It's time to reclaim the Luddite

[marmar]

It’s time to reclaim the Luddite
Big Tech looted our attention. Getting it back means rethinking the world offline

By Andi Zeisler
Senior Writer
Published July 13, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Delivering the commencement address at Wesleyan on May 24th, Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) inadvertently demonstrated the success of a century-spanning smear campaign against a single historically significant term. Murphy had a powerful piece of advice for the graduating class: Resist efficiency.

“Every day, technology companies are rolling out new products that cut the time it takes to do everything in your life, from eating to shopping, to dating, from getting [from] one place to another,” the senator said. “These aren’t products designed to make you happier. These are products designed to make you more efficient . . . Our entire economy is built on rewarding companies that are efficient at making a profit, not based upon how they treat their workers, the social value of their product or the impact they have on the community.”

But Murphy was quick to assure his audience: “I’m not a Luddite.” Because we all know what that means: In history written by the victors, the Luddites impeded technological progress, attempted to halt innovation, and were soundly defeated by the Industrial Revolution. The narrative of Luddites as cantankerous reactionaries has been remarkably durable, and the push to correct the record, as tech journalist Brian Merchant did in 2023’s “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech,” has had little effect on the term’s epic run of terrible PR. The resistance to efficiency Murphy advocated is the actual legacy of the real Luddites, who weren’t opposed to technology, Merchant wrote, but “were opposed to the way technology was being used against them [by] industrialists who used machinery to depress wages, evade labor laws, and degrade the quality of products in order to profit at their expense.”

Casting Luddites as anti-technology, in other words, has slandered an historic labor uprising as a destructive tantrum thrown by fearful, hidebound cranks, and Murphy’s reference to them underscores that the term retains its power to invalidate objections to and skepticism about the weaponization of technology as a synonym for progress. As Merchant points out, the AI founders who misrepresent objections to their technology as ideological rather than material — such as concerns about environmental impact, inadequate regulation, and the theft of intellectual property — are using a similar playbook, portraying anti-AI protests as the predictable backlash of people resisting progress. The difference is that history is no longer written solely by the winners, and today’s industrialists no longer have a monopoly on shaping the narrative. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/07/13/its-time-to-reclaim-the-luddite/

[erronis]

2. Thanks for this interesting post especially the bit about the Summer of Ludd and the Friends of Attention

Last edited Tue Jul 14, 2026, 01:46 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.salon.com/2026/07/13/its-time-to-reclaim-the-luddite/

Among the organizations who participated in SoL is Friends of Attention, whose recently published book, "Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement," starts from the premise that in a limitless expanse of information, attention has value and tech companies mine it with a process the authors liken to “human fracking: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market." The Quaker-inspired coalition also founded New York's Strother School of Radical Attention, which offers courses and workshops on attention as a practice that, maintained and exerted, makes it easier to recognize and refuse such extraction.

[Cirsium]

3. Recommended

Thanks for this.