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Comment by gremlinunderway | Hacker News Reader

"Neo-luddite" is thrown around by people who don't actually know history and just eat up terminology that was spoonfed to them for a purpose. FYI, the luddite movement wasn't some stupid movement against technology for the sake of being against technology like the eventual term evolved into. Historically, they were skilled artisans who were protesting exploitative working conditions and practices that came about as a result of automation. When some of them started destroying machines, the British government subsequently made it a capital crime to do machine-breaking and violently suppressed these protests and controlled the narrative that the reason luddites were breaking machines was because they were ignorant people who hated progress.

Not ironically, you're eating up the same propaganda brought to you by the likes of Thiel and co. that the people protesting legitimate grievances just simply "hate technology".

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Interesting, do you think the current form of anti technology ideology is different from Luddism? In what way?

Do you mean to say that the current protests are actually against technology for the sake of being against technology?

Also, I don't say that they are against technology for technology's sake, but the real actual reason they are against technology is because they are fundamentally conservative. They act in their own self interest as normal people do and try to conserve their status, employment and lifestyle. Technology tends to act against it - naturally they oppose it.

> They act in their own self interest as normal people do and try to conserve their status, employment and lifestyle. Technology tends to act against it - naturally they oppose it.

Why is the underlying assumption that tech must make life of people worst? That the only way tech can advance is by actively creating dystopia, by harming, by disrupting instead of creating better opportunities for people?

Tech changed, from positive to pure anti-human sociopathy. It used to have positive vision and many people in it actually wanted to help actual people. Then the SV pretended to want to create something good while not caring whether they were harming people. Now they stopped even pretending to want to create something good while actively openly trying to cause harm.

For christ sake, look at art. These companies could have been creating better and empowering tools for artists. Instead, they brag about destroying them, about destroying everything art communities like and then blame the victime for not being happy with that.

Its an interesting question and I'm biased here. As for the morals of both parties I'll leave you with this: Waymo is cool tech that actually works and saves lives everyday. These are the parties lobbying against Waymo

- Trial Lawyers because they gain from accidents [1]

- Labour Unions [2]

- Transport Unions [3]

Most recently Uber also opposed it but in a different format, but still the same. I wonder what your take on this is? Who is being anti-human here? Who wants to help people? And who are selfish? For me it looks like each one of these parties would rather have less safety in streets than have their jobs taken away.

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/tr...

[2] https://teamster.org/2026/03/illinois-teamsters-demand-lawma...

[3] https://www.twu.org/waymo-testing-in-nyc-is-a-danger-to-the-...

> Waymo is cool tech that actually works and saves lives everyday

Is it? I don't know. I was listening about self driving cars being better the people for years now ... only to find every single time it was a lie. And always comes with "but that was old tech", but the new tech is better.

But I do give you that they are one of the few "seems like they are not as casual about killing people as Uber and Musk and rest of SB". Note that the hate toward them is also much lower then hate of AI and Musk.

> Labour Unions

Considering destruction of labor unions ended up being bad news for average poorer workers and considering the K shaped economy ... maybe we need more of them.

> Most recently Uber

Uber is poster child of a tech company being build on a fraud, trying to sell service under price, create monopoly and then jack up price. And no, famous medallions were not everywhere, plenty of places had and still have normal competitive taxi market. What Uber did there was to break labor rules, sell drives under price from VC money, tope to establish monopoly, hope law obeying taxi companies and drivers will.

All the while SV celebrated it. Frankly Uber is one of the reasons why tech is hated so generally.

Every societal shift that puts large groups of people out of jobs gets protested. Just look at how protected various groups are (like car dealerships vs online sales) because they lobbied at the right time. Same deal for the groups protesting Waymo.

The human thing to do is to protest if your livelihood is going away. That’s not evil. But it is a problem when the government just encodes one groups desires even if it’s not actually better for people.

If a community sees a building going in that they think will pollute the community (light noise, water, literally anything), they have a right to protest and push back. Does it matter what the reason is?

People are concerned about data centers because they are perceived to be disruptive and polluting, and not offering a public good to the community.

People are concerned about LLMs because there are existential questions about work, information (and misinformation), learning, and so much more. That big AI firms don’t have any answers for other than “oh yeah we’ll bulldoze that career.”

So yeah, people are concerned about this, and it’s valid. This does not make them generally anti-progress or anti-human or even anti-technology .

I completely agree with you except the environment part which seems forced. It is valid for people to be concerned with their jobs. But in writing this obvious thing we both agree about, you have forgotten the more interesting part: Waymo stands to reduce a significant number of deaths. What does it say about the ethics of labour unions? In fact, if you could leverage any control over all this, what would you do? Release waymo or protect people's jobs?

No, I'm saying is that you fundamentally don't understand what "Luddism" even is or was at any point. Let me be clear. The the term "Luddite" is completely made up. The group it was supposedly based on were simply people whop opposed exploitation at the time of early industrialization. The state at the time came up with this trope of "they are against technology!" as a way to undercut that movement and impose harsh punitive measures like capital punishment for machine breaking. They weren't just self-interested / conservative people who simply went out to conserve status, employment and lifestyle by opposing technology, that's a label/strawman put on them by the British government at the time.

Just like there was no real luddism historically, there's no group of people who are just selfish people fighting against technology out of pure self-interest. This is just a strawman setup by people who don't wish to receive criticism for their own use of technology as a means of exploitation.

Who do you think came up with the term Luddites?

You are confusing a lot of things here. Like the existence of the movement and the people itself. And you are questioning the existence by using an adjacent topic of Luddites were not against technology.

Luddites did exist. And the people opposing data centers now are the same type of people.

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