The Return of the Luddites

BY THE TIME a frequently boozy, brilliant, and scandal-inclined Lord Byron delivered his impassioned speech to the British House of Lords on the February 27, 1812, the poet had already weighed in on the dangers of mechanization. In his poem “The Curse of Minerva,” he had lamented, “The starv’d mechanic breaks his rusting loom, / And desperate mans him ’gainst the common doom.”