PERSON
Eric Hobsbawm
The Marxist historian who spent a career demonstrating that the standard narrative of technological progress is a political document—and whose rehabilitation of the Luddites as rational, targeted, analytically precise resisters to specific deployments of new technology has become the indispensable framework for understanding AI’s contemporary critics.
Eric Hobsbawm’s 1952 essay “The Machine Breakers” did something historians had been declining to do for a century: it read the Luddite movement not from the perspective of the factory owners who prevailed but from the perspective of the framework knitters who were right. What Hobsbawm demonstrated through close archival reading was that the Nottinghamshire croppers and Yorkshire weavers who destroyed specific stocking frames in 1811 were not ignorant workers afraid of progress. They were skilled artisans who understood the machines they attacked more intimately than the manufacturers who deployed them, who distinguished precisely between frames used to violate established trade norms and frames used within them, and who had exhausted every legal channel before turning to direct action. The concept of
collective bargaining by riot was his name for what they were doing: using the only instrument remaining when all institutional channels had been closed. This is the framework