Last year a Washington think tank, the International Centre for Technology Assessment, set up the Jacques Ellul Society to honour the great anti-technology philosopher and keep his ideas alive (1). Its aim is to bring together writers like Wendell Berry and Jerry Mander (2), environmentalists such as Edward Goldsmith (3) and organisers such as Helena Norberg-Hodge and Vandana Shiva and to establish the legitimacy of resisting technological change. Next April the society will hold its second meeting in San Francisco, where it will decide on a statement of its objectives and assign authors to write a series of white papers on problems of modern technology.

The meeting will take place just a week after a committee of scholars and activists, called the International Forum on Globalisation, holds its third annual teach-in on the dangers of the western approach to development, in particular the spread of an international economy based on hi-tech-driven finance. Two weeks later the Learning Alliance, an adult education centre in New York, will hold its second one-day meeting on “voluntary simplicity”, with panels and workshops on resisting consumerism, self-reliance, promoting local economies and evolving simpler, low-tech lifestyles.

These three meetings are linked by their hostility to modern technology and their desire to promote low-tech and locally rooted economies as a basis for a sustainable future. Inspired by the machine-breaking movement that appeared in Britain during the first industrial revolution (5), this new political force appeared on the United States political scene two years ago, seeking to popularise the idea of a new Luddism. In the words of a manifesto for the Second Luddite Congress which took place