The AI Rebellion Already Happened
Arlo Gilbert ·
Last week in Festus, Missouri, voters threw out four city council members. Their offense was approving a $6 billion data center. A few days earlier, somebody fired 13 shots into the front door of an Indianapolis councilman who had voted the same way. In April, a 20-year-old from Texas allegedly tossed a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house. Some 360,000 Americans have joined Facebook groups dedicated to stopping new data centers in their towns.
The Wall Street Journal is calling it a rebellion. They're not wrong.
The reflex inside our industry is to wave a hand at this and say "Luddites." That's a useful word if you've never read what the Luddites actually did. Or what people in 1890 wrote about electric lights. Or what the New York Times said about the telegraph in 1858. Once you have read those things, the reflex starts to feel less like analysis and more like a habit.
I went and read them. Not the Wikipedia summaries. The original newspaper coverage. Five episodes spanning roughly 75 years of American and British history, each of them treated at the time as an existential reckoning with a dangerous new technology. The thing that surprised me wasn't the similarity to today. That part is obvious within about five minutes of looking. The surprise was how different the endings were.
1812: The frame breakers
The Luddites get cited a lot and understood almost not at all. They were not anti-technology zealots. They were skilled textile workers, mostly stocking-frame knitters and croppers in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, whose specialized trades were being eliminated by wide stocking frames and shearing machines operated by unskilled labor. The math was simple. One machine plus one untrained operator could replace four trained craftsmen at lower wages. The Napoleonic Wars had crashed the export market. Bread prices were the highest in living memory.
So they broke the machines. Organized bands moving at night, signed letters from "General Ludd" or "Ned Ludd" delivered to mill owners with threats and timetables. They burned mills. In April 1812 they killed William Horsfall, a Yorkshire mill owner who had bragged he would ride his horse up to his saddle-girths in Luddite blood. They had something close to popular sympathy in the affected towns.
Parliament responded by making frame breaking a capital crime. The Frame-Breaking Act passed February 1812 over the famous objection of Lord Byron in the House of Lords. Within a year, 12,000 government troops were deployed to suppress the movement. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm later pointed out, that was a larger force than Wellington had taken into Portugal in 1808. In January 1813, a mass trial at York hanged seventeen men. Penal transportation to Australia took care of dozens more. The movement was finished by 1816.
The newspapers of the time were doing what newspapers always do. The Leeds Mercury covered armed bands marching into villages two hundred strong. The Nottingham Review tried to give the workers a fair hearing. The Tory press, especially the Nottingham Gazette, called the whole thing Jacobin revolution. The Smithsonian's archive has reproductions of the original coverage worth your time. The UK National Archives has the original correspondence between magistrates and the Home Office, including the threatening letters signed "General Ludd."
What did the rebellion accomplish? Almost nothing for the workers it claimed to represent. The machines went in. The trades disappeared. The mill owners who survived 1812 ran their towns for the next century. But the word "Luddite" stuck, and we use it badly.
Smithsonian Magazine: What the Luddites Really Fought Against
UK National Archives: Why did the Luddites protest?
1858: "Too fast for the truth"
On August 16, 1858, the first transatlantic telegraph cable was completed. North American messages could reach Europe in minutes instead of weeks. Three days later, on August 19, the New York Times published an editorial that, with a few word swaps, could run in any major paper today about AI:
"Superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth, must be all telegraphic intelligence. Does it not render the popular mind too fast for the truth? What need is there for the scraps of news in ten minutes? How trivial and paltry is the telegraphic column?"
"How will its uses add to the happiness of mankind? Has the land telegraph done any good? Has it banished any evil, mitigated any sorrow? Is it of any consequence that you of New York should know on Tuesday, rather than on Wednesday, that Jones smashed the nose of Thompson in Congress on Monday?"
That's the New York Times in 1858, asking the same question we are now asking about AI: does this new technology actually contribute to human flourishing, or is it just a faster way to consume slop? The Pessimists Archive has the clipping. It's worth screenshotting just for the experience of recognizing your own newsfeed in a 168-year-old editorial.
