There’s a specific kind of post that does numbers on social media right now.
Someone shares an AI-generated image. Or a demo of some tool that does in four seconds what used to take a designer three hours. And the comments fill up with the same chorus. This is the end of creativity. This is the death of art. We have to stop this before it’s too late.
I get it. I really do. But if you think this moment is new, you’re wrong by about two hundred years.
Nottingham, England. March 1811.
Bands of masked men meeting at night on the moors. Military drills under cover of darkness. Then they’d descend on textile mills and systematically destroy the machines inside.
They called themselves Luddites, after Ned Ludd, a mythical weaver who supposedly smashed two stocking frames in a rage and vanished into Sherwood Forest. He probably never existed. Didn’t matter. Every threatening letter to factory owners was signed “General Ludd.” The myth was the point.
Here’s the thing people forget: these weren’t uneducated rioters. They were skilled craftsmen. Weavers who’d spent years mastering a trade. Blokes who could feel a flaw in fabric before they saw it. And they were watching that expertise become worthless overnight.
The new power looms could be run by anyone. Unskilled labour. A fraction of the wage. Cheaper product, faster output. The mill owners didn’t need masters of the craft anymore. They needed warm bodies to feed the machines.
Tell me that doesn’t sound exactly like “anyone with a laptop and a ChatGPT subscription.”
The parallels are almost too obvious.
Swap “stocking frames” for “generative AI.” Swap “textile workers” for “designers, writers, illustrators, videographers.” Swap “unskilled labourers operating machines” for “a marketing intern with Midjourney.”
Same emotional core. Skilled people watching a tool arrive that lets less-skilled people approximate what took them years to learn. And yeah, the output isn’t as good. The Luddites said the same thing about machine-made fabric. Inferior quality. But faster. Cheaper. And the market has never been sentimental about quality when speed and cost are sitting right there.
The difference is the Luddites didn’t write angry comment threads. They burned factories down. They sent death threats. They actually killed a mill owner named William Horsfall who’d been particularly vocal about how much he loved his new machines. This wasn’t online outrage. It was war.
And the British government was terrified of them.
The government’s response tells you everything.
On February 14, 1812, Parliament passed the Frame-Breaking Act. Machine vandalism: death penalty.
They deployed more troops to crush unemployed weavers in the Midlands than the Duke of Wellington had fighting Napoleon in Spain. More soldiers for angry craftsmen than for the French army. That’s how seriously they took it.
Before it passed, Lord Byron (yes, that Byron, the poet, 24 years old, first speech he’d ever given in Parliament) stood up in the House of Lords and basically said: these aren’t criminals. These are desperate men.
“Nothing but absolute want could have driven a large, and once honest and industrious, body of the people, into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their families, and the community.”
He was arguing something that I think still applies: the people smashing the machines weren’t stupid. They weren’t anti-progress for the sake of it. They were watching their ability to feed their families disappear, and nobody with any power seemed to care.
Parliament voted for the death penalty anyway.
January 1813. Seventeen men hanged in York. Others shipped to penal colonies in Australia. Movement over.
The machines stayed.
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for everyone. Including me.
The Luddites were right about the pain. They were dead wrong about the trajectory.
The Industrial Revolution did destroy their livelihoods. Real families starved. Real skills became worthless. The transition was brutal and nobody in power gave a damn about the human cost while it was happening.
But the machines also built industries that didn’t exist before. New kinds of work. A middle class. Goods that ordinary people could actually afford. Within a generation, the children of displaced weavers were living better than their parents ever had.
And this pattern has repeated every single time since.
The printing press was going to destroy scholarship. The camera was going to kill painting (painting got more interesting). Radio would destroy reading. Television would rot your brain. The internet would destroy music, journalism, retail, education, everything.
Every time: real disruption. Real casualties. Real people left behind who deserved better. And every time, a bigger, wealthier, more connected world on the other side.
The question nobody wants to sit with.
I use AI tools every day. I run a creative agency. I make films and tell stories for a living. I’m not speaking from the sidelines here.
I’ve watched these tools go from a novelty to something I genuinely can’t ignore. And I’ve had the same 2am moments as everyone else where you lie there and think: does what I know even matter anymore?
It does. But only if you’re honest about which parts matter.
The strategy of resistance, pure resistance, has a zero percent success rate across two hundred years of data. The Luddites smashed the looms. The looms won. Taxi drivers protested Uber. Uber won. Record labels sued Napster. Streaming won. Every single time a group has tried to hold back a more efficient technology through protest, legislation, or brute force, the technology has won. Not because it was morally right. Because it was economically inevitable.
The people who survived every one of these transitions weren’t the ones who fought the machines. They were the ones who figured out what they could do that the machines couldn’t.
The Nottingham weavers who actually made it through the Industrial Revolution weren’t the fastest weavers. They were the ones who understood fabric, design, quality and taste, and brought that understanding to the new tools instead of setting fire to them.
Not human or machine. Not human versus machine.
I think taste, judgement, lived experience, the ability to know why something matters and not just how to make it: those aren’t things you ship in a software update. They’re not features on a roadmap. They’re the accumulated weight of a life spent caring about something enough to get genuinely good at it.
The machine can generate. It can approximate. It can produce volume at a pace that would’ve made a Nottingham mill owner weep with joy. What it cannot do is mean it. It can’t bring the specific gravity of a human life to a creative decision. It doesn’t know what it’s like to fail at something for years before you finally understand it. It doesn’t have taste. It has statistics.
If you’re a creative person and your honest answer to “what do I bring that the machine can’t?” is “nothing,” then the panic makes sense. But I’d push back hard on that answer. Because I don’t think it’s true for most of the people who are afraid right now. I think most of them have skills, instincts, and understanding that go way deeper than the mechanical parts of their job. They just haven’t had to articulate it before, because nobody was asking.
Now everyone’s asking.
The Luddites were asking the right question.
What am I worth in a world where the machine can do what I do?
They just picked the wrong answer. Seventeen of them died for it.
We’ve got time to pick a better one. But not as much time as we think.
If this landed, send it to someone who needs to hear it right now.
Sam