Rage Against the Machines: From the Luddites to the AI Data Center Backlash🔒 SSL Verified

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"in History, Technology | September 18th, 2026"

"One often-repeat­ed anec­dote about Mil­ton Fried­man has the famous econ­o­mist vis­it­ing a canal under con­struc­tion in nine­teen-six­ties Chi­na. Notic­ing the sheer num­ber of human labor­ers dig­ging away with shov­els, he asked the offi­cial in charge why they weren’t get­ting the work done faster with exca­va­tors and oth­er mod­ern machines. The bureau­crat explained to him that doing it by hand cre­at­ed more jobs. Fried­man’s reply: “If it’s jobs you want, you should give those men spoons instead.” Whether or not this exchange ever actu­al­ly hap­pened, it illus­trates a con­flict that’s arisen more than once in the his­to­ry of civ­i­liza­tion, pos­si­bly since the dawn of indus­tri­al­iza­tion — and at least since the hey­day of the Lud­dites."

"Accord­ing to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, that hey­day came in 1812, the year of “an assault by some 150 armed labor­ers on a Hud­der­s­field mill, in which sol­diers opened fire on the mob to stop them break­ing into the premis­es, fatal­ly wound­ing two attack­ers.” This was the cul­mi­na­tion of a series of protests across Eng­land, all of them inspired by anger at “new tech­nolo­gies, like auto­mat­ed looms, which were being used in the tex­tile indus­try in place of the skilled work of arti­sans, threat­en­ing their liveli­hoods as a result.” These des­per­ate­ly infu­ri­at­ed pro­test­ers, whose doc­u­ment­ed actions include the mur­der of a York­shire mill own­er, loud­ly expressed alle­giance to one Ned Ludd, a weaver said to have tak­en the bold step of smash­ing a cou­ple of new­fan­gled stock­ing frames some 25 years before."

"The sto­ry of Lud­d’s ear­ly stand against mech­a­niza­tion may be even more ques­tion­able than the one about Mil­ton Fried­man and the spoons, but his name sur­vives today nev­er­the­less. In fact, it’s under­gone some­what of a revival thanks to the arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence boom of recent years, dur­ing which even the mod­ern “knowl­edge work­ers” have come to fear the tram­pling of their liveli­hoods under tech­nol­o­gy’s inex­orable march. Their calls for restric­tions on the devel­op­ment and deploy­ment of AI are, in one side’s fram­ing of the argu­ment, mere­ly the lat­est pub­lic spasm of Lud­dism, a move­ment explained in the video above from The His­to­ry Guy. How many here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, after all, would argue that the mass pro­duc­tion of socks ulti­mate­ly con­sti­tut­ed a real loss for human­i­ty?"

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