this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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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.
The work Linus is referring to is authoring commit messages in the Linux kernel.
He's arguing for letting the AI write the commit message. Honest question for you; if a person does not have the ability to articulate something like a change to the kernel, how do we know they understand the change?
Yea reactionary thinking is easier for most people than nuance.