Sometimes the term "Neo-Luddite" gets tossed around to describe that nebulous group of people that protest and resist ostensibly "beneficial" technological advances like nuclear power, genetically modified foods, and the proliferation of social media. The Luddites as a historical group are typically looked down on as enemies of progress and mindless primitivists. But just as there is another layer of interacting factors to consider today, there were also other factors to consider at the time of the Luddites in the 19th century as well.
From the 18th century to the 19th century the first Industrial Revolution was underway, transforming the society it was a part of. You had these Luddite characters that were famous for destroying these labor-saving textile machines, which were one of the symbols of industrial progress at the time, and for the Luddites, symbols of displacement and disenfranchisement. These machines were replacing skilled textile workers, aggravating already-rising unemployment rates.
Now one could look upon these characters with disdain and say they were selfishly setting back progress and that they just could have taken up other trades or done something more productive than smash up industrial equipment, but there was more to it than that. Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, you also had a series of increasingly restrictive laws drawn up that were essentially designed to remove the support systems of peasants in rural areas in order to create a labor force for the expanding factories in the cities and industrial centers.
You had these wealthy landowners and this emerging class of capitalists looking to invest their wealth in production capital, and they were looking to populate their factories with cheap labor so that they could see handsome returns on their investments. Of course, all of these rural peasants had relatively robust systems of self-sustainment in the rural areas: they could hunt and farm and all of these things provided them more benefits and more leisure time than if they were to toil away every hour of every day in some dingy factory in the city. These capitalists were getting quite upset; there are actual documented writings of these characters complaining about the indolence of peasants and suggested they be made even more poor to force them into wage labor. And well, part of having cheap labor is a steadily replenished pool of unemployed with no means to support themselves, who will gladly take up a position as a poorly paid and treated wage laborer.
So you see the passing of laws restricting peasant hunting, and then the Enclosure Acts which basically allowed wealthy land owners to fence off the commons. These laws effectively destroyed the peasants' means of subsistence, forcing many of them to move to the cities to become wage laborers in the factories. Now I don't know enough about the Luddites to know if they were literally this group of peasants, but you do have to consider these things that were happening in the region that they lived; this is the historical context to take note of.
Now you have to consider the economic conditions and the cultural milieu we find ourselves in today. We have a large population of people that have virtually no say in the direction our society goes, with an equally significant discrepancy in the distribution of material wealth. Most people are usually obedient and trusting of an effective authority, that is an authority that has demonstrated that it can keep a people safe and improve their lives. But when an authority fails to do that, you get mass social fragmentation and dissent, and consequently a fragmenting direction of progress.
Nuclear power is great when it works. It provides excellent output with very little pollution other than heat dumping (of course if the actual radioactive material is properly contained). Nuclear waste is another problem, but in a time when petroleum based energy is literally killing us as we use it, the technology looks more and more attractive. But there is a vast populist anti-nuclear lobby which resists nuclear power wherever it shows up, and that is because our nuclear power is almost exclusively handled by heavily subsidized private companies, companies whose ethical actions are constrained by the profit motive. These companies make more profit when they form monopolies, charge high prices for energy utilities, and neglect their infrastructure. Unfortunately when you neglect nuclear infrastructure, it is incredibly dangerous and results in catastrophic events. Fukushima was entirely preventable, but the owning company Tepco ignored the reactor's problems until it was too late, the results of which are quite horrific and ongoing. It is not that anti-nuclear activists are anti-progress or prosperity or what have you, they simply don't trust our social modes of organization that handle this technology, and for good reason. The privatization of public utilities like energy, currency creation, and health care in general has been an absolute disaster.
