Re-Evaluating the Luddites: The Wisdom of Opting-Out of Tech for the Glory of God

As Technology is reshaping the world, it's also reshaping our lives. Perhaps we should take a second look at the Luddites.

If you’ve followed my posts here at Insight to Incite, you’re aware that I’ve named Artificial Intelligence as something - in light of Romans 16:17 - to be ‘marked and avoided.’ It is a rebirth of Babel, an attempt by men to become trans-human, to make a god and in return, to be made gods by their creation. You can read about that in the post, Stargate and Sauron: One A.I. to Rule Us All, Singularity and Babel: Comparing the Newest and Oldest False Religions, and Transhumanism: Neuralink, Starlink, and Evangelicals Arguing About Hussies.

As you’ll see in those posts, A.I. is quite literally advertised to us as a religion. It promises us eternal life, the Fountain of Youth, and the Tree of Knowledge. These are not hyperbole or assumptions; these are explicit in A.I.’s advertising. Its prophets promise us that A.I. will be able to control the weather, cure cancer and all disease, and allow our consciousness to flow endlessly into perpetually upgraded robotic bodies. One wonders why the latter will be necessary, if all disease and aging is cured, but that’s besides the point. False religions don’t have to make sense.

I put it this way on a Substack post:

While evangelicals are arguing about bull crap, dogpiled in personality conflicts, and resurrecting dead debates, many have failed to notice a new god has arisen and Babel has been reborn.

The god of Artificial Intelligence and its doctrine of Singularity will be a greater god than any other gods ever comprised in the minds of men or devils.

It promises to give eternal life, the fountain of youth, and the Tree of Knowledge. It will have greater powers than Allah, Molech, Asherah, Ba’al, Zeus, or the Gnostic Monad all combined. Its crafting is of the Watchers and principalities of darkness; its blueprints, drawn by Lucifer and demonic engineers.

It’s high priests - Ellison, Altman, and Masayoshi Son - announced today with President Trump, the merger of their triune gods into one Godhead. It will consolidate all three major AI engines into one, quickening its pace to Singularity.

Mark my words, this will be the greatest false god of history, and will only be thwarted by the brightness of Christ’s coming.

It will, in a matter of months and only a few quick years, create a world that you will not recognize. I fear we fail to see it, because we are not heeding well enough “the times and the seasons.”

But the question now becomes, what do we do about it? In fact, “Red-Beard” posed that question on the above post:

Well, very good question. I’m sorting that out, piece-by-piece, at Insight to Incite. Part of that response, other than giving it the metaphoric middle finger of Christian resistance, a sort of “Here I stand, I can do no other” last stand against the urge to go quietly into that good night, most of our response will be a conscientious decision to not take part in the Beast’s contrivances. That will be difficult, because as I explained yesterday, “we regular earthlings like the potions and spells.” We like the gadgets.

I was working up to this next point, an answer to the question, “What do we do now?” in the post, Tim Keller's City Fetish, Homesteading, and the Agrarian God. In short, the Holy Ghost is leading many Christians to choose to simply opt-out of the very rat race that makes those spells and potions so tempting.

OPTING OUT

I’ve been bewildered at the guffawing seen when we suggest “opting out” of the proverbial System, whatever that system might be. One example is the Public School System, as it has quickly turned into an indoctrination program that largely corrupts our children, teaches them to hate themselves and their ancestors, confuses them about biology rather than teaching it, and turns them into bots who are trained to become subservient servants of their future employers.

Just…drop…out.

The binding power of peer pressure, the natural desire to just “go with the flow” of culture, truly is an opiate of the masses - far more than religion has ever been. Such a simple suggestion as “teach your own children” or “send them to a quality Christian school” was - not that long ago - seen as a radical or perhaps even revolutionary concept. People living in a free country, who apparently didn’t know, have asked me more times than I can count, “Is that allowed?”

But this suggestion of just drop out has always been a freeing one to me, just as it was in 7th grade football. It’s definitely an option; it’s always an option. Usually, it’s a perfectly good one.

When in a state of personal crisis, after millions of dollars passed straight through my hands as a 24 year-old business owner, and knowing the business made me miserable, my wife told me over the phone, “just come home.” I gave her a thousand reasons why I couldn’t; employees, bills, budgets, expenses, pride, and so on. And she responded, “just come home.” And that’s what I did, and it turns out, I never regretted it.

In fact, my biggest regrets in life have been from not dropping out. I could have avoided a decade of pointless fighting and a thousand wounds on my back had I just left the Southern Baptist Convention instead of turning it into my personal Alamo. In the end, there was no saving it, and in the end, I couldn’t even save myself. I should have left the Ichabod denomination long before I did.

But millions of Americans are discovering that despite it seeming impossible, the rat-race that requires the 24/7 hours of being plugged-in, the driving to work in expensive electric vehicles (and bonus if it can drive you itself, so you can shave and brush your teeth on the way to work), can come to an end the moment you decide it’s possible. Millions of us are finding that a quiet, agrarian, simplified life is key to avoiding the temptation to be attached to our cellular devices, to never being able to wander far from the wifi, or being tied down to a half-dozen different email accounts.

We can, if we choose to, unplug. We can, if we choose to, just drop out.

Think of it this way, whether or not A.I. is the bugbear I think it is, one day a very real and literal anti-Christ is going to install a worldly system that supposedly requires opting-in. To opt-out of that system will require you to forgo buying or selling. And, it might require you to jump upon a cross or be set on fire. We should all be literalists in that respect. And if you’re a Christian, you’re going to have to decide then to opt-out, and damn the rules.

You might as well practice dropping-out now.

OPTING OUT IN THE LITTLE THINGS

“I don’t use those,” I told one of the half-dozen Wal-Mart CSI employees (or whatever they’re called now). You know who I mean, the girls with the electronic tablets that stand and watch you to make sure you aren’t stealing anything, when you’re forced to check out your own groceries.

The woman looked at me blankly and said, “But you only have a few items.”

“Correct,” I said, “but I don’t use those,” gesturing to the self-checkout machines.

“Here, I’ll help you,” she insisted.

Again, I told her, “I don’t use those.”

“I don’t understand. Here, it’s easy.”

“Ma’am,” I told her, “I don’t use those.” And then I explained slowly, “Every one of those self-checkout machines represents a human being who doesn’t have a job. I’m a human. I like humans. I like humans to have jobs. So, I don’t use those.”

She looked at me like I had fallen from another planet, and said innocently and bewilderingly, “But, I have a job.”

It reminded me of the question you’ll sometimes hear on social media, “How would you feel if you didn’t eat breakfast this morning?” As the lore goes, the question comes from a study asking people that simple question. A surprising percentage of the respondents couldn’t answer. Instead, they answered, “But, I did eat breakfast this morning,” showing them bereft of empathy and more importantly, incapable of hypothetical thought.

It might be a small matter, perhaps even a trivial one, but if the reports are true (and they’ve been accurate up to this point), the world is about to suffer a major unemployment crisis due to A.I. and automation. In fact, it already is; 14% of Americans have lost a job due to automation already. That number will triple this year, and grow exponentially from this year onward.

The old paradigms of what makes a conservative a conservative, and a liberal a liberal, are quickly changing. We are entering a period of political Singularity, where the rules will no longer apply. As opposed as conservatives have always been to unions, the day is quickly approaching that anyone who is pro-human may very well need to be pro-union; a union fighting for human interests against the interests of the machines.

As a side note, if you want to know more about that, listen to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Sean O’Brien, the union boss of the AFL-CIO, who’s fighting quite valiantly for the rights of not just laborers he represents, but humans in general. It was a fascinating conversation, and you’ll see that many humans will be fighting for their economic survival, and it’s quickly becoming a tale of people vs machines. You can find the episode here.

Those who’ve not spent much time thinking about this, will assume that the Free Market will solve our problems. I’d suggest that the Free Market makes for a terrible deity. As O’Brien points out, the argument that the job market will adjust might have been true for the teamsters, who started out on mules (teamsters were teams driving mules) but learned to adjust to moving freight via automobile. Why? The concept of the Singularity (as I explained yesterday) means that the old rules no longer apply. This is beyond the old rules.

Christians desiring to opt-out of the coming New World Order of A.I. and automation should begin by asking themselves simple questions; Do we want to rely on this lit-up rectangle in our hands? If not tethering ourself to this device will place us at a disadvantage, what will we do when our competitors and colleagues all have that device implanted their heads? If we don’t opt-out now, will we have the grit to opt-out then?

From self-driving cars to smart meters regulating our homes, from smart-appliances like fridges that connect to wifi, to robotic vacuums that map out our homes and send our floor-plans for storage up into the cloud, do we conscientiously need this stuff? Or can we live without it? Do these things make our life better? Do they give us more meaning? Do they really improve our homes? Do they raise better children? Do they make us smarter or dumber?

DISCOVERING THE LUDDITES

The Luddites were a sect of Calvinists who - as best as I can tell - took it a little too far. Beginning in 1811 in Nottingham England, the Luddites’ religion put such an emphasis on being the elect of god that they merged into a kind of antinomianism (or at least, the historians allege). But their religion aside, they had an axe to grind with automation.

Ned Ludd was a fictional character, although perhaps he was a real man (there is an Edward Luddlam buried in the Antsley Cemetery by this name and dating to this era) but it’s quite unclear, similar to “Robin Hood” who, despite being fictional, was lionized as the embodiment of a hero setting wrongs right. Supposedly, Ned Ludd broke two weaving machines after being told he was being replaced by the machine. This character, whether real or not, was turned into a fictionalized folk hero commonly called “King Ludd” or “General Ludd” and inspired a harsh revolt against the growing role of automated machines replacing people in England in the 19th Century.

Letters and treatises against mechanization and automation appeared with “King Ludd” as the signer, but everyone was in on the joke that he likely didn’t exist. He was credited with a string of vandalism around England, attacking the machines. Eventually, the Luddite movement grew from textile manufacturing to virtually all industry. The Napoleonic Wars made working conditions already difficult in an already difficult economy. The people were fighting back under the banner of Ned Ludd.

Eventually, the English government sent in 12,000 troops and put on show-trials of Luddite leaders and the movement quickly died only a few years after it started. And today, the term “Luddite” refers to those who are skeptical of new technology.

INTENTIONAL LIVING

The Luddites were right about one thing; skepticism is next to godliness. Asking the question about how we live our lives, or our use of technology, ought to be done regularly. And the question Christians need to ask is, “Can this be used by God’s enemies to persecute or harm God’s people?” But in even in a broader way, because God is pro-human, we should also ask, “Can this be used by humanity’s enemies to persecute or harm humanity?”

Only two years ago, an Amazon delivery employee reported that they were called the N-Word by the occupant of a home where they were delivering a package. Amazon’s response, upon receiving their employee’s complaint, was to shut down the home’s smart-home features, which effectively took their home offline, including the locks on the doors. It turns out, the delivery driver lied.

As I mentioned above, the robot vacuums we use map our homes, sends the blueprints up into the cloud on Chinese servers and servers made accessible to the government or any other agency that wants them, if they’re willing to pay the price. One might think that most county courthouses have the blueprints to our homes anyway, so what is the big deal? But those blueprints aren’t in a mega-database made accessible for profit on the open market. And besides, many homes are like mine - which was built in 1900 - and has been built onto at least three times, and likely never with a county inspection. But if a SWAT team wanted to breach your home, they can pay a few dollars and find out exactly what it looks like inside thanks to your Roomba.

By the way, your wifi router does the same thing. It maps your home and the signal strength shows where you spend your time, presuming your phone is in your pocket.

A popular propane grill and smoker feature allows one to control the heat from an app on their phone, and alerts them when the meat is done. But when a company’s hardware glitched on Thanksgiving in 2023, their customers found their grills unusable. Imagine not being able to grill without Wifi.

Any data you have access to - like the AirTags used to track your wallet or keys - is simultaneously available to others. Your cellular phone is basically an elaborate snitching device, and all but two models on the market (like the one marketed by Erik Prince, of the company formerly known as Blackwater) have a backup battery that cannot be removed, so that your phone can be remotely accessed even when it’s powered off and the main battery completely removed.

Facial recognition software is so precise, it can find someone in Union Station within seconds. Repo men utilize cameras on their car that scan every license plate the car sees, and feeds it into a nationwide database to alert them when a car is up for repo. Government agencies can buy that data without a warrant. Several states allow police departments to use this technology, on the grounds that if you’re in public they don’t need a warrant, cataloguing every single license plate it automatically scans. That info is put into a database, and if you’re ever suspected of committing a crime in the future, they can ascertain your whereabouts if they’re curious where you were. Law enforcement agencies use this technology to know your daily routines, for example, that your license plate is regularly scanned at 7:30AM on Tuesdays at your favorite doughnut shop, so they know where and when they can find you.

Of course, you might be asking the question, if this is all true, is it really safe to even leave the house? Obviously we can’t lock ourselves on our homesteads and never leave. But the point is, we should at least be thinking about how all this technology can affect us in the future. And if it’s true we can’t do anything about our license plates being scanned or our face being recognized, perhaps we can at least avoid what is it is we can avoid.

What we can do - today, right now - is intentionally decide if this gadget or that one is truly necessary for our lives. Then, we can make decisions accordingly. But if we’re not thinking at all about these things, then we’ve become the NPC bots and melded minds and thoughtless individuals that the Public School System designed us to be.

If we are to “do everything to the glory of God,” this implies - at the very least - we actually think about what it is we’re doing.

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