Oftentimes when Luddite comes up on HN I quote a bit of John Ralston Saul - today will be no different. From his most excellent book 'The Doubter's Companion',

Oftentimes when Luddite comes up on HN I quote a bit of John Ralston Saul - today will be no different. From his most excellent book 'The Doubter's Companion', an alphabetically ordered series of delightful rants on various topics. On the subject of Luddites, he writes somewhat presciently: "Highly trained individuals whose careers were destroyed by technological progress. This progress was treated as inevitable and uncontrollable. The Luddites therefore occupied the only remaining intellectual position, which consisted of rejecting technological progress. "This reduction of attitudes to two extreme positions was accomplished between 1811 and 1830 when the introduction of Watt’s steam-engines and water-driven wool-finishing machines made hundreds of handicraftsmen redundant. Industrialization was spreading from sector to sector and quickly eliminated most crafts along with tens of thousands of jobs. "The Luddites (named after an imaginary leader, Ned Lud) broke up and burnt factories. Their revolt ended in a group trial in 1813. Five were hanged. The attitude of society towards unrestrained technological progress was made perfectly clear. The judge said the Luddites’ actions were “one of the greatest atrocities that was ever committed in a civilized country.” 1 "This was a classic case of provocation and order versus despair and disorder. Wilfrid Laurier described the nature of this type of conflict when he spoke in 1886 about the Riel Rebellion. “What is hateful...is not rebellion, but the despotism which induces that rebellion; not rebels but the men who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone.” "What society misunderstood early in the nineteenth century when faced by the industrial revolution was the full nature of the change. The debate should not have been over whether there should be technological progress or not. It was more accurately a question of progress in what conditions: what progress, when, in what circumstances? Market extremists would argue that what happened was inevitable and eventually brought general prosperity. Their view ignores the social disorder, followed by suffering, followed by serious social disorder that this approach towards change brought on. Communism was the direct result. England, France, Germany and Sweden suffered recurring internal violence throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of it expanding into civil wars. Most of these countries passed within a shadow of revolution. "The question is therefore not whether technological progress was necessary, but whether it was necessary to go about it in a barbaric manner. It can be argued that the Luddites were wrong in 1811. But society spent the next 150 years rendering progress civilized and thereby proving that the infuriated craftsmen had been right at least in spirit. Did these decades of wasted time, effort, lives and money represent an intelligent use of human talents? " The recovery of the quote true meaning unquote, and implications of, Luddite feels similar to the change in consensus around a frog's actual response to being in gradually warming water, or a goldfish's actual short-term memory capabilities. We're aware - and it's uplifting to find TFA dwells on this morphing of our collective understanding - that there was a generally agreed trope, since subverted / rectified, but in this case, unlike our amphibian or piscine revelations, we still find ourselves in desperate need of a way to succinctly describe a relatively calm but firm desire for society to work on an inclusive way of navigating significant social changes wrought by technology before we end up having to react violently to same.