AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
A sympathetic view of the Luddites as an essentially pre-Marxist form of rebellion, of a class of laborers (textile workers) against an encroaching industrial system which directly threatened their livelihoods. They were not against technology per se but only against the particular form of it that was encroaching on their way of life, not in some symbolic sense but in a very real economic sense.
It is hard not to feel sympathy for these men, who were in exactly the same position as any modern day labor movement -- extreme underdogs; the factories and owners are always going to be better equipped and more organized. It's a cliche actually, the scrappy rebel alliance against the evil empire.
The problem is, the empire won, we are living in it (and our relatively good position as high-paid knowledge workers is under threat by a new form of industrial automation). The Luddites lost, and their way of life did in fact disappear along with a great many others in history. At least industrialism has made us rich, at the small cost of destroying the habitability of the planet.