PERSON

E.P. Thompson

The British historian who rescued the original Luddites from the enormous condescension of posterity, demonstrating that their machine-breaking was a sophisticated political campaign grounded in legitimate grievance—and whose framework for understanding technological displacement and the moral economy of expertise is indispensable for anyone thinking honestly about the AI transition.

Thompson spent his career proving that ordinary people understood their situations. His masterwork, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), rescued laborers, artisans, and radicals from what he called “the enormous condescension of posterity”—the habit of treating the poor, the displaced, and the resistant as objects of historical processes rather than as agents who analyzed their options and acted with intelligence and purpose. The framework he developed for understanding how technological change intersects with class power, how the displacement of workers is experienced and resisted, and how the language of progress is deployed to silence legitimate grievance applies to the present moment with a precision that should unsettle anyone who believes the AI transition is merely technical. The original Luddites of 1811–1816 did not oppose machinery as such; they opposed specific machines deployed under specific conditions that violated the established customs of their trades. Their targeting

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