AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

AImish is a term I just invented to denote AI refuseniks – those people who absolutely refuse to use LLMs because it violates some sacred aspect of their humanity. There are many such. They share a stance with others who turn away from some technology, the actual Amish, Luddites, Wendell Berry, woodworkers who eschew power tools.

A sympathetic view of the Luddites as an essentially pre-Marxist form of rebellion, of a class of laborers (textile workers) against an encroaching industrial system which directly threatened their livelihoods. They were not against technology per se but only against the particular form of it that was encroaching on their way of life, not in some symbolic sense but in a very real economic sense.

Part of me is horrified that the question would even arise. Because of course not. Not only are machines without the spark of the divine that must be at both ends of a benediction – they should stay that way, there is something unclean and horrific about blending these two realms, the machinic and the divine. The machines are so good at faking it that they are positively dangerous to the soul. My inner Weizenbaum is activated, my inner PKD, my inner Luddite, we should have the Butlerian Jihad before these things sap what is most precious from us.

I may be marinated in the values of MIT and Silicon Valley, but I still am 100% on the side of the real Luddites, who were not opposed to technology as such, but the use of technology to rob them of their livelihood and their agency. If I was an Amazon warehouse worker or Uber driver, I would be in rebellion against my masters and their machines and systems. I don't think I'd make a fine distinction between the digital technology, which is supposedly value-neutral, and the oppresive applications to which it is put.

Defense of the Luddites, citing that Kirkpatrick Sale book, Rebels Against the Future. They weren't anti-technology, just anti- having their livelihood destroyed and turned from a craft into factory enslavement.

Luddism

19 Mar 2023 - 18 Sep 2026

There's an effort to rehabilitate the idea of Luddism, which is usually thought of a s dumb, reactionary movement against technological improvement. The real Luddites were not anti-technology in general, they were weavers opposed to the use of a specific technology that threatened their livelihoods. Their enemy was not technology as such, it was the deployment of technology by capital in a way that devalued the power of labor.

A modern Luddism might be expected to turn its targets towards AI, or the heavily monitored working conditions of people Below the API. Or of course to social media, whose harmful effects on the social fabric are now universally recognized.

I made a very small effort to convince Meaningness that his anti-AI book should proudly call itself Luddite, but it didn't take.

This Day in Labor History: March 11, 1811. The Luddite movement began in Arnold, Nottingham, England, when textile workers destroyed the machines where they worked as a protest against the oppression they felt as workers. Let's talk about who these people really were! pic.twitter.com/ptqcPeezLr
— Erik Loomis (@ErikLoomis) March 11, 2023