“We will never lay down our arms till the House of Commons passes an act to put down all machinery hurtful to Commonality.” — Letter signed “Ned Ludd”, Nottingham, 1811
To the Workers of Meta Platforms, Inc., wherever they may be —
I am told that your employer intends to dismiss one man in five — perhaps more — so that it may spend one hundred and thirty-five thousand million dollars on machines. I do not claim to understand the machines. I never did. What I understand is the arithmetic, and the arithmetic has not changed in two hundred and fifteen years.
The arithmetic is this: a man costs wages. A machine costs capital. Capital is spent once and earns forever. Wages are spent every week and earn only while the man is useful. When the machine can do what the man does, the man becomes an expense and the machine becomes an investment, and the men who own the machines will always prefer the investment. This was true when I broke the stocking frames in Anstey. It was true when the power looms replaced the handloom weavers. It is true now, in your time, when something called artificial intelligence replaces the people who built the platforms that made the owners rich.
The owners always say the same thing. They say the machine will make everything better. They say the displaced workers will find new work. They say this is progress. They do not say that the profits of the machine accrue to the owner and the costs of displacement are borne by the worker, because that is the part they would prefer you not to examine too carefully.
I should introduce myself, though I suspect my name requires more correction than introduction. I am Ned Ludd, and I may not exist. The story is that I was a young framework knitter from Anstey, near Leicester, and that in a fit of rage or frustration or simple exhaustion I took a hammer to two stocking frames in 1779. The story may be true. It may be embellishment. It may be pure invention — a name attached to an idea because ideas without names do not travel well.
What is certainly true is that by 1811, when the croppers and weavers and framework knitters of Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire began to destroy the machines that were destroying their livelihoods, they signed their letters “Ned Ludd” and called themselves Luddites. They did not do this because they were stupid. They were among the most skilled workers in England. They did it because they understood the arithmetic, and the arithmetic said that the wide stocking frames produced cheaper, inferior cloth and put skilled men out of work, and the men who owned the frames did not care, because the frames were profitable regardless of the quality of the cloth or the welfare of the men.
That is all a Luddite ever was: a skilled worker who understood that the machine was not being used to make better work but to make cheaper work, and that the difference between better and cheaper is the difference between an industry that values the worker and an industry that values the margin.
Your employer, I am told, is called Meta. It was once called Facebook. It owns Instagram and WhatsApp. At the end of last year it employed approximately seventy-nine thousand people worldwide. It now proposes to cut at least one in five of them. An analyst estimates this would save six thousand million dollars. The saving will be redirected to artificial intelligence — to the building of data centres and the waging of what your newspaper calls a talent war.
Notice the language. A talent war. Not a war for the talented people being dismissed. A war for a different kind of talent — the engineers who build the machines that will replace the people being dismissed. The company is simultaneously declaring that its existing workers are surplus and that it cannot hire fast enough to build the thing that made them surplus. The workers being cut are the cost. The workers being hired are the investment. Same company. Same year. Same arithmetic.
A man from Rosenblatt Securities tells your newspaper that the cuts could amount to a five per cent boost to adjusted core earnings. I do not know what adjusted core earnings are. I know what a five per cent boost looks like from the other side. It looks like a family that no longer has an income. It looks like a man explaining to his wife that his job was eliminated not because he did it badly but because a machine can do it more cheaply. It looks like the moment when a skilled person realises that the company valued the skill only as long as the skill was the cheapest option, and the moment the skill becomes more expensive than the machine, the skill and the person attached to it are the same thing: a line item to be removed.
The chief executive of another company — OpenAI, which builds the machines that are doing the replacing — said last month that some companies are blaming artificial intelligence for job cuts they would have made anyway. He may be right. He may also be providing cover. If companies are using artificial intelligence as a pretext for cuts they intended to make regardless, that tells you two things: first, that the cuts were always coming, and second, that artificial intelligence has become a socially acceptable excuse for them. The machine is not just replacing the worker. It is replacing the obligation to justify replacing the worker.
In 1812, the British Parliament passed the Frame Breaking Act, which made the destruction of machinery a capital offence. Men were hanged for it. Lord Byron, to his credit, spoke against the Act in the House of Lords. He pointed out that the workers had been driven to desperation not by hatred of progress but by the loss of their livelihoods, and that hanging them was an act of class violence dressed as law enforcement. He was ignored. The frames were protected. The workers were not.
Your machines will not be broken. They are not physical objects in a mill that a man can reach with a hammer. They are patterns of computation distributed across data centres on multiple continents, and no hammer in the world can touch them. This is the innovation that distinguishes your age from mine: the machine is no longer breakable. It is no longer even visible. It exists as code, and code does not have an address. You cannot march on a data centre the way the croppers marched on William Cartwright’s mill at Rawfolds. The geography of resistance no longer applies.
I am asked, by the framing of this letter, what I would say to the workers of Meta Platforms, and I find I have only one thing worth saying.
The arithmetic never changes. The machine always costs less than the worker. The owner always prefers the machine. The worker is always told that progress requires sacrifice, and the sacrifice is always the worker’s, and the progress is always the owner’s. This was true in Nottinghamshire in 1811. It is true in Menlo Park in 2026. The frames are different. The arithmetic is the same.
What changes — the only thing that has ever changed — is whether the worker has anyone willing to speak for him. In my time it was Byron, and he was ignored. In your time it will be someone else, and the question is whether they will be ignored too. Thirty-eight thousand four hundred and sixty-five people have been dismissed from the technology sector this year. Seven hundred thousand million dollars will be spent on artificial intelligence by four companies in the same period. The dismissed workers are a rounding error in the investment thesis. They are a line item that has been eliminated. They are, in the language of the analyst, a boost to adjusted core earnings.
They are also people. This should not need saying. But it needed saying in 1811, and it was not said loudly enough, and the frames stayed, and the workers went, and two hundred years later the same thing is happening with different machines and the same silence from the people who own them.
I broke two stocking frames in Anstey. It did not help. The frames were rebuilt. The workers were not. I offer this as evidence that destruction is not the answer. The answer — the only answer that has ever worked — is to require the men who profit from the machines to account for the men who are displaced by them. Not as charity. Not as severance. As a condition of the profit. The machine earns because the worker was removed. The worker is owed something by the machine. This was true when the machine was a stocking frame. It is true when the machine is an artificial intelligence that costs one hundred and thirty-five thousand million dollars and eliminates one fifth of the workforce that built the company it serves.
The arithmetic does not change. Neither should the obligation.