The culture of automation brought by artificial intelligence is ultimately a culture of de-specialization, an anti-critical culture, for anti-critical people who must consume without understanding how to produce. To a large extent, it is the ultimate vision of disciplining the sources of value – ourselves – just as it was for the titans of industry a century ago, an industrialization of passivity and compliance.

From the author’s preface to the second edition of the book in Greek

Luddism is not simply opposition to new machines and technologies, but a set of specific political directions with positive content. Inspired by the struggles of workers at the point of production, Luddism emphasizes autonomy: the freedom of workers' behavior, their ability to set rules, and the continuation and improvement of working conditions. For the Luddites in particular, new machines posed an immediate threat, and thus Luddism carries a critical approach to technology that pays special attention to the relationship between technology and the work process and working conditions. In other words, it does not see technology as neutral but as a field of struggle. Luddism rejects production for production’s sake: It criticizes "efficiency" as an ultimate goal since other values are at stake in labor. Luddism can be generalized: It is not an individual ethical stance but a multitude of practices that can be multiplied and built through collective action. Finally, Luddism is confrontational: It opposes existing capitalist social relations, which can only be ended through struggle, not through parameters such as state reforms, increased abundance of goods, or a better-designed economy.

How does technology affect labor and workers? Is the introduction of technological innovations in production and work methods an objectively progressive process, enabling less and less arduous work and thus potentially leading towards a "communism of luxury"? Or is it perhaps a neutral technical practice whose impact depends solely on how each technology is used?

Gavin Mueller returns to the historical Luddite movement to reconstruct the underground current of a history of workers’ struggles against the consolidation of power relations in workplaces driven by technological innovation. In doing so, he illuminates the repressed Luddism of everyday resistance movements against mechanization, automation, and cybernization that echoes to this day, urging us to confront the reorganization of work and free time, to slow down escalating exploitation, to reclaim knowledge and control over the product and the conditions of our labor; in other words, to "break machines."