The Age-Old Urge to Destroy Technology

Our go-to tale of resistance to technology is the story of the Luddites: In England in the early nineteenth century, skilled weavers and craftsmen found their livelihoods threatened by automated machinery, so they began to attack textile factories, destroying the machinery with hammers. Less familiar are the revolutionaries who used large clubs to smash thousands of hanging lanterns on the streets of Paris in 1830, in rebellion against gas lights as a form of state surveillance; or the Committee for the Liquidation or Subversion of Computers, a.k.a. CLODO, a gang that set fire to magnetic data cards and computer programs in the Toulouse offices of Philips Informatique in 1980. Members of the latter group identified themselves as information-technology workers and described their attack as “an intelligent act of sabotage,” opposing the “dangers of IT and telematics.”