If you have ever voiced a critical thought about a technological development, you know the reflex that follows: you are placed in the company of people who went at looms with hammers. A bogeyman for anyone who considers themselves progressive, and a convenient label for anyone who merely raises doubts. So convenient, in fact, that it blocks the view of what actually drove the Luddites — and, more importantly, of what their gesture means philosophically.
#The Historical Machine-Breakers
The Luddites were English textile workers who destroyed mechanical looms and stocking frames between 1811 and 1816. Their concern was not the abolition of all technology. They themselves operated machines, some for generations. What they fought was a specific practice: the deployment of machines that made entire occupational groups redundant at a stroke, without any reciprocity between the technical gain and the human loss. The machine was not the problem. The problem was an order in which technical efficiency was the sole measure and the question of what becomes of the people was dismissed as sentimentality.
The government responded with the Frame Breaking Act of 1812, which made the destruction of machines a capital offence. The property in the machine became a legal subject; the workers’ right to exist remained unnamed. If you picture this asymmetry clearly, you can see where the real diagnosis lies: not in the machine-breaking itself, but in an order that places the artefact above the human being and treats this ranking as self-evident.
#From Mumford to Kirchhoff: The Ontological Turn
Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) shifted the question from the individual device to the structure. In The Myth of the Machine (1967/1970) he described the megamachine as an invisible edifice assembled from living but functionally reduced human parts. The most dangerous thing about this machine was not its output but the belief in its inevitability: the only lasting contribution of the megamachine was the myth of the machine itself, the belief that it is by nature invincible and ultimately beneficent (cf. Mumford, 1977). The Luddites had instinctively attacked this myth. Mumford showed why it was instinct rather than analysis: they lacked the language for what they sensed.
Oswald Spengler went a step further in Man and Technics (1931). He recognised in technological civilisation a late phase in which the Faustian drive is no longer tempered by an inner order but obeys its own logic of escalation (cf. Spengler, 1931). Spengler’s diagnosis remained cultural-morphological: he described the decline without asking about the foundation.
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944-2025) began where Mumford and Spengler left off. In Was die Erde will (1998) and in numerous lectures, he showed that technological civilisation rests on a metaphysics that understands the cosmos as a dead mechanism. When the human being, disregarding the living, directs his gaze entirely at inorganic relations and grants them alone the throne of the real, then the machine-city is his destiny (cf. Kirchhoff, J., Goethe as Philosopher, 2020). This is no longer cultural criticism. It is critique of ontology: the question of what technology produces cannot be answered without the question of what worldview it generates. If you try to criticise technology without touching this ontological level, you inevitably end up with the Luddite gesture: fighting the symptom while leaving the cause intact.
#The Question the Accusation Conceals
In the Everlast AI Debate (2026), Gwendolin Kirchhoff made clear that her position is not simple Luddism: machine-breaking is too crude, the usefulness of many developments is uncontested (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast AI Debate, 2026, from 94:04). What she formulated instead was a thesis about the inner structure of modernity: that what we call Enlightenment or Modernism is the imprisonment of the human being in an inner cave, not liberation from it (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, from 94:26). The three defining features of this captivity that she named are Chorismus (the ontological split between inside and outside), the erasure of interiority (tabula rasa, behaviourism), and the confusion of simulation and reality.
The accusation of Luddism typically serves to avoid having to ask precisely this question. Anyone who charges another with technophobia need not engage with the ontology behind the technology. The label closes the discussion before it begins. Yet the truly pressing question would be whether a civilisation that produces technology and AI as progressive symptoms of a disease that mistakes itself for health (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, from 93:37) can be healed by more technology.
#Symptom or Diagnosis
The historical Luddites were right about the problem and wrong about the solution. Destroying machines treats the symptom. The machine itself is neither good nor bad. What matters is the thinking that designs it and materialises within it. If that thinking rests on the assumption of a dead cosmos — a world without interiority and without living relations — then the result is a technology that treats the living as raw material and books its own destructive power as efficiency. That is pathogenesis: not individual technologies are sick, but the fundamental attitude from which they arise.
The philosophical position that Kirchhoff represents is therefore neither Luddism nor affirmation of progress. It is a critique of ontology that asks: what happens to a civilisation that regards the cosmos as a mechanism and then attempts to rebuild the living thing it had previously declared dead? The Promethean impulse that drives this dynamic is no accident but the consequence of a foundational metaphysical error. And transhumanism, which promises the overcoming of the human through technology, is its most consistent expression.
Once you have grasped this distinction, you can use technology without ceding to it the authority to define what is real. That would be the difference between a thinking that uses the machine and a thinking that lets itself be used by the machine. The next time you hear someone described as “against technology,” the follow-up question is worth asking: does the objection target a tool, or the worldview that elevates that tool to the measure of all that exists? In the answer to that question, Luddism parts ways with philosophy.