I’m here to watch a performance called “Luddite Recreations,” which is a history of the Luddite movement—a group of artisans and textile workers who resisted the adoption of machines during the early years of the Industrial Revolution in England and whose resistance to being displaced from their work was met with violence by the British monarchy.
Dramatic oversimplification of what Luddites were.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/
There are probably better sources on their history than smithsonianmag, but it’s the one I remember having bookmarked from the past. Here are some tidbits it claims:
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
And:
The Luddite disturbances started in circumstances at least superficially similar to our own. British working families at the start of the 19th century were enduring economic upheaval and widespread unemployment. A seemingly endless war against Napoleon’s France had brought “the hard pinch of poverty,” wrote Yorkshire historian Frank Peel, to homes “where it had hitherto been a stranger.” Food was scarce and rapidly becoming more costly. Then, on March 11, 1811, in Nottingham, a textile manufacturing center, British troops broke up a crowd of protesters demanding more work and better wages.
That night, angry workers smashed textile machinery in a nearby village. Similar attacks occurred nightly at first, then sporadically, and then in waves, eventually spreading across a 70-mile swath of northern England from Loughborough in the south to Wakefield in the north. Fearing a national movement, the government soon positioned thousands of soldiers to defend factories. Parliament passed a measure to make machine-breaking a capital offense.
And:
But the Luddites were neither as organized nor as dangerous as authorities believed. They set some factories on fire, but mainly they confined themselves to breaking machines.
One technology the Luddites commonly attacked was the stocking frame, a knitting machine first developed more than 200 years earlier by an Englishman named William Lee. Right from the start, concern that it would displace traditional hand-knitters had led Queen Elizabeth I to deny Lee a patent. Lee’s invention, with gradual improvements, helped the textile industry grow—and created many new jobs. But labor disputes caused sporadic outbreaks of violent resistance. Episodes of machine-breaking occurred in Britain from the 1760s onward, and in France during the 1789 revolution.
My takeaway is that the Luddites were not an explicitly organized movement under the label “Luddites” but were more like spontaneous resistance to shit labor treatment that sometimes destroyed machines as retaliation and that got labeled as Luddites by authorities. And importantly, they were not peacefully protesting and getting out the vote at the appropriate time in order to move the needle on a legislator once in a blue moon. They were actually making their bosses hurt in the pocketbook for treating them as an object to replace with a low quality machine.
A modern day festival under its name with an article that frames Luddites in a way removed from any sort of use of force, is pretty standard for capitalism these days. Whitewash a movement in a way that divorces it from any sort of militant resistance and turn it into a spectacle for people to enjoy. Revamp its message to become whatever you want it to be and ride the coattails of its branding.
That said, I think events that teach people offline skills and get them to be less stuck to their phones is a good idea. It’s just, this has nothing to do with Luddites and seems to water down what they were.