Rage Against the Machines is Justified
A Defense of the Luddites
No one wants to to be called a Luddite. When someone slings this pejorative at you it means that you are old fashioned, reactionary, anti-modernist. It conjures up the image of the guy who still has a rotary phone and uses a typewriter, who hates any and all new technology due to fear and hatred of the unknown. The Luddite is cast as an out-of-touch bulwark against the march of progress — a philistine who stands between humanity and its next leap forward. But this is a sleight of hand. What if technological development didn’t necessarily represent true progress for the average person? What if these “technophobic reactionaries” were misunderstood? What if the rage against the machines was justified? With the broad proliferation of artificial intelligence winding its way into every industry, promised to be the “next big thing” that solves all social ills, there has never been a better time to be Luddite.
Few groups have been as misrepresented in history as the Luddites. While they are oft-painted as a band of unthinking machine smashers who abhorred the progress of the industrial revolution, they were anything but. The Luddites originated within a sect of highly skilled textile workers who made fine stockings by hand for the wealthy classes and were paid well per piece to do it. In 1811, when the merchant capitalists began to raise the rents on their stocking frames as well as introducing new “wide” frames that could be used by low skilled, low paid workers, the Luddites retaliated by smashing these frames and the automated textile looms which threatened their livelihood1. In fact, the only machinery that the Luddites attacked was that which used unskilled labor or imposed high rents. This was clearly not the work of a people who hated technology for technology’s sake, but instead a group who rightly saw an attempt by capital to strip them of their ability to earn a living by replacing them with labor saving technology and unskilled workers who would undercut them while making an inferior product. The Luddites also engaged in other actions like targeted protests and riots, and wrote letters to industrialists and politicians, explaining their reasoning and their demands2. This was far from uncoordinated reactionary hysteria, it was a highly organized and historically progressive movement for the protection of workers rights.
The Luddites of the 19th century understood a lesson at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution that workers of every generation under capitalism eventually come to understand: every time there is an advancement in technology, that advancement will be wielded by the capitalist to strip the worker of his or her ability to command a high wage, and if possible will replace the worker altogether. The Industrial Revolution itself resulted in masses of people who became permanently unemployed, the “industrial reserve army”. Our new technological revolution of robotics and generative AI is threatening to once again do the same. While generative AI itself is not as godlike in capability as those peddling it want you to believe, it has been sold as the skeleton key by Silicon Valley hucksters who want capitalists to believe that they can use it to replace their labor force wholesale. The allure of being able to lay off most of the country’s work force has proven far too intoxicating to resist. Capital has fully bought in, resulting in many baffling decisions like “AI journalists” that churn out unintelligible slop on news websites and Google’s “AI Overview” that has degraded the utility of their flagship product significantly.
In Capital Vol. I, Marx dedicates his longest chapter how the advent of new machinery impacts the working class. With every new technological development, the capitalist increases his ability to undercut the labor force, moving from skilled workers to unskilled, thereby broadening the total pool of labor he can draw from and paying the worker less. Instead of this technology being used to shorten the length of time a worker must labor to earn a wage, the capitalist absorbs the gains in socially necessary labor in order to make more products in the same period of time, keeping the surplus for himself. While the capitalist makes temporary gains through this increase in production, eventually the entire capitalist class also adopts these technologies and the rate of profit begins to fall. This increased “boom” eventually results in a shortening of the period between boom and bust. The explosion in production also creates a similar explosion in exploitation of the global south, who is relied on to produce the raw materials needed for increased production; “the rapid strides of cotton spinning, not only pushed on with tropical luxuriance the growth of cotton in the United States, and with it the African slave trade but also made the breeding of slaves the chief business of the border slave-states”3
