Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, where we remember the past and choose to repeat it.

Last February, we weren't even living under a fascist techno- oligarchy in which the billionaires who own and control most of the means of our communication had overtly pledged their support for an authoritarian

maniac intent on crushing all his enemies. And yet we still went ahead and made this episode

about how it might be worthwhile to question the full speed ahead approach to technological advancement

those billionaires are pursuing when the needs of everyday people are so clearly not being taken into

consideration. And now, to look back, but with an eye on the future, sources today include

shift, left reckoning, the interview, is Tubes on TikTok, Factually, Torres, the Majority

Report, and Alice Capel.

The Luddites were a band of rebels, basically, cloth workers in the beginning stages of the

Industrial Revolution, who, after trying various peaceful measures for a long,

long time to make sure that their working lives and their identities and their trades were

protected from the march of what we would refer to today as automation, found themselves with

their backs against the

wall. Tech companies of the day, entrepreneurs of the day, were using machines that automated

work that sort of did their jobs, worse, shoddier and more cheaply, changed course. And they started

fighting and they started doing the thing that would come to define them, that smashing the machines that were taking their jobs. They organized around this fictitious, apocryphal figure

Ned Ludd, who was probably just completely made up or may have been an apprentice cloth worker

who wasn't working as fast as his master wanted him to. So his master had him whipped

and he enraged, took a giant hammer and smashed the machine that he had been working on.

fled into Sherwood Forest like Robin Hood before him. They were both in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire

and the legend grew. He's Ned Lud. So the people who

followed in his footsteps, smashing the machinery of oppression, were the Luddites. And they

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