Entertainment / Literature / Luddite: The Luddites of the early 1800s were part of an anti-technological, anti-industrial grassroots movement in Britain. They protested specifically the introduction of textile machines as a threat to their jobs and more generally protested the jarring social changes from the Industrial Revolution, producing much propaganda for their cause. By 1813, they had demolished or burnt down severa, textile factories. Government intervention resulted in their imprisonment or forced deportation to colonies in America and Australia. The Luddite movement is partly the result of economic stress in a time of rapid social change, and partly it corresponds more generally to the Romantic movement, which tended to criticize man's alienation from nature and condemned urbanized and industrial life of the 19th century as spiritually and ethically sterile. William Blake went so far as to dub modern textile factories the 'satanic mill.' In many cases, Luddites and neo-Luddites have broadened their horizon of concern to embrace technology more generally and science more specifically as de-humanizing intellectual endeavors, frequently embracing the Frankenstein motif (which also dates from the early 1800s).
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