As Artificial Intelligence begins to be woven into just about everything, the contradictions between a workforce that needs stable employment and a technology that appears to be able to replace them heightens. Our tech oligarchs are now openly proclaiming that “humans won’t be needed for most things”4, and promising to replace human teachers, doctors, researchers, writers, artists, engineers, and more with artificial intelligence. While this almost sounds utopian at first glance, the idea that these gains made by the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) will be passed down to the worker, giving us more free time and more prosperity, is delusion — it, in fact, goes against the very laws of capitalism. What is far more likely - and more horrifying - is that these developments will follow the a path laid out by “house philosopher” of the Peter Thiel universe, Curtis Yarvin. Both Thiel and billionaire Marc Andressen have close ties to the Trump Administration and are acolytes of Yarvin (along with J.D. Vance who has expressed admiration for the man). Yarvin has a vision for the future that involves the creation of a techno-feudal state with limited or no democracy that is run like a corporation, stating “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”.5 Thiel expressed his support for this vision in his 2009 essay stating “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”. This movement is rooted in the works of Nick Land, an English philosopher called the “Godfather of Accelerationism” who wanted to create a system built around strong men guided by technology like AI, that would “hard reboot” the administrative state and dismantle democracy. Land called this the “Dark Enlightenment” saying “the ideal state is a capitalist monarchy described as “gov-corp,” the state-controlled by an authoritarian CEO organizing policy according to the dictates of “rational corporate governance.”6
While Elon Musk smashes the administrative state into bits, and Trump announces billions in investment in AI, we are already witnessing the vision of the “Dark Enlightenment” come to fruition. 404 Media recently found7 that ICE is using a database powered by Palantir (a defense contracting technology company whose founders include Peter Thiel) that allows ICE to filter people by hundreds of different categories and mark them for deportation. Clearview AI (another Thiel-funded outfit), is also being used by ICE and the FBI and uses artificial intelligence and biometric data like facial recognition (gathered by scraping billions of photos across the web), in order to identify immigrants and create surveillance dragnets8. The implications of this are stark — the state can now identify anyone who has attended a protest - citizen or not - and target them for repression. A handful of companies have recently secured contracts with various government agencies to use their AI technology to scan social media and identify and deport visa holders who have expressed support for Palestine9. The digital panopticon is being built before our eyes.
The only solution to the hell being created before us is a total dismantling of this system and the building of a new one. Technology is not a dirty word, but in a world where only a handful of people reap the spoils, the gains made by technology will always be absorbed by the top. Technological development under socialism has the potential to free us all and give us more opportunity for leisure, but under our current system, it only has the ability to surveil, undercut, and repress us. The Luddites understood something that we must all internalize, that the capitalists do not have our best interests at heart, and that they instead seek to maximize their profits at the expense of the rest of us. While AI has some negative implications for the environment, those could be negated under socialism by the use of clean energy. The goodness or badness of any tool lies in how it is wielded. As the use of Artificial Intelligence threatens to take away our good paying jobs and place us all under a high tech microscope, only working class solidarity can save us. We must continue to rage against the machines to expose the contradictions of this system and how it is incapable of providing prosperity for all. Capitalism has long past exceeded its utility, and only under a new system, a socialist system, can we truly thrive and provide for everyone. It is incumbent upon us to seize the crises created by technology and use it to advance our vision for a truly equal world. We cannot afford to fail, as the very future of humanity hangs in the balance. We are facing a sharp increase in the suffering of the masses accelerated by artificial intelligence, but we mustn’t lose hope. In the immortal words of Mao, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”
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Conniff, Richard. 2011. “What the Luddites Really Fought Against.” Smithsonian. Smithsonian.com. March 2011. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/.
Mueller, Gavin. 2021. Breaking Things at Work : The Luddites Are Right about Why You Hate Your Job. Verso Books.
Marx, Karl. (1867) 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. / Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin in Association with New Left Review.
Jr, Tom Huddleston. 2025. “Bill Gates: Within 10 Years, AI Will Replace Many Doctors and Teachers—Humans Won’t Be Needed ‘for Most Things.’” CNBC. March 26, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/26/bill-gates-on-ai-humans-wont-be-needed-for-most-things.html.
Simon, Ed. 2025. “What We Must Understand about the Dark Enlightenment Movement.” TIME. Time. March 24, 2025. https://time.com/7269166/dark-enlightenment-history-essay/.
