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As AI Breathes Down Our Necks, It’s Time for a Luddite Renaissance

Nineteenth-century textile workers longed to stay human in a machine age. So do we.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders became the first federal legislator to seriously challenge the lurch by Big Tech oligarchs into the uncharted territories of artificial intelligence when he issued a call in December for a “moratorium on the construction of data centers that are powering the unregulated sprint to develop and deploy AI.” His reasoned argument—that a moratorium is necessary “to slow it down” and “give democracy a chance to catch up”—echoes the sentiments of a growing number of Americans who have come to see AI less as a promise than a threat. Yet Sanders was hit with immediate, and strikingly vitriolic, pushback from the tribunes of the billionaire class.

Dismissing the concerns that he raised—and despite the fact that many of the defining figures in the development of AI have expressed similar sentiments—Fox News’s Stuart Varney rushed to label Sanders as “economically illiterate,” while other corporate-friendly conservatives tagged him as “the nation’s foremost avatar of reactionary socialism,” accused him of engaging in “AI doomerism” and “NIMBY-type” reasoning, and concluded that he might just be peddling “the most poisonously stupid idea of the year.” Then they hurled the ultimate insult that contemporary elites can muster when the American people and their elected representatives start to question tech-bro definitions of “progress.” Sanders, they announced, was “a Luddite.”

In an editorial headlined “Bernie Sanders’s Worst Idea Yet.” The Washington Post fumed that “a national ban on new AI data centers would make the Luddites look good.” This was not the first time that the label had been attached to him. A few months earlier, after Sanders and Democratic staffers on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee had issued a report warning that AI could eliminate 100 million US jobs, the notion was savaged by an American Enterprise Institute commentator as an example of “Luddite legerdemain.”

Never mind that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had already speculated, in May of 2025, that the rise of AI could eliminate half of all white-collar entry-level jobs and lead to unemployment rates as high as 20 percent, and would explain that “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” Or that Bill Gates had predicted in March of 2025 that humans “won’t be needed for most things.” Social-media critics ripped Sanders on mega-billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform, declaring that “socialists are the new Luddites” and claiming that Sanders was bent on “cornering the Luddite vote.”

With so much vitriol coming his way, it was perhaps understandable that the senator would announce, “I am not a Luddite.”

But there’s no shame in being a Luddite—or, to be more precise, in being an heir to the Luddite tradition of refusing to accept the adoption of new technologies simply because capitalists decide to impose them on workers.

Elite opinion writers may still dismiss the Luddites as unthinking reactionaries who sought to wreck the machinery of the dawning Industrial Revolution. But many of the most tech-savvy observers of the dawning AI era are expressing admiration for the 19th-century weavers and mechanics of northern England, who fought to prevent the dislocation and wage cuts that the factory-owning oligarchs of their day called “progress.” On campuses across the country, New Luddite and Neo-Luddite clubs have been formed by students who have grown up with smartphones and are justifiably concerned about what’s coming their way. After the Writers Guild of America waged a prescient struggle in 2023 to prevent media conglomerates from using AI technologies to capture their creativity and then toss them into the dustbin of history—a fight that anticipated The Hollywood Reporter’s blunt declaration in 2024 that “generative artificial intelligence is killing jobs in Hollywood, with little relief on the horizon,” and the more recent reports linking AI consolidation and cost cutting to tens of thousands of layoffs in the media and entertainment industry—the actor and documentary filmmaker Alex Winter wrote, “The term Luddite is often used incorrectly to describe an exhausted and embittered populace that wants technology to go away. But the actual Luddites were highly engaged with technology and skilled at using it in their work in the textile industry. They weren’t an anti-tech movement but a pro-labor movement, fighting to prevent the exploitation........

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