In 19th century England, factions of Nottingham textile workers began destroying new factory machinery meant to automate parts of the job. History deemed them the Luddite movement, named after a semi-fictional weaver named Ned Ludd, whose identity was appropriated by disgruntled laborers to herald laborers around their cause.
The Luddite fallacy — the false theory that long-term technological development impedes employment prospects rather than improves them — has persisted throughout modernity. The fallacy became fundamental to Karl Marx’s ideology, and resurgence in belief in the fallacy has occasionally reemerged throughout economic downturns. But perhaps no embrace of the Luddite fallacy in recent memory has proven as disturbing as that among contemporary populists, predictably within a socialist fringe of the Western Left, but more frighteningly in the angry far-right.
