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.

This write-up articulates the issues from the perspective of a security lecturer. The core issue really is ownership of technology.

https://techrights.org/o/2021/11/29/teaching-cybersecurity/

Whatever the appearance of competition between, say, Apple and Facebook, Big-Tech companies collude to maintain interlocking systems of controls that enforce each others shared values including sabotage of interoperability, security and inviting regulation upon themselves to better keep down smaller competitors. Big-Tech comes with its own value system that it imposes on our culture.