The Return of the Luddites

This month, we’re toasting to America’s technological revolution—it’s given us the automobile, the airplane, and AI. The steamboat and the space shuttle. The Pill and the polio vaccine. But over the past decade, political divisions and fractured trust in institutions have stoked a strong anti-tech backlash. In this essay, Noah Smith digs into the history and data to explain the rise of American Luddism. We mustn’t take modern technology for granted, he argues, lest we “quickly find out why being a medieval peasant was not actually a good life at all.”

—The Editors

Advanced civilizations sometimes really do throw it all away. I recommend reading the book Lost Enlightenment, which is about how the golden age of Islamic science, scholarship, and literature gave way to centuries of religious fundamentalism and backwardness. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, China turned its back on exploration, refused to import Western technologies, and generally de-emphasized science; centuries of economic stagnation and military weakness followed.

These are useful examples, but they’re all from the premodern period, where cutting-edge science and technology didn’t make a huge difference in people’s standard of living; most people were farmers living on the edge of subsistence. But around 200 years ago, technology really started to matter, and living standards began to skyrocket in a way they never had in history. Thanks to technology, humanity is now about 20 times richer on average than we were two centuries ago, and the number keeps going up:

For a civilization to turn its back on algebra in 1100 or on spring clocks in 1800 was certainly foolish. But for a civilization in 2025 to turn its back on the technologies that took our species from indigent peasants to modern standards of living would be just unfathomably insane.

And yet that is exactly what I now see Western civilization doing. In the U.S., the Anglosphere, and Europe, there are simultaneous backlashes against a number of key technologies that have either made the modern world what it is, or promise to make it even wealthier. These include: