Those engines of mishcheif were sentenced to die by unanimous vote of the trade and Ludd who can all opposition defy was the grand executioner made. That produced these unhappy effects. Whatever its presumed benefits, of speed, or ease, or power, or wealth, industrial technology comes at a price, and in the contemporary world that price is ever rising and ever threatening. From a long study of the original Luddites, I have concluded that there is much in their experience that can be important for the neo- Luddites today to understand, as distant and as different as their times were from ours. And as I see it, there are seven lessons that one might, with the focused lens of history, take from the Luddite past.1 Technologies are never neutral, and some are hurtful.
Tools come with a prior history built in, expressing the values of a particular culture.
It was a war on the land, sweeping and sophisticated as modern mechanization can be, capable of depleting topsoil at the rate of three billion tons a year and water at the rate of 10 billion gallons a year.