By John Pane, Chair, Electronic Frontiers Australia
To fight Big Tech’s unchecked power and our government’s complicity in rushing through AI adoption at scale, I believe we must reclaim the term “Luddite.” Far from being anti-progress, the original Luddites fought economic exploitation – a rebellious spirit we desperately need today to dismantle the predatory and anti-democratic systems being built by Silicon Valley and weaponised by the US government.
As EFA Chair, I invest significant personal time helping our organisation bring the fight to manipulative surveillance-based architectures and data-extractive business models forced upon us by Big Tech. Whenever digital rights advocates push back, whenever we demand evidence, transparency and accountability, tech executives, tech boosters, and platform apologists reach for their favourite weapon to dismiss us: They brand us “Luddites.” Sometimes, they say it with a sneer, expecting us to cower from the implication that we are backwards, anti-tech, or afraid of the future.
I think it’s time to embrace that term as a “neo-Luddite” and why we should wear that name as a badge of honor.
The original Luddites were not ignorant thugs terrified of progress. As Brian Merchant brilliantly captures in Blood in the Machine, they were early nineteenth-century English textile workers who understood exactly what was happening to them. They did not hate technology itself. They hated technology that was deliberately deployed by mill owners to slash their wages, deskill their trades, and consolidate wealth into the hands of a few (sounds familiar, eh?). When they took hammers to automated frames and looms, it was a targeted, desperate, and strategic form of collective bargaining against widespread worker and economic exploitation. The machines were just the proxies for the cruelty (and greed) of their bosses.
Over time, the industrialists won the public relations war. They rewrote history, twisting “Luddite” into a derogatory slur to silence anyone who dared question the march of their profit-driven machines. But adopting a neo-Luddite mindset today is not just an act of defiance; it is essential to shine a light on the true goal of BigTech and AI platforms. It means refusing to accept that all technological development is inevitable or inherently good. For more on this subject, read this excerpt from Professor Daniel J. Solove: On Privacy and Technology. As the brilliant Jathan Sadowski explored in The Luddite and the Mechanic, technology and capitalism work as an intertwined system that demands our compliance. A neo-Luddite must therefore ask the following: Who owns the tools, who profits from it, and who is crushed beneath it?
Today we need this critical, rebellious mindset more than ever because generative AI and surveillance-based capitalism are the newest global market forces.
They are built on mass exploitation and the government-sanctioned theft of our personal data and creative works. In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy lays bare how modern techno-capitalism acts as a ravenous force of extraction, actively fueling global inequality. We cannot regulate platforms built on this predatory foundation with a “light touch”; dare we stifle “innovation.”
We must challenge these mega-corporations and their entrenched, profit-before-all-else motivations and their sense of entitlement to strip-mine our digital and offline lives.
Yet, instead of protecting us from this extraction, our own political leaders are complicit in the problem.
Rather than hitting the brakes and slowing AI adoption down by introducing mandatory guardrails for AI platforms (as proposed 2 years ago by Ed Husic), instead, and for the most part, the Australian government has been acting as an enthusiastic enabler and booster for Big Tech platforms and AI. They are currently pushing us through an accelerated but performative assessment process, desperate to clear the runway for Big Tech as soon as they can. And what is the justification fed to the public? The relentless pursuit of the 3PS: Profit, Productivity, and Prosperity. But a neo-Luddite must look at that agenda and ask: profit, productivity, and prosperity for whom? How will this impact our society? What are the risks and harms? What are the human rights impacts? Or will we get the same “great deal” Faustian bargain as we currently enjoy on our gas resources? By positioning the narrative around vague, untested economic metrics, our government is deliberately sacrificing broader societal benefit, labor rights, and our collective privacy at the altar of corporate growth for foreign mega-corporations.
When the state colludes with foreign capital and Big Tech interests to force unregulated technology onto the public, the stakes go far beyond consumer rights; they strike at the heart of our democracy. We are facing a reality where the insular billionaires steering the tech industry harbor deeply anti-democratic ideologies – a creeping digital autocracy detailed in warnings about Silicon Valley Fascism and the so-called Nerd Reich. Our civic institutions are being actively dismantled by code and capital, and neo-Luddism provides the ideological friction needed to fight back.
To genuinely protect our digital rights, we must stop conceding the definition of “progress” to governments and corporations that view our individual agency as raw material to be extracted to enable their 3Ps. It is time to think like a Luddite. Scrutinise the machine, question the power of its owner, and to never be afraid to throw a wrench in the gears.
Note: All the books linked in this article have been “recommended reading” in EFA’s newsletter over the past 12 months. I really do think they are great reads!