this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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Lmao your hero is here to call you out on your dogmatic Amish stance and you lot just outright reject him. Absolutely wild.
The Luddites weren’t opposed to technology. They were opposed to, in their words, “machinery harmful to commonality”.
It’s a shame that their name and cause has been totally contorted by the capital forces that opposed them, cuz it’s actually a pretty good lens for analyzing the societal impacts of AI.
After all, you can’t spell “machinery harmful to commonality” without AI.
Very interesting. Great knowledge, thank you. I guess I’ll have to revert to calling it being like the Amish.
Linus is talking about the worker using the technology. He likens it to other tools used in his trade. I don’t see him arguing about who should see the profits from the technology.
I think being dogmatic about strictly not using AI is not empowering the workers who would benefit from utilizing the tool in the correct context.
Luddite is correct. It just isn't the insult you thought it was. I'll add to the above commenter by saying that the Luddites were textile workers, which was the most highly skilled labor force in the world up to that point. They had I think a 6 year apprenticeship to learn to work with their very complex machines. The Luddites were the software engineers of their time.
They didn't want to do away with the machines, they wanted the workers to be in charge of what machines were used, when, where, and how. They were specifically concerned with the markedly lower quality of the fabric being produced with the new machines. In the burgeoning industrial capitalist economy, this could be considered an early example of enshitification. The Luddites were a labor movement concerned with the bosses ruining their craft with cost cutting measures, and they got branded as strict anti-technology primitivists so hard that it's still the common cultural understanding today.
There are of course no modern parallels for this and anyone skeptical of AI's usage today is definitely a primitivist that wants the AI genie put back in the bottle. /s
To quote Cory Doctorow "What's important isn't what a machine does, it's who it does it for and who it does it to."
Yeah that’s a great reply if you were trying to competitively comment but 99.9% of the online discourse against ai is completely against it. Including most of the discourse on this post.
Luddite is not the correct term. These folks are more dogmatic against Ai while Linus is literally talking about workers using it as a tool to make their work easier.
Yea reactionary thinking is easier for most people than nuance.
He's a hero to a cult of tech bros. He's never been my hero and there's many in the Linux space who have been calling him out and asking for a democratic succession plan for ages. He's not some all knowing perfect being.
linux has a succession plan, though?
Sort of. The plan is "convene to make a plan" 72 hours after Linus's git stops updating. I should have been a little more clear though that people have been calling for a democratic secession plan to happen now instead of when Linus passes or steps away.
ah that does make more sense
Blasphemy!!
Can't take anyone seriously that uses the term luddite
I fixed it to correctly compare it to the Amish. Who are just against all use of technology beyond a point.
Linus is very obviously talking about the worker using a tool.
Y’all found a fake pedantic win and rushed me on it because winning is more important than conversations. Kudos on that.
So not being thrilled about huge corpos throwing billions of dollars destroying the environment, ruining people's minds and jobs and potentially killing us all in 10 years is a "dogmatic Luddite stance". Got it.
You could say the same about the railroad bubble, when companies got over excited about rail.
Or the dot com bubble, the Internet destroyed many many jobs.
That’s weird, I didn’t see anyone approving of those things in the original posted text and I definitely didn’t imply any of that with my comment.
Unless I was mistaken this was about Linus saying that using ai is akin to using any other tool.
Actually with some thought, you’ve convinced me.
Hell the printing press is being used by our oppressors to kill the earth. I will be deleting my account and from here on out I will only communicate and read through hand written notes.
You dont know shit ^^
He's not a hero. He's an old man past his prime.