Literally just got bored! There's a ton of angles that get me in their story, but the fact that these rich white guys just made this mess for lolz is... a lot.

Oh wow, that took off!

If you like this, my anti-corporate space operas might be up your alley. Labor organizers doing Leverage style heists against a big bad corporation... In space!
books2read.com/u/3Jeere

The Luddites weren't anti-progress. They weren't anti-technology. They were pro worker rights. And it's convenient for the tech barons (in any age) to make us believe those are the same thing.

It's not an accident that "Luddite" is now synonymous with "backward, technology-fearing dummies." That's how they'd like to brand anyone who dares to question whether new tech might be bad for us.

They posted clear demands which, if met, they would stop the violence. They weren't anti-tech. Some new tech was helpful to them. They just wanted back their careers.

The rich factory owners were no more willing to negotiate than Big Tech today. Same playbook. Shockingly similar abuses.

So they moved on to direct action. They had a strategy. They smashed only the specific machines that took their jobs. They didn't attack people. Only the machines.

Of course they protested! They had no work, their families were starving. They begged for new laws to protect their trades, and even for existing laws to be enforced. You can guess how that went.

So you've got children and newbies working in horrible conditions for awful wages doing what was previously a skilled trade and good livelihood that people did from their homes.

These machines can do the work of 4 skilled men with just one worker. They're so easy even a child can run them.

...which in this period meant: Oh good, we can recruit children to work our factories!

Then one day some rich asshat gets bored and invents a machine to do this skilled work. "It'll save so much work and money," they say, churning out an inferior product. (Sound familiar?? Nah.)

The original Luddites were cloth makers. This was a skilled trade in the early 1800s. Men apprenticed for 7 years to learn it, then spent life honing their skill. They were proud of their high quality work.

(This all comes from Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant, which draws a line from the Luddite rebellion to the modern tech industry, go read it, it's really good: bookshop.org/p/books/bloo... )