The term Luddite is usually used as an insult. It suggests someone who is backward-looking, averse to progress, afraid of new technology, and frankly, not that bright. But Brian Merchant claims that that is not who the Luddites were at all. They were organized, articulate in their demands, very much understood how factory owners were using machinery to supplant them, and highly targeted in their destruction of that machinery.
Their pitiable reputation is the result of a deliberate smear campaign by elites in their own time who (successfully, as it turned out) tried to discredit their coherent and
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