Writers struck as part of larger contract negotiations; they had relatively tame demands around AI that mostly boiled down to IP contracts. And modern strikes t

Writers struck as part of larger contract negotiations; they had relatively tame demands around AI that mostly boiled down to IP contracts. And modern strikes themselves are really tame compared to what the Luddites did. If people look at the writers' strike as more extreme than Luddite protests, they don't know much about Luddites. The Luddites struck too, the difference is their strikes involved riots where they intentionally destroyed factory equipment and where they clashed directly with police. Modern AI "protests" barely register, Silicon Valley workers just think the backlash is extreme because the modern tech industry is culturally disconnected from the history of most blue-collar labor movements. There is something to the idea that this is the first time that many white-collar workers have ever seriously thought about the cultural impacts of automation before and on a small-scale it's the first exposure many people have to backlash over automation and so that backlash feels novel to them. But that doesn't mean the backlash is actually more extreme now, Luddites captured an attitude about automation's impact on labor and worker rights that is largely absent in today's society.