You seem to be a very technically smart person. But it's not uncommon for people of high technical knowledge to assume that historical, sociological problems are ultimately technical and thus by analogy easily understood from their skill set point of view. It is also not uncommon for such people to think Luddite is a dirty word nominating ignorant laborers who tried to arrest progress.

These people are wrong. History and sociology have a lot of irreducible complexity and analogies and systematization are usually misleading. There is a lot of literature linking Luddite movements with organized and progressive labor movement. As is " What's actually best for society?"

> Luddites to hold the industrial revolution at bay

They never tried to do such a thing. Rather, they made an effort to steer it in a way that would be more socially equitable, such as advocating for better coordination and communication between management and laborers, not unlike the system Germany - a very successful and technically advanced industrial power - has in place currently. Machine destruction was a last resort sort of action with a high correlation with suppression of other outlets for industrial action, such as strict enforcement of the legislation outright banning of any workers associations.

> If you disagree, well, other sites beckon.

This is plain false dichotomy. Equating disagreeing with you with being wrong is not very conducive of an open discussion and I think this kind of posturing has not place in a forum such as this one.

Their movement was very popular at the time, which is why it was a threat to the ruling class, which is why they executed the organizers with extreme prejudice.