The Luddites were not concerned primarily with the power of the technology, but rather the people—the bosses, the factory owners—using it against them.

What the Luddites feared and protested was entirely of the human-made variety: labor exploitation. The Luddites were fighting bosses using power looms and wide frames as a justification for driving down wages, building factories and pushing workers into them, forcing them to sacrifice their autonomy, to “stand at their command.” The Luddites were not in denial about the technology’s power because it was quite clear where that power was derived from, which was the industrialists who owned it. That’s who they organized against, not the technology itself. That’s why Luddites wrote letters to factory owners excoriating them for degrading labor conditions and taking work away from weavers, and exhorting them to stop using the “obnoxious” machines, and threatening them with sabotage if they didn’t. It’s why Luddites like Gravener Henson spent their daylight hours petitioning Parliament and agitating for worker protections and labor rights. Not because machines were too powerful, but because they were often being used by unscrupulous men in exploitative ways like facilitating child labor and driving down industry standards.

In fact, the Luddites did say, quite loudly, look at these stupid machines and all the mistakes they’re making. This was one of their chief complaints, that the mechanized looms and wide frames produced low-quality “fraudulent” goods that drove down prices and ruined whole cloth-producing towns’ reputations. They also said that those machines could never adequately replace them. And they were right!

To this day, our clothes are made not by autonomous machinery, but by workers around the world, often in countries with cheaper labor markets. The automation of the industrial revolution did not abolish weavers or knitters; it helped bosses deskill them, break their labor power, and immiserate them. Eventually, it dispersed the supply chain of cloth production further around the globe. It did facilitate a broad and lasting change; that there would be more and cheaper cloth, produced by workers who were paid much less, at the benefit of a relative handful of industrialists and capitalists.