Luddite Sticker

A premium die-cut vinyl sticker with a smooth super matte finish, featuring original artwork by Katie Beaton.

Sticker Type
Die Cut

Size
2.425" × 3.000"

Finish
Super Matte

What Does "Luddite" Mean?

The word luddite is often used to describe someone who is opposed to technology, but that isn't what the Luddites were.

The Luddites were skilled textile workers in early 19th-century England who organized against factory owners using new machinery to replace skilled labour with lower paid workers. Their struggle was not against technology itself, but against the use of technology to concentrate wealth, undermine workers, and strip people of their livelihoods and autonomy.

Today, the term has largely lost that history. We use it in its original sense: as a reminder to question who benefits from new technologies, whose work is being displaced, and what is lost when efficiency is valued above people, craft, and community.

The history of the Luddites also sits within a broader history of industrial expansion and colonialism. The wealth that fueled Britain's industrial revolution was deeply tied to the extraction of land, labour, and resources across colonized nations. The fight for workers' rights has never been separate from the fight against systems that treat both people and places as resources to be exploited.

For us, luddite isn't about rejecting progress. It's about believing that progress should serve people rather than the other way around.