Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job

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In the 19th century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new tecnologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. Our history is the Luddites’ as well, and their insight—that technology was political, and that it could and, in many cases, should be opposed—has carried down through all manner of militant movements, including those of the present. Sometimes we get this tension with technology at work that part of the labor movement just thinks you can’t challenge new technology.

The Luddites and their supporters anonymously sent death threats to, and possibly attacked, magistrates and food merchants. Those practices made their movement very strong and they were able to marshal a kind of discipline that went beyond the workers themselves and into their communities, to the point where authorities who were really keen on tracking them down really struggled to do so. Everything that takes place in the app which is controlled and monitored, where management is algorithmic and individualised. In 1956, during a British Parliamentary debate, a Labour spokesman said that "organised workers were by no means wedded to a 'Luddite Philosophy'.

Mueller notes in his introduction that one of his “goals in writing this book is to turn Marxists into Luddites”; undoubtedly, one of the key strengths of this work is its compelling argument for a Marxist critique of technology.

Hemant is also a best selling author and advocate for Responsible Innovation, with his latest book Intended Consequences being named a Forbes Top Ten Tech Book of 2022. They actually believe they had the law on their side for a while, and that actually the factory owners who were violating the law by using new machines, so they organise to petition the government. Breaking Things at Work presents the decelerationist politics of Luddism as something very pertinent to our contemporary world.

And because their rebellion occurred during the early days of the advent of mass production, the Luddites have become synonymous with an irrational fear of inevitable progress.