The telegraph won, of course. The "scraps of news in ten minutes" became the wire services. The wire services became the modern news cycle. The news cycle became Twitter, and Twitter became the thing we now complain about in roughly the same words the New York Times was using in 1858.
Pessimists Archive: NYT August 19, 1858 telegraph editorial
1890: The execution room
The most cynical piece of fear-mongering against new infrastructure in American history was run by Thomas Edison against George Westinghouse, and it worked. Edison had bet his company on direct current. Westinghouse was deploying alternating current, which was cheaper to transmit over long distances and was eating Edison's market. Edison's response was a media campaign aimed at convincing the public that AC was a death trap.
He paid for public electrocutions of stray dogs at his West Orange lab. He lobbied successfully for AC to be the current used in New York's new electric chair. He pushed editors at the New York Times, the New York Sun, and the North American Review. Every accidental death from a live wire became proof that the technology was unfit for human use.
The first execution by electric chair was William Kemmler, on August 6, 1890. The Los Angeles Herald put it on the front page the next day under the headline "The Execution Room." The first jolt failed. The second took eight minutes and produced smoke from Kemmler's head.
Westinghouse, on hearing the news, said: "They would have done better with an axe."
AC won anyway. The grid is alternating current. Edison's company merged into what is now General Electric and quietly switched. The fear-mongering didn't stop electricity. It briefly slowed one specific implementation and produced a botched execution that haunted American capital punishment for the next century. People did die from poorly insulated AC lines. They also died from horse-drawn carriages, cooking fires, and cholera in the same years, and nobody was running a campaign to ban any of those.
Los Angeles Herald, August 7, 1890, "The Execution Room"
LOC Chronicling America: Electric Chair research guide
1899-1910: The homicidal orgy of the motor car
On September 13, 1899, a real estate salesman named Henry Bliss stepped off a Manhattan trolley and was killed by a passing electric taxi. He was the first recorded pedestrian fatality by automobile in the United States. He was not the last. By 1925, children would account for roughly a third of American traffic deaths in a typical year.
The newspaper response was something like collective civic grief turning to civic rage. The New York Times ran editorials about the "homicidal orgy of the motor car." Editorial cartoonists drew the new vehicles being piloted by skeletons. In Vermont, the publisher of the Middlebury Register, a man named Joseph Battell, became a one-man anti-automobile movement. He used his paper to demand local bans. He owned much of Camel's Hump mountain and personally offered to give it to the state of Vermont if the legislature would prohibit automobiles on the roads through it. Towns across rural America passed ordinances banning cars. Drivers were pulled from their vehicles and beaten. The Princeton Alumni Weekly later called the period "the invasion of the devil wagon."
You can see how the pattern reads. Real deaths. Local political mobilization. Newspaper-driven outrage. Bans. Occasional violence. Editorial cartoons with skulls in them.
The automobile won, completely. Within twenty years it had reshaped American cities, killed off the streetcar in most of the country, and converted streets that had been pedestrian commons into car-priority infrastructure. Battell died in 1915 without ever seeing his bans take hold. He's remembered mostly as an eccentric.
San Francisco Call, May 31, 1896, "A Ride in Charley Fair's Horseless Carriage"
LOC Chronicling America: Horseless Carriages and Ford's Model T research guide
1886: Bogus butter
This one is the unexpected story, and the one that should make AI executives least comfortable.
Margarine was invented in France in 1869 and arrived in the United States by 1875. The dairy industry hated it on sight, for obvious reasons. By 1886, seventeen states had passed laws regulating margarine. Seven had banned it outright. New York banned it in 1884. Pennsylvania followed. The dairy lobby went to Washington and got the Oleomargarine Act of 1886, which imposed a two-cent-per-pound federal tax and required margarine makers, wholesalers, and retailers to obtain federal licenses. The New York Sun covered the debate at length on July 10, 1886.
When margarine manufacturers added yellow coloring so the product looked like butter, states banned that too. The Supreme Court upheld those bans in 1894. Five states then went further and required margarine to be dyed pink, on the theory that nobody would eat pink butter. Some required red. One actually proposed black. The Wisconsin border with Illinois saw decades of margarine smuggling, with cars carrying contraband yellow margarine across the line until Wisconsin finally repealed its color ban in 1967.
