Luddites have been horribly misrepresented throughout history. They were a prosperous middle class who had their livelihoods extinguished by rich assholes running sweatshops.

As Amazon grew, stories emerged about grueling conditions in its warehouses. Google used its monopoly power to strangle competitors' products. A suicide epidemic swept an iPhone factory. Predictions mounted that AI would soon replace tens of millions of human jobs — that the rise of the robots was at hand. The Luddites would have had a problem with all of that.

That's what I realized one long Labor Day weekend in 2014, when I stumbled on an academic work that examined the Luddites and their struggle against the tech titans of their day.