One reason Luddism is appealing to me is media coverage of harmful tech goes into detail explaining its grave threat, but with huge gaps between that diagnosis & the treatment (reforms). If some tech is a grave threat, we should talk about breaking it. https://www.nysfocus.com/2021/04/13/new-york-bitcoin-mining-threat/

Breaking tech can take many different forms. Legislation can be one. But there is a chasm between abolishing or breaking harmful technology to render it inoperable vs fixing harmful tech & believing it will no longer hurt prople again with just the right touch.

There are some things that shouldn’t exist ever. There are some things that shouldn’t exist for now. Just because we can imagine some technical system or because it exists right now does not mean it should. These things aren’t people, they don’t have a right to exist.

And most of what is harmful right now is defend on nebulous grounds that it’s either inevitable (if we don’t do it, someone else will), uncontrollable (tech has some nature inherent to it), or the harms are negligible/worth it (convenience or providing work to desperate people)

As long as the critical discourse doesn’t commit to breaking some of these systems, outright banning others, and rolling back others, even at great cost to the public/economy/etc then these systems will be used to dictate & reinforce a political economy that’ll destroy everything

Not that there isn’t any tech criticism that does that. I think most of it is in academia but it’s exciting stuff. The mainstream criticisms of technology, however, still operate on the assumption that all these systems are redeemable, genuinely useful, and here to stay.