That's eighty-one years of regulatory war against a product whose only crime was being cheaper than the incumbent. The dairy industry did not stop margarine. They taxed it, colored it, licensed it, banned it, and in the end the market took margarine anyway. What they got for their eighty-one years of effort was a slower defeat and a lot of black-market bootlegging.
If you want to know what aggressive local regulation of a new technology actually buys you, read the history of bogus butter. The technology arrives. The lobby fights it. The fight produces a kludge of state-by-state rules that lasts for generations, costs everyone money, slows adoption modestly, and accomplishes essentially nothing of what the original opponents wanted.
The Sun (New York), July 10, 1886, oleomargarine coverage
JSTOR Daily: When Margarine Was Contraband
So which one is this?
The five rebellions had five different endings.
The Luddites lost everything. The machines went in, the workers were destroyed, and the regulatory response was state violence on a scale we'd find shocking today.
The telegraph critics were proven right and ignored. The technology became central to civic life and the complaints about information velocity got recycled, almost word for word, every generation.
The anti-electricity campaign briefly slowed AC adoption and produced an unusable execution device. The grid happened anyway.
The anti-automobile movement spent twenty years getting outvoted, outspent, and reshaped around by an industry that turned the streets they were trying to defend into the infrastructure of car-priority America. The children kept dying. The bans didn't hold.
The margarine fight lasted eighty-one years, produced a thousand weird state laws, made smugglers rich in Wisconsin, and didn't stop margarine.
There is also a sixth ending worth knowing, which I haven't told you about yet. In 1865, Britain passed the Locomotives on Highways Act, popularly known as the Red Flag Act. It required road vehicles to be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag, capped speeds at 4 mph in countryside and 2 mph in towns, and required a three-person crew. It stayed on the books for thirty-one years. By the time it was repealed in 1896, Germany and the United States had taken over the automobile industry, and Britain spent the next century trying to catch up. The Red Flag Act is the cautionary tale industry people love to cite. They cite it less because it's the only outcome they can imagine. It is, in fact, one of six different outcomes the historical record offers.
So when I look at Festus, Missouri throwing out four city councilors, I don't see a Luddite uprising that's going to be crushed by state troops. I don't see a telegraph critic who'll be proven right and ignored. I see something closer to the bogus butter wars, with maybe a little bit of devil-wagon energy mixed in. Local political mobilization. A patchwork of city and state rules. Some real harms being named alongside some imaginary ones. An industry that will, in all likelihood, get most of what it wants and pay for it with twenty or thirty years of regulatory tax and locally unpopular siting battles.
I want to be careful with that guess. It's a read on which precedent seems to be rhyming hardest right now, not a prediction. If the violence escalates, the precedent shifts. If a single facility produces a Kemmler-scale public failure, the precedent shifts. If a foreign competitor uses our backlash to take the industry the way Germany took the auto industry from Britain, we'll be living the Red Flag Act, and we should be embarrassed.
What I'm sure of is this: the people in Festus throwing out their councilmembers are not crazy, and they are not new. Joseph Battell wasn't crazy. The dairy farmers who got Wisconsin to ban yellow margarine weren't crazy. The New York Times editor in 1858 who thought telegraphic news was making people stupider was, arguably, ahead of his time. The Luddites were defending real livelihoods. Every one of these rebellions had legitimate grievances at its core, and every one of them produced an outcome the rebels would have considered a loss.
The honest position for those of us building and deploying AI is not to dismiss the rebellion as historically illiterate. The rebellion is the historically literate thing. What's missing from most of the coverage, and from most of the industry's response, is the same thing the dairy farmers were missing in 1886 and Joseph Battell was missing in 1905: a clear-eyed view of which fights actually change the outcome, and which just buy you eighty years of bootlegging and pink-dye laws.
I'd rather we have that conversation than another round of "Luddites." The Luddites were hanged. Most of us would prefer a different ending, I hope.