Now take genetically modified foods. Sure it would be great if we can simply tinker with our crops to increase yields and nutrition, but you have to consider the motivations behind such manipulation. One of the largest purveyors of genetic modification is Monsanto. Now Monsanto is one of the closest things we can get to true evil, and the horrors that company has perpetuated on global populations are too many to list here. But the motivations behind that company's GMO program are worth considering. Monsanto started out as a chemical company and they are chiefly remembered for their Agent Orange product, a scourge that was waged on East Asian populations in the Vietnam war. Eventually there was enough pushback against Agent Orange and they couldn't manufacture it anymore, so Monsanto had to figure out what to do with their productive capital to continue to be profitable. Well, they switched to becoming an agriculture company, manufacturing chemicals like the popular Round Up to be used as herbicides. A large part of their GMO program is making crops resistant to these herbicides, so they can patent them and sell them alongside their outputs of their herbicide lines. It is hard to tell how much actual effort they devote to engineering their crops for yield, as claimed by their PR. The company's actions demonstrate that they don't give a shit about feeding populations though: they've actually engineered their patented seeds to be sterile, so that farmers can't continue planting new generations. Plus they've suppressed many studies on their GMO crops and manipulate results to their scientific research, so there's reason to doubt the desirability of their GMO product. Plus there have been reports of animal health problems with their GMO products. Their behavior has resulted in vigorous pushback around the world: they've been kicked out of many countries. So people have reason to be skeptical about their wondrous GMO inventions.
Finally, you have the proliferation of social media. Theoretically, these can be wonderful tools of communication and connection, which they have actually demonstrated in many instances. But there is tremendous pushback in this sector as well. Among the larger tech companies like Facebook and Google is a push for greater transparency and public connection, as if this is some vast cathartic merging of public consciousness and technological utility, but again, the motivations behind these changes are very different from their stated purpose. Everything you do on sites like Facebook and its similars is cataloged away in vast databases, which serves as a sort of raw material these companies can sell to marketers in bulk. What's more, the growing partnership between these tech companies and the government allows the mass sharing of data on the entire population, to aid with surveillance and social control. So its not that people are afraid of the raptures of deep technology and a radical transparency that is to bring everyone together, it is that wherever there is technological innovation, especially in communication, it is colonized by commercial entitities seeking to commodify a population's deepest, most private social relations, and a government seeking to control and suppress the population in turn. Resistance to this "progress" is actually well-informed and carefully considered, though some of it will always be knee-jerk. People understandably don't wish to take part in their own commodification and supression, especially when they are prevented from sharing in any of the benefits.
This problem of uneven growth has plagued humanity for thousands of years. The creation of an owning class with interests directly in conflict with the rest of the population results in bouts of uneven progress in which some innovations are incredibly useful and spread while others actually create more problems. This fatal flaw is central to the terminal state of late capitalism and its impending fall. Taking energy stored in oil over billions of years by burning the oil and releasing it into the air is a powerful process for driving technological process, but the negative externalities caused by such a process (the re-releasing of stored carbon into the air) is proving detrimental to the entire global ecology, yet because of our class structure a minority of the population is addicted to such a process and there are no working mechanisms for turning the process off, in large part because of the calcification of our habitation patterns and the resulting urban sprawl which necessitates the ongoing consumption of petroleum products. This is a choice a minority of our society has made without consulting the rest of the global populace, which ultimately results in spiraling, intensifying conflicts around the world.
This is a problem that must be solved, for the sake of bare survival. Its solution lies in a tricky region amidst the tension between the conservative conception and the progressive conception of life forms: for conservatives, a class system must exist because it forms naturally; for progressives, the universal dignity of humankind is a natural principle behind the formation of societies. Both conceptions lead to social formations that happen by necessity: wealth concentrates and remains sticky and calcified through fear, while the powerless and disenfranchised remain in an eternal struggle to retake what is theirs. Reality is a strange volatile place that will forever defy the numerous abstract utopias we construct in our minds to compensate for the dystopias we always seem to wind up with. But for the sake of survival, it is a problem worth tackling.
It could be that the birth and death of a large organizational entity like a civilization necessitates such calamities, as something so large and complex is impossible to control or direct, but there must be a collective effort to encourage more even development, sharing of power and resources, and the collective addressing of existential problems. Or, well, poof?