Beauchamp, Zack. 2019. “Accelerationism: The Idea Inspiring White Supremacist Killers around the World.” Vox. Vox. November 11, 2019. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/11/11/20882005/accelerationism-white-supremacy-christchurch.
Koebler, Jason. 2025. “Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People.” 404 Media. April 9, 2025. https://www.404media.co/inside-a-powerful-database-ice-uses-to-identify-and-deport-people/.
O’Brien, Luke. 2025. “The Shocking Far-Right Agenda behind the Surveillance Tech Used by ICE and the FBI.” Mother Jones. April 7, 2025. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-immigration-ice-fbi-surveillance-facial-recognition-hoan-ton-that-hal-lambert-trump/.
Politico. 2025. “The Worries about AI in Trump’s Social Media Surveillance.” POLITICO. April 8, 2025. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2025/04/08/the-worries-about-ai-in-trumps-social-media-surveillance-00279255.
For me, a gentleman in his later work life, I can recall a time when my work product was written longhand, faxed to an assistant, then typed and returned to me for final edits, which I then returned for a final version for distribution. That seemed needlessly laborious even in the early 90s, and I suggested that we work on laptops with email. One was purchased for me, and I learned DOS because no one else knew what to do. I started to produce at a much greater pace, and I was encouraged to train co-workers so they could do likewise. Initially, there was some bump in pay, though not commensurate with our production. Eventually, our pay stagnated, though our production was not expected to diminish. This is a not uncommon experience.
Now come the LLMs, which do in fact make some elements of my job easier. I’m no longer in the avant-garde of these innovations, though my production is greater. My younger colleagues, OTOH, have used these innovations to create systems of production that are much faster than we have used in the past. Production is up and that initial market efficiency has resulted in a modest pay increase for me, and a larger one for my digital native colleagues who have developed these tools. The market efficiency is gradually diminishing, but the demand for production is unrelenting. I have cautioned my co-workers that we may be planning our own obsolescence once the market adjusts to the production expectations and the profit level can no longer exploit this temporary market efficiency. But the lure of immediate pay gains trumps any desire to wrest control of the means of production. This is America, and we will gladly pay Tuesday for a hamburger today.
I hate hate to reference Malcolm Gladwell, but I can usually tell when work product has relied on GPT based on a “Blink” test. There are many tells (rule of threes, “While x may be true, one must consider y”, etc.), and sometimes users will deliberately include typos for authenticity. But the Blink test can discern whether the voice is authentic, though that doesn’t help with calculations or coding.
There is a lot to consider here, as the college-educated class may be relegated to lower paying service jobs. A new definition of intelligence will be mandated. Who cares if you have access to a fund of information and can answer Jeopardy questions when the libraries of information plundered by LLMs grant you easy access? The hope would be that we would be able to use that information for purposes other than capital accumulation, but that requires self-awareness, compassion, and probably sacrifice on behalf of others.
Many things about this are conflicting—and true. The threat isn’t AI itself. It’s the economic paradigm that deploys it. AI is a vibe amplifier, a productivity multiplier, and in the hands of capital, a tool for workforce extraction on an unprecedented scale.
The displacement has already begun. Junior software hiring is drying up. ShadowIT and ShadowAI emerged because individuals inside orgs are using these tools quietly, without permission, just to keep pace or make things easier. Management didn’t lead this. They’re just now realizing they’re behind.
By the end of the year, the workforce will be in an obvious state of collapse. Not everywhere at once, but enough to break denial. Management is only incentivized to optimize their silo, not protect people. And the middle class has long functioned as a semi-meritocratic pseudo UBI—a buffer. That buffer is being erased.
This is the shift from Software-as-a-Service to Employee-as-a-Service. Add one or two zeroes to a SaaS invoice, and a platform replaces a person. It’s already happening. And it will accelerate.
This isn’t a defense. It’s a description. Even if one company resists, another won’t. Even if one region regulates, another won’t. The tech moves freely. It will hollow out regional payrolls and reroute capital into subscription services owned by the same platforms that trained the models.
The capitalists will win. And, as the vibes have been warning for generations—that means everyone else loses.