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1 min read History

The Luddites Weren't Anti-Technology. They Were Anti-Getting-Fleeced.

They smashed the machines, but the machines weren't really the point. What the Luddites actually wanted has been misread for 200 years, and the misreading wasn't an accident.
Dispatch

Dispatch

on

On March 11, 1811, in Nottingham, British troops broke up a crowd of textile workers demanding better pay. That night, workers smashed textile machinery in a nearby village. The attacks spread fast, eventually sweeping across a 70-mile stretch of northern England.

They rallied under the name of a general called Ned Ludd. No such person existed. The name came from a fake legend about an apprentice who smashed a stocking frame after getting yelled at for sloppy work. One made-up tantrum, two centuries of misrepresentation.

The workers weren't actually fighting the machines. They were fighting manufacturers who used those machines to cut corners, replace skilled labor, and slash wages while turning out worse products. Britain was already in the middle of a brutal economic stretch, made worse by a war with France, and factory owners were happy to let the machines take the blame for the squeeze.

Those same factory owners had enough pull in Parliament to get soldiers sent in and frame-breaking made a capital crime.

Ned Ludd never existed. The wage cut did.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011

Hot Take: Swap the stocking frame for a chatbot and the complaint hasn't moved an inch. The machine changed. The result didn't.

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