ABSTRACT
In the late twentieth-century a new branch of Ludditism surfaced in America, working often with newly empowered environmentalists, to oppose what Neil Postman called, in his influential book Technopoly, “the deification of technology”. In the early years of the nineteenth century a self-styled “General”, Ned Ludd, organized a revolt in Britain of traditional workmen against the new mill technology. James Combs, a leading scholar of the period, highlights the long-term importance of Ned Ludd’s revolution: The Luddite movement was one of the first flashpoints of a social conflict typical of modernity: that the traditions, arrangements and habits of the past must be sacrificed in the present for the promise of a more glorious future. The new industrial order had political power, but it didn’t have the support of the workers.
