Every few months, a think piece appears explaining that Luddites were stupid.
The argument is always the same: they smashed machines because they feared progress, they lost, and history was right to forget them as a cautionary tale about technophobia. The word “Luddite” survives as an insult, shorthand for anyone who can’t keep up. If you have ever been called one for questioning a technology rollout, you already know the subtext: you are afraid, you are backward, and you will be left behind.
There is only one problem with this story. It is wrong.
What Actually Happened in 1811
The original Luddites were not technophobes. They were skilled textile workers in the English Midlands who had spent years building expertise in their trade: operating stocking frames, weaving cloth, finishing fabric. When factory owners began deploying wide-framed looms that could produce inferior goods cheaply using unskilled labor, the Luddites did not protest because they feared machines. They protested because the machines were being used specifically to destroy their wages, eliminate their bargaining power, and produce shoddier goods at the expense of quality and craft.
The movement ran from 1811 to 1816. Groups of workers, operating under the mythical banner of “General Ned Ludd” (a possibly fictional folk hero), organized night raids on factories and destroyed equipment. The British government responded by making frame-breaking a capital offense and deploying more troops to suppress the Luddites than Napoleon had facing him in the Iberian Peninsula. The establishment took the Luddites seriously. They could not afford not to.
What the Luddites were demanding was not the abolition of machinery. Historian E. P. Thompson, whose 1963 work The Making of the English Working Class rehabilitated their legacy, documented their actual demands: fair wages, the right to negotiate, standards for the quality of finished goods, and some say in how new technology was deployed. They were asking who technology should serve, and who should bear its costs.
They lost. The machines spread, the workers were scattered or hanged, and the owners won. The industrial revolution produced enormous wealth and enormous misery in roughly equal measure, depending on where you sat in the hierarchy. The Luddites were written into history as fools, and that characterization has stuck for two hundred years because it is very useful to the people who benefit from unchecked technological deployment.
We’ve Been Here Before
As we mapped out in the nine types of AI anxiety, the fear most workers feel about automation is not abstract. It is specific, embodied, and tied to identity. The identity disruption we called Type 8 (the “what am I if my skills no longer matter” anxiety) is not a new psychological phenomenon. The original Luddites felt it first. They had spent their working lives developing expertise that gave them standing in their communities, income for their families, and a sense of mastery over their work. The factories dissolved that mastery overnight, not because the workers were inadequate but because the economics had changed and the workers were not the ones the new economics was designed to benefit.
We have established in this series that 61% of workers today fear job displacement from AI. The Luddites would not have been surprised. They understood, before the vocabulary existed for it, that technological change is not neutral. It does not arrive from outside society and reshape it evenly. It arrives shaped by the interests that deploy it, and it reshapes society in ways those interests designed.
The Luddites got this right. History softened it by calling them backwards. What they actually were was inconvenient.
Enter the Neo-Luddites
In 2024 and 2025, something started shifting in how younger generations talked about technology, and not just AI. The Deseret News ran a feature documenting a growing cohort of Gen Z and millennial professionals who were deliberately stepping back from digital tools: deleting social apps, using dumb phones, refusing AI writing assistants at work, practicing what the piece called “appstinence.” These were not technophobes in the pejorative sense. Most of them had grown up as digital natives. They were making considered choices to limit their engagement.
Dave Karpf, an associate professor at George Washington University and a longtime observer of technology and politics, published an essay arguing “We should all be Luddites now.” His argument was not that AI is useless or that progress should stop. His argument was that the Luddite question, the original one, the one the history books buried: who does this technology serve, and who pays the cost? is exactly the right question to be asking right now, and that we have been discouraged from asking it by decades of tech-industry messaging that frames any skepticism as fear or ignorance.
The neo-Luddite moment is real. It is messy, it contains multitudes, and it is not purely about AI. But AI is increasingly central to it.
Why Gen Z, Why Now
Gen Z is the first generation to have grown up entirely inside social media. They did not adopt it as adults with existing identities; they formed their identities inside algorithmic systems optimized for engagement rather than wellbeing. The research on the psychological effects of this is not subtle. Anxiety and depression rates among young people rose sharply during the 2010s, tracking the spread of smartphones and social platforms with a correlation that serious researchers have spent years trying to explain away and mostly failed.
