Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because history is written by the victors, the Luddites were painted as idiots who just hated machines for no reason or dumb reasons. This couldn't be further from the truth.
The sad thing that I haven't been able to resolve in my mind is that this is a cultural multi-party prisoners' dilemma among sovereign entities. From a power-centric point of view, if my neighbors intentionally cast off modern technology, they are ripe for domination, economic exploitation, etc. The history of human civilization from the age of city-states onward is about navigating the need for protection from hosti…
Be like Zohran Mamdani. Zohran only had to win an election where everyone hated the incumbent, which is one of the easiest ways to get power. His enemies are floundering now, they're trying to pin baseball losses on him because they've got nothing else. Most of us here, being nerdy technologists and not charismatic politicians, will have to do it by creating technology and learning the tricks of back-end sales, the way ZUckerberg or Page did.
Dictators win elections and then replace them with hereditary lines of succession. We don't have a word for kings who hold elections for their successors. Usually they only do so at knifepoint. Game theory - inter-agent power dynamics - is one of the strongest forces in the universe, almost as strong as entropy. Game theory is Cthulu, Moloch, SCP-3125, that thing from Homestuck that eats universes, and both God and Satan. But if we give up, we lose.