Ella McPherson: Neo-Luddites in the UK & the Adirondacks

Speaker: Ella McPherson

Topic: Neo-Luddites in the United Kingdom and the Adirondacks

These days, many of us live with low-grade malaise about how Big Tech is infiltrating our everyday lives.  But when does this individual malaise tip over into collective movements?  This talk looks across time and place to understand resistance to technology – not as backwardness and insularity as some would have us believe, but as a collective defence of community values threatened by the values hidden within new technologies.  We will start with the original Luddite movement, English millworkers in the early 1800s, who – creatively, and sometimes violently – protested new automated spinning and cropping machines because of their disruptions to expertise, labour conditions and the balance of work and domestic community life.  I argue that Luddism remained latent in British society and has re-emerged in the digital age.  We will consider contemporary cases of movements…