Forms of Luddism

In 1492 the abbot of Sponheim, Johannes Trithemius, wrote a treatise called In Praise of Scribes. Monks, he argued, should keep copying books by hand even though the new presses could produce them faster. Copying was devotion. A scribe meditated on every word as he formed it, and a parchment manuscript would outlast anything printed on paper. Two years later the treatise appeared in Mainz, set in type.

Trithemius is easy to laugh at, and that's a mistake. He wasn't confused about what a press could do. He was saying something about what a monk is. For him copying wasn't a means of producing books, it was a form of life, and a monk handing it to a machine would stop being the kind of monk he meant. Printing his praise was no contradiction: books were for readers, copying was for the copyist.

That distinction runs through every form of refusal now gathering around AI. Some refusals are about wages, some about quality, some about community, some about the self. Some are acts of private conscience and some want the whole society bound by them. Lumping them together under one word, Luddite, used as an insult, is the kind of quick conclusion On Purpose of Writing warned readers to avoid. Better to look at each in turn.

Original frame breakers

The first Luddites weren't against machines as such. Between 1811 and 1816 knitters in Nottinghamshire and croppers in Yorkshire broke stocking frames and shearing machines owned by masters who used them to cut wages, hire untrained hands, and turn out cheap goods that undercut the trade. Their letters, signed in the name of an imaginary General Ludd, singled out machinery "hurtful to commonality." Frames used on fair terms were often left standing.

The government's answer was the Frame Breaking Act of 1812, which made wrecking a machine a hanging offense. Lord Byron, twenty-four years old, gave his first speech in the House of Lords against it, asking whether there weren't already enough capital crimes on the statute book. The act passed. Men were hanged under it, and thousands of soldiers were stationed in the manufacturing districts, more than Wellington then commanded in Spain.

Two lessons sit in that episode. Luddism began as a dispute about who captures the gain from a new tool, not about the tool. And the state, from the start, didn't stand neutral between machine owners and workers. It put the hangman on one side.

Writers who will never touch the machine

The form closest to this collection of essays is the writer who refuses outright.

In 1987 Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer, poet and essayist, published "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer." He wrote with a pencil on paper, his wife typed the manuscripts on a Royal standard typewriter, and he saw no reason to change. A new tool, he argued, should be cheaper, smaller, better, and should replace something bad, not something good. He wasn't going to pay for a machine that replaced a working household partnership. The essay drew furious letters. Berry didn't buy the computer.

Berry's refusal is Trithemius's refusal. A writer whose existence is the slow forming of sentences by hand, in a particular life on a particular farm, would end that existence by handing the forming to a machine. Whatever came out afterward might be good, but it would belong to some other writer. Today many writers are in the same position with AI. For them the derivation is not one part of the work, it is the work, and the self they built over decades is made of it. Touching the machine wouldn't make them more productive. It would make them someone else.

That position deserves respect, and it doesn't need anyone else's agreement. On Purpose of Writing argued that, for a reader, it matters little who or what ordered the sentences. For a writer of this kind it matters entirely, and the reasons are theirs. A vow is not a mistake about efficiency.

Thomas Pynchon asked in 1984, in the New York Times Book Review, "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?" His answer, roughly, was that the Luddite impulse belongs to a long line of refusals of the reasonable, and literature is one of its homes. Novelists, he noted, have been writing against the machine since the machine arrived.

A church that votes on the telephone

The Amish are often taken as the purest Luddites, and they're nothing of the kind. Each church district governs itself by its Ordnung, an unwritten order the members agree on, and new tools are taken up one at a time, after watching what they do to families and to the community. A telephone might be allowed, but in a shanty at the end of the lane and shared among households, so it serves a need without ringing through dinner. Power tools might run off a diesel engine or compressed air but not the public grid, which would tie the household to outside institutions. Districts decide differently, and members who can't accept their district's choices can move.

This is the form of refusal most at home in a free society. Nobody outside the community is bound by it. The judgment is made close to the people who live with the result, and it is made deliberately, tool by tool, rather than by default. It's a phenomenology of technology practiced as self-government: look at how the thing actually shows up in a life, then decide.

Hammer as theater, and sabotage as code

In 1995 Kirkpatrick Sale, author of a history of the Luddites, stood on stage at Town Hall in New York and smashed a computer with a sledgehammer. Five years earlier Chellis Glendinning had published "Notes Toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto," calling for the dismantling of technologies destructive to life. These were symbolic acts, made to be seen.

Sabotage today is quieter and runs in software. In 2023 researchers at the University of Chicago released Nightshade, a tool that lets artists alter their images invisibly so that a model trained on them learns the wrong things, a cow labeled as a handbag. Its sibling, Glaze, masks an artist's style. Nobody's machine is broken. A poisoned image is a frame breaker's hammer reduced to a few altered pixels, and it acts only on what the artist owns. Whatever one thinks of it, it's an artist defending their own work with their own means.

There's also the form that has to be named and set apart. Theodore Kaczynski mailed bombs for seventeen years in the name of a war on industrial society, killing three people and injuring twenty-three. Murder is not a position in this debate. It's the end of debate, and it has done lasting harm to every peaceful refusal that came after it.

Refusal by statute

The last form is the one that wants everyone bound. Proposals now circulate to ban AI from whole categories of work, to require machine-made text and images to carry labels by law, to license who may train or run a model. Some are framed as protecting workers, some as protecting the public, some as protecting truth.

These are the Frame Breaking Act in reverse. In 1812 the state took the machine owners' side and hanged the breakers. Now some want it to take the breakers' side and bind the machine users. Either way the instrument is the same: a central authority settling, for everyone at once, a question that Trithemius, Berry and the Amish each settled for themselves. The AI Event of 2026 argued that the danger of this moment is capability being fenced back into the center under the name of safety. A ban in the name of human work is a different motive and the same fence.

Which forms sit with liberty

Put side by side, the forms sort themselves.

Refusal of one's own belongs fully to liberty: a writer who will never touch the machine, a farmer with a pencil, a teenager with a flip phone. Nobody else is bound, and the reasons don't have to persuade anyone.

Refusal by a community that chose it belongs too, as long as members can leave: the Amish district, a cooperative, a guild or workshop that sells handmade work as handmade and lets buyers decide what that's worth.

Defense of one's own work is defensible on the same ground: the artist poisoning their own images, the author refusing a license to train on their books.

Disputes over who captures the gain are the original Luddite question and still the most important one. Tools that make work cheaper make someone richer. Whether that's the person doing the work, the person owning the tool, or a few firms far away is a question of property, land and institutions, the questions this collection of essays keeps returning to, and not one the machine settles on its own.

Refusal imposed on everyone, by statute or by violence, does not belong. It treats a question of conscience as a question for the hangman.

Trithemius's monks kept copying for a while, and the copies they made are now among the most valued objects in any library, precisely because they were made by hand. Something similar may happen to sentences. A writer who never touches the machine may end up producing the rarest thing in the age of the machine: a line that is certainly one person's derivation. That isn't a reason for everyone to write that way. It's a reason to leave that choice theirs.

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A note on how this piece was written: the question, the forms of refusal it sorts, and the judgment on each are mine. The sentences were drafted with AI assistance from that direction, then edited by hand, which is itself one of the choices this essay describes. Writers who would never work this way are owed a plain statement of it.