I'm no Luddite, but...." we often hear people give this apology as they begin even the most tepid criticism about some technology or another. Evidently, it's important to let everybody know that you still affirm the overall beneficence of technological progress. How astonishing, then, to read in the Wall Street Journal and other recent press reports that a movement of "Neo-Luddites" is taking shape in the United States.

The original Luddites were displaced workers in early nineteenth-century England who resisted the destruction of their traditional, crafts economy by mechanized industrial production. In an era when labor organizing was illegal, the followers of the mythical "Ned Ludd" smashed textile machines as a protest against a system whose rise spelled their eventual doom. In the end, the British army brutally crushed the rioters.