The technological automation driven by artificial intelligence (AI) is expanding on an unprecedented scale, transforming individuals and societies across the world while generating profound social and environmental consequences. Millions of jobs are at risk of displacement, while human skills and creativity are increasingly incorporated into machines, algorithms, and systems of commodified knowledge. Technology now penetrates almost every aspect of human life, leaving individuals with diminishing control over basic choices, including the right to privacy.
It is therefore unsurprising that resistance to AI-led automation is growing. Some of these movements have been described as a “Luddite renaissance,” demanding that societies ban certain technologies, restrict bots, or slow the development of AI before it causes further damage. Yet technophobia cannot provide a viable alternative to the problems created by technological capitalism.
Contemporary resistance to big technology companies, data corporations, data centres, and AI is frequently labelled “Luddite,” drawing a historical parallel with the workers’ uprisings that spread through the textile towns of England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From Manchester and Nottinghamshire to Lancashire, Yorkshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire, textile workers protested against low wages, deteriorating working conditions, and the erosion of their skills following the introduction of power looms, knitting machines, and other forms of mechanisation.
Workers destroyed machines and attacked mills not because they opposed technology in the abstract, but because machinery was being deployed within a system that deprived them of decent wages, autonomy, security, and control over their labour. Their struggles challenged the power of factory owners and the ruling classes that controlled the emerging industrial order.
The British ruling classes responded with extraordinary repression. Thousands of troops were deployed against the workers, while legislation criminalised machine breaking and imposed severe punishments, including the death penalty. At the same time, the ruling classes promoted the idea that these struggles represented an irrational opposition to technology and progress. Branding workers as “Luddites” helped turn a conflict over wages, working conditions, property, and power into a supposed conflict between workers and technological progress.
The workers themselves appropriated the language of this conflict. The name “Ludd” became associated with the mythical figure of General Ludd, King Ludd, or Ned Ludd, supposedly an apprentice who had rebelled against the machinery imposed upon workers. Over time, “Luddite” became a general term for anyone perceived as hostile to technological change. Contemporary defenders of corporate technological power continue to deploy the term in this pejorative sense. The American Enterprise Institute, for example, has characterised contemporary resistance to technology as “Luddite legerdemain.”
But the historical Luddites were not simply enemies of technology. Their struggles were fundamentally about power, property, wages, working conditions, and control over the production process. They were resisting a particular social organisation of technology, not technology itself. Their demands were rooted in workers’ rights and economic justice.
This distinction matters today.
Contemporary movements such as “algorithmic disobedience,” associated with the Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group; calls for “decomputing society” and “decomputing for a better future”; campaigns such as “Welcome Spring, Burn a Tesla”; movements for digital sovereignty; the Non-Aligned Technologies Movement; and other forms of resistance to big technology companies raise legitimate concerns about the social and ecological consequences of technological development.
These movements draw attention to the environmental costs of data centres, including their demands on water and energy resources. They question the effects of technologically mediated life on mental health and social relationships. They challenge the concentration of personal data in the hands of a small number of corporations. And they remind us that individuals should not be reduced to numbers, codes, behavioural profiles, and algorithmic models controlled by powerful data and AI companies.
These interventions are important. Humanising, democratising, decentralising, decolonising, and decarbonising technology must be central to any progressive technological project. Technology should empower people rather than deepen their alienation, exploitation, and dependence.
But an uncritical opposition to technology takes us in the wrong direction. It risks turning legitimate criticism of technological capitalism into a rejection of scientific and technological knowledge itself.
The fundamental point is often overlooked: AI and digital technologies are themselves products of human labour.
From the development of algorithmic models and computational machines to the collection and classification of data, from data entry and annotation to software development, management, maintenance, and analysis, the technological systems that increasingly organise social life are built through layers of human knowledge and labour. Even the most sophisticated AI systems depend upon infrastructures, workers, intellectual traditions, datasets, and forms of collective knowledge accumulated over generations.
If technology is a product of human labour, then the central political question should not simply be whether technology should exist. The question is: who owns it, who controls it, and in whose interests is it developed and deployed?
This is where the contemporary debate about AI must move beyond technophobia.
Working people should claim ownership and democratic control over AI-led technologies—not only over the skills and knowledge embedded in them, but also over their operational, organisational, and institutional structures. Such collective ownership offers a pathway towards humanising, democratising, decentralising, decolonising, and decarbonising technology.
Mere opposition to technology can inadvertently strengthen the very corporate power that critics seek to challenge. When workers reject technological development without challenging ownership, corporations retain control over the technologies produced through workers’ knowledge and labour. The result is that the ruling class continues to appropriate the social product of collective human creativity.
The corporatisation of AI and the commercialisation of knowledge therefore pose a deeper problem than technological innovation itself. They allow a small number of corporations to exercise growing influence over human beings, societies, economies, and the planet.
The alternative is not to abandon technology. It is to own it, control it, and direct it towards social needs.
Rather than accepting the technological future offered by corporations, or surrendering to the fearmongering and self-serving claims of powerful AI companies and their leaders, workers and communities should demand democratic ownership and control over the technologies they collectively produce.
The historical trajectory from the Luddites to contemporary anti-AI movements risks missing this crucial point if it treats technology itself as the enemy. The real issue is not technology versus humanity. It is the social organisation of technology: who owns it, who benefits from it, who bears its costs, and who has the power to determine its future.
It is therefore time to shift the politics of technology from alienation to ownership.
AI should not become another instrument through which wealth, knowledge, and power are concentrated in the hands of a technological elite. Nor should the legitimate fears surrounding AI become an excuse for abandoning scientific inquiry and technological creativity. The challenge is to build institutions through which technological knowledge becomes a collective resource rather than a private asset.
This requires pursuing new frontiers of scientific and secular knowledge while placing AI within a democratic social framework. AI-led technologies can contribute to human emancipation when they address genuine human needs rather than manufacturing artificial desires through hyper-consumerism, surveillance, and platform capitalism.
Calls to ban, slow down, or destroy AI may express legitimate anxieties about its consequences, but they do not by themselves constitute a progressive social project. Without challenging ownership and control, they leave the underlying structures of technological capitalism intact.
The more fundamental demand is therefore to reclaim workers’ rights—and workers’ ownership—over AI.
Collective ownership can help shape a sustainable technological future by confronting the corporatisation, commercialisation, and weaponisation of AI for private profit and political power. The future of AI should not be determined solely by corporations, investors, or technological elites. It should be shaped collectively by the people whose labour, knowledge, and creativity make these technologies possible.
The question is no longer whether society should have AI. The question is who should own it, who should control it, and what it should be made to serve.
The answer should be clear: AI must serve humanity, not the other way around.
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*Academic based in UK
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