already adopted by many community members should be abandoned. They worried that private text messages could facilitate extramarital relationships. And #smartphones, they feared, tempted users to access unfiltered, immoral content such as pornography, which could undermine human intimacy.
"The black-box phone, by contrast, was a happy medium that posed threats to community members’ social and spiritual health. Its design reflects that: The phone is an intentionally bulked-up contraption that enables mobile communications from a vehicle but is highly inconvenient to carry. It only allows public, audible conversations — no texting or internet access. It is also shared among the crew members. Ministers in the settlement hoped that adopting these devices would make individual cell phone ownership among their constituents unnecessary.
"As a substitute for cell phones, the black-box phone is a distinctively Amish modification of an existing technology that better aligns with their values. It forces public communicative arrangements, allowing peers to hold each other accountable for their actions. Additionally, this device enables the Amish to achieve their goals and adhere to their social norms without submitting to the individualizing, privatizing, and attention-fragmenting logic of #BigTech."
Read more:
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-the-amish-let-technology-in-without-letting-it-take-over/#SolarPunkSunday #LowTech #LoTech #SmartPhoneAddiction #TechAddiction #Communication #Luddite #Connections #ConnectingWithCommunity #ConnectingWithNature
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“We are interested in building alternative social infrastructure that allows us to be no longer reliant on Big Tech”👌🏻😍
“The new Luddites seek not to abandon technology entirely, but build new infrastructure that embraces proximity and in-person human relationships, instead of alienation and doom-scrolling” 👈🏻 My favourite quote from the entire article! It's pure 👨🏻🍳💋
Wearing my #Luddite badge with pride 🤘🏻😎
#DigitalAutonomy #DigitalSovereignty #SovereignByDesign #FuckTheAlgorithm #GenAI #Luddites
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The luddites were not angry about the new industrial tech. They were angry about abusive labor practices used by capitalist owners.
...basically.
So yeah - call me a #Luddite too I guess..
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Please stop calling yourselves Luddites every time some new technology that you don't like or understand pops up. https://youtu.be/h9jySZkBQ94?si=OKCOdq7VOehVrq9d
#luddite #ludditeClub #ludditeRevolutionNow -
One difference is that someone actually grows real food and (at least currently) industrially-processed food is much worse (both nutritionally and taste/quality-wise) than human-grown and human-cooked food.
Yes, currently, the clothing we wear is industrially made, not hand-constructed, but when the weaving machines were introduced, they produced crappy clothes relative to what experts could do. (The #luddite s were not anti-technology. They were anti-crappy-technology that was being pushed on them by corporate CEOs interested in the bottom line over quality work.)
I think the answer to these arguments is that we are a long long long way from AI providing human-quality scholarship.
1/2
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I remember when Netflix was too good to be true. Mind you, I used to feel that way about Google, once.
While venture capital demands ever increasing profits based on eternal growth, the world eventually refuses to work that way. Now that the commodification of TV drama has reached its peak, fully AI-generated TV series can't be far behind. In the way that Spotify slops AI-generated music into playlists.
@Antigrav is right and boycotting the US is a moral choice I actively support. But revulsion with everything Trumpine is only a part of it.
For ethical reasons I cancelled Netflix and Spotify in 2020 and weaned myself off all big tech. I'm old and grumpy and I've reached a happy stage where nobody can enshittify my digital life, because I hardly have one.
Living in an area with no cellular reception helps -- I don't own a cellphone. I've run my own web and mailservers since 1995, have never used "the cloud" and don't own any device which phones home. Thanks to uBlock I never see a single advertisement anywhere. Not one. Ever. Mastodon is my only social media.
Some may see that as a sad life. In my defence, my collections of books and CDs remain conveniently algorithm-free. Film festivals are a delight and libraries have again become magical places.
For fifteen years I've described myself as an accidental Luddite. These days I'm a decidedly deliberate one.
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I was thinking about the term "Luddite" today. I've read @brianmerchant's work and I identify with the historical movement, but not the colloquial term. I was reflecting on the difficulty of explaining the difference.
Then I recalled the Orphan-Crushing Machine meme. That one is so simple!
I'm not opposed to technology or AI. I love it. But I am opposed to orphan-crushing. I see a dangerous enthusiasm for orphan-crushing in the tech industry today.
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Inside the #Luddite Festival Harnessing Gen Z’s Rage Against #BigTech
New York City’s Summer of Ludd festival is teaching people how to live offline amid the suffocating presence of Big Tech.
#privacy #genz #nyc #summerofluddhttps://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-luddite-festival-harnessing-gen-zs-rage-against-big-tech/
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@MissConstrue You know, the marching song of the original Luddites remains almost completely appropriate today. You'd just need to change "cutting and coating and squaring" in the last verse to "cutting and coding and pasting."
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#Meta conducted a secretive program that directed hundreds of contractors to pose as children while bombarding its competitors’ #AI models with disturbing prompts ranging from suicide to cannibalism.
Internally known as “#Cannes,” the project, run by Meta contractor #Covalen, targeted #OpenAI’s #ChatGPT, #Google’s #Gemini, and #Character.AI chatbots using throwaway under-18 accounts.
Prompts focused on suicide and self-harm, eating disorders, and sex or romance, all written from the perspective of a child.
Wanna know where some child porn is coming from? #Zuckerberg is building it in to every AI he can pay to touch.
Eat the rich. Kill the #AIs. #Luddite the data centers.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-contractors-pretending-to-be-teens-chatbot-testing/
