Copy/pasting an old comment of mine:

The Luddites were a 19th century guerrilla movement that smashed textile machines, burned factories and threatened their owners. But they were not motivated by a fear of technology […]

the luddites […] were engaged in the most science-fictional exercise imaginable – asking not what a technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for.

The Luddites, you see, were skilled weavers whose intense physical labor produced the textiles that clothed the nation. The difficulty of their trade – both in terms of esoteric knowledge and physical prowess – allowed them to command high wages and good working conditions.

All that was threatened by the advent of textile machines, which produced more fabric in less time, and required less skill. The owners of textile factories bought these machines with profits derived from the weavers’ labor, and then used those machines to grind down the weavers. Their hours got longer, their pay got shorter, and many of them were maimed or killed by the new machines.

Weaving engines are ingenious and delightful machines. The Luddites had no beef with the machines – their cause was the social relations that governed those machines. By painting Luddites as mere technophobes, we strip ourselves of the ability to learn from history. The lesson of the Industrial Revolution is that merely asking what a machine does and not who it does it for and to can lead to literal genocide.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/04/general-ludd/

I love this. The Luddites were an early labor movement and their reputation is pure capital propaganda.

(Go read [The Conversation’s] article if you want to know more – it is a very good read)

Thanks for the recommendation, Joachim. It sure would’ve been nice if you’d linked to it.

This article seems to try to take The Conversation’s compelling comparison of anti-AI to Ludditism and then shoehorn it into FOSS. I can agree it’s related as left-libertarian, but this article’s idea feels like it came about after they read The Conversation’s and just did it worse for a less relevant connection.

If [Take Back CTRL] isn’t in line with the philosophy of the Luddites, I don’t know what is. Dignity, self-determination, agency. That’s what it’s always been about.

Okay, no, Luddites weren’t just generically anti-every-bad-thing-about-tech (and two of those things listed are the same thing); they destroyed machines as high-value targets to get early industrial manufacturers to stop abusing labor.

I’m not trying to convince you of anything with this article; I am not looking for converts. I am just trying to point out that the FOSS movement is not anything new, not really.

So you’re trying to convince us that the FOSS movement is not anything new; did you ever learn what a persuasive essay is? Also, the headline and subheader is: “[…] I Use Linux; And Maybe You Should Too”. Trying to convince someone of something isn’t nefarious, and it’s staggering that someone would write this in a published opinion piece.

I like the ideals of this author, but their piece is poorly argued, meandering, and generally feels stream-of-conciousness.