Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening.
Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall.
You’re reading Dispatch Energy, a weekly newsletter on energy and climate policy featuring Alex Trembath, Philip Rossetti, Lynne Kiesling, Rory Johnston, and Roger Pielke Jr. To access more Dispatch reporting and analysis, become a member today.
Welcome to Dispatch Energy! Conventional wisdom holds that the Luddites, the 19th-century English workers who smashed textile machinery to protest automation, were anti-technology. But historians of the movement have added considerable nuance: The Luddites were skilled craftsmen who opposed not the technology but what the technology did to their wages, working conditions, and livelihoods. This perspective lives on—opposition to technological innovation is usually far more complicated than pro- or anti-technology. What people care about are the real or perceived consequences of innovation.
Luddite dynamics have been replayed in the context of almost every important technology of the last half-century: fracking, incandescent light bulbs, SUVs, childhood vaccines, water fluoridation, nuclear power, wind turbines, genetically modified crops—each became a proxy fight in which the combatants often let pro- or anti-technology symbolism crowd out consideration of risks and benefits.
