Great summary by Dave Karpf of Brian Merchant's "Blood in the Machine".
"The craftsmanship of the book animates his discussion of the modern-day Luddites. Instead of Kirkpatrick Sale’s apocalyptic warnings, Merchant urges us to think seriously about power and inequality today. The modern-day Luddites aren’t rejecting technology and living simply, off-the-grid. They’re people like Chris Smalls and Timnit Gebru, organizing resistance and demanding that the gains from technology ought to benefit workers and communities.
The modern-day Luddites, in other words, are critical technologists. For the most part, they make use of legitimate outlets for resistance (ones that were not available 200+ years ago). They are not opposed to technological progress; they are challenging lazy, self-serving definitions of technological progress."
"You don’t have to reject technology to be a Luddite. That was always a bait-and-switch.
Merchant convincingly demonstrates that a Luddite is someone who thinks about power, and who demands that we build a digital future where we take seriously how the increases in wealth and prosperity will be distributed.
Take it as a call-to-arms: We should all be Luddites now."
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/we-should-all-be-luddites-now