Learning from the Luddites in the Digital Age: Retaining Human Agency and Resisting Alienation

Alienation is a serious problem in our modern world. It takes "resilience, boldness, risk, and working together" to maintain our humanity in a world (real or virtual) filled with machines.

Anyone who has made counter-cultural decisions about digital devices or questioned the adoption of a new technology has likely been called a Luddite at least once or twice. The term is used to silence those who dare doubt the sacred narrative of technological progress. But baked into the usage of the term are faulty assumptions about who the Luddites were, and an ignorance of the rationale behind their actions. The term has become nothing but a straw-man, which easily gets knocked over and steamrolled by the momentum of the technological machine.

What if, instead, we steel-manned the Luddite perspective on technological progress so we can glean some of their hard-fought wisdom. This is by no means a full-scale analysis of Luddite history, nor an endorsement of every aspect of the movement. But what we will see is that they were neither dumb nor shortsighted, and have something to teach us about retaining human agency and resisting alienation—a message we desperately need as the effects of digital living are becoming more evident, and AI continues to reach further into our lives.

A Luddite Snapshot

In February of 1812, the British poet Lord Byron delivered a speech in the House of Lords about the violent and riotous behavior that was breaking out in industrial towns across Britain. As a new wave of industrial machinery was sweeping the country, many workers sensed the nature of their work changing, their bargaining power shrinking, and their personal agency in their own labor and livelihood eroding. After various attempts at peaceful resolution with the owners, some workers banded together and resorted to the breaking of specific machines—only the machines that “stole their bread.” By machines that “stole their bread” the workers were referring to new machinery that was replacing skilled labor with low-wage, unskilled labor. As professor Kevin Binfield explains, the Luddites were “totally fine with machines” in general. It was, rather, specific machines that were being used in what Luddites called a “fraudulent and deceitful manner” to avoid fair labor standards and replace skilled workers. Binfield further notes in Writings of the Luddites that the Luddites “were artisans—primarily skilled workers in the textile industries in [England]—who, when faced with the replacement of their own skilled labor by machines and the use of machines (operated by less-skilled labor) to drive down wages by producing inferior goods, turned to wrecking the offensive machines in order to preserve their jobs and their trades” (76).

What the Luddites were experiencing was alienation from their work and their world, and a diminishing window of personal agency over their own lives, and they knew it. Their response to such alienation—not to mention a loss of wages—makes some degree of intuitive sense. It was not a rejection of technology in toto; in fact, many of them were very skilled with the machinery of the day. Rather, it was a rejection of specific forms of technology that they perceived as negatively impacting themselves, their communities, their livelihoods, and the quality of their products.

Might we be at a similar technological crossroads today with tech giants, artificial intelligence, and lives that are lived through glowing glass rectangles? The Luddites remind us that there are more important things than technological advancement and profit margins. They remind us that we need not sacrifice skill, livelihood, and independence in the name of progress.

Retaining Human Agency and Resisting Alienation

The Luddites were not outmoded simpletons or sticks-in-the-mud who feared new machines. While we can certainly find inconsistencies in their actions, they are an intriguing example of those who warned that technological progress comes with unintended consequences. And we ignore them to our own peril.

The Luddites show us the importance of not ceding all our embodied human agency to outside forces, whether, governments, managers, or machines. Their position was not that there is no place for machines or technological advancements, but rather that we should consider how such changes impact our humanity, our families, our livelihood, and the structure and stability of our communities. Have we let the machine intrude too far into our lives? Are there any domains of embodied human agency that aren’t infiltrated or taken over by the digital revolution? Is there any task we do that isn’t somehow connected to a device or the internet? Take cooking and baking—have the fridge and the stove become another portal to Siri or Alexa, another techno-tentacle of the internet of things? What about driving—has it too been taken over by automation and algorithms, computer chips and GPS? Or, consider exercise and fitness—has it been colonized by Fitbits, Apple Watches, and Earbuds as yet another extension of the digital machine? And what about our homes and workplaces—do we ever get a break from the hum and lights of the screen? Honestly, what domains of embodied human agency are truly left that are untouched by digitality? And what does this do to us in the long run?

When we cede human agency, our experience of alienation grows. And the Luddites intuitively sensed this. They were becoming alienated from their work as it was further mechanized. We all want our work to be meaningful. We want our actions, mental and physical, to have a measurable impact on the world. That very tangible and concrete satisfaction is harder to find when so much of our work is digital or mediated through devices. In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft Matthew Crawford reminds us of the importance of engaging our bodies with physical things:

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. (15)

This kind of manual engagement with material reality is one step to keep us properly oriented towards the world as embodied beings. It will take resilience, boldness, risk, and working together to carve out ways to retain our humanity in a world where it seems easier and more glamourous to merge with the Machine. But the Luddites give us hope and courage that you don’t have to comply, and that there might be a better way. And that better way—that sense of community, wholeness, embodied work, and in-person relationship—is looking more intriguing each day.

The preceding is excerpted from Chapter 4 of the new book Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine by Joshua Pauling and Robin Phillips.

Photo Credit- Amazon Books.