Ned Ludd

By Andy Kessler.

Ned Ludd writes, was the fabled hero of the early 19th century Luddites who smashed stocking frames, knitting machines for socks, and burned factories to protest job-destroying technology.

The Industrial Revolution created more jobs than it destroyed, and now a similar Luddite backlash against artificial intelligence is picking up speed like a runaway train headed towards Silicon Valley.

Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro, New York's Kathy Hochul, Arizona's Katie Hobbs, and Illinois's J.B. Pritzker, all Democratic governors have moved to halt or restrict data center development or tax incentives.

New York City recently banned AI in public elementary and middle schools.

Never mind that only 48% of New York students in grade three through eight are proficient in English language arts and 57% in math.

Sure, let Ned Ludd teach them.

Los Angeles schools also restricted AI for all grade levels, despite proficiency scores as awful as New York's.

Workers were paid a fraction of what their hand-knotted pieces had earned, and entire villages that depended on cottage spinning were left with little work and fewer opportunities.

In the first murmurs of protest, a tale surfaced about a young weaver named Ned Ludd, who allegedly smashed two stocking frames in fury.

Newspapers spread his name, turning it into an emblem for all disgruntled laborers.

By late eighteen eleven, these disgruntled artisans organized themselves into clandestine bands, meeting after dark on the outskirts of towns like Nottingham and Derby.

Paradoxically, while the protests stuttered local production for weeks, they also accelerated the trend toward mechanized factories that could now churn out cloth at rates no hand worker could match, making mass production a national standard by eighteen sixteen.

The movement’s visibility forced Parliament to confront the brutal conditions of factory life, prompting the Cotton Mills Act of eighteen nineteen, which first restricted child labor hours and laid groundwork for subsequent factory acts that improved sanitation and limited night work.

Yet even as these reforms took root, the story of Ned Ludd and the violent raids fed into a popular narrative that equated any technology with malevolent mechanization.

Eventually, the label Luddite entered everyday speech to brand anti-tech sentiment.

Their actions were motivated not simply by a hatred of progress, but by a concrete threat, the replacement of their skilled labor and the collapse of living wages that had allowed them to maintain small households.

The story of Ned Ludd was a convenient mythic rally cry, but contemporary accounts show that the real fear lay in an economic reality, child labor exploitation, brutal factory conditions, and the sudden erosion of class dignity.

Historians now agree that while the Luddite strikes were violent, they reflected an urgent struggle against an unjust system that could not be ignored.

Then came the steam engine, not a single machine, but a series of incremental refinements that turned raw energy into a practical motive force.

Uh, you know, there, there was, like, well, you know, and you had these big, big giant rooms of women weaving and clothes together, and all of a sudden you have this looming machines that can do the work of, like, 30 women.

And, you know, people, there was a guy named Ned Ludd who went, and one day him and some folks went, and they, they broke up all the machines, right?

Hmm.

Yeah.

All of a sudden you have this looming machines that can do the work of, like, 30 women.

And, you know, people, there was a guy named Ned Ludd who went, and one day him and some folks went and they, they broke up all the machines, right?

Hm.

Yeah.