Gen Z watched this happen to themselves and to their peers. They are not credulous about the promises of tech platforms because they have lived the experience of those promises failing. When a previous generation was told that social media would connect us and make us more informed and bring us closer together, and then watched it fracture communities, commodify attention, and harvest personal data for targeted advertising, the lesson was not lost on the people who grew up inside it.
Now those same people are entering the workforce at exactly the moment AI is promising to transform every profession. They are hearing the same register of promises. This will make you more productive. This will free you from drudge work. This will let you focus on the creative and meaningful parts of your job. Some of that may be true. But Gen Z has pattern recognition that older workers lack, because they have already been through one version of this cycle. They know what it looks like when the technology serves the platform and not the user.
They are also entering the workforce at entry level, which is precisely where AI displacement is landing first. The ethics anxiety we identified as Type 4 in last week’s taxonomy is proto-Luddite territory: the discomfort with participating in a system whose broader effects feel harmful, even when you cannot opt out individually. Many young workers feel this not just about AI’s effects on the climate or on creative labor markets, but about their own position inside those systems. They are being asked to use tools that may be actively eliminating the junior positions they were hoping to build careers through.
The Spectrum of Resistance
Neo-Luddism in practice runs a wide range, and it is worth being precise about what it actually looks like rather than flattening it.
At one end: full rejection. A small but vocal group of workers, artists, and activists is refusing to use AI tools at all, on ethical or labor grounds, often both. Writers who have signed pledges against AI-generated content. Illustrators who have stopped posting their work publicly to prevent it from being scraped as training data. Programmers who will not use AI code assistants on principle.
In the middle: critical adoption. This is probably the largest cohort. People who use AI for specific tasks under specific conditions, who maintain skepticism about its outputs, who think carefully about where they let it into their workflows and where they do not. This is less visible than full rejection because it does not produce memorable gestures, but it is probably the most consequential position because it is where most people actually are.
At the other end: conscious refusal of the narrative rather than the tools. People who use AI but reject the frame that they must be enthusiastic about it, that their resistance is failure, that asking who benefits is Luddite in the pejorative sense. They have reclaimed the term.
All three positions share the core Luddite insight: technology is not neutral, its deployment reflects choices, and those choices should be subject to scrutiny and pushback.
What They Understand That the Discourse Keeps Missing
The mainstream conversation about AI tends to operate in two modes. The first is uncritical enthusiasm: AI will solve every problem, productivity will soar, the future is bright, skeptics are holding us back. The second is apocalyptic anxiety: AI will take all the jobs, or it will become conscious and destroy us, or it will be used for surveillance and control. Both modes are loud. Both are largely useless for actually navigating the present.
The neo-Luddites are operating in a third mode, which is also the oldest mode: who is this for? Not as a rhetorical question, but as a practical one. Who decided this technology would be deployed in this way? Who profits? Who absorbs the costs? What would it look like if the answers to those questions were different?
This is the mode in which the original Luddites operated, and they were hanged for it. The contemporary version is less violent and less dramatic, but the underlying logic is the same. It is the logic of workers asking for a voice in decisions that affect them. It is the logic of consumers asking whether a product actually serves them. It is the logic of people with legitimate competing interests refusing to simply defer to the people who benefit most from a particular outcome.
It is, in short, reasonable.
Wearing the Label
There is a tradition, going back at least to the Luddites themselves, of reclaiming a slur. They named themselves after a mythical figure their opponents had mocked. Neo-Luddites today use the label the same way: directly, deliberately, as a refusal of the shame attached to technological skepticism.
If you find yourself in that camp, you are not alone, and you are not stupid. You are in a long line of people who looked at a new technology and asked the inconvenient question rather than the approved one.
That is, historically, how the better outcomes got negotiated.
Next in this series, we look at the people for whom the question is no longer theoretical: workers who have already lost work to AI automation and are navigating what comes next.
AInxiety tracks the intersection of AI and the people living through it. Browse the full series or explore the shop if you want something to wear to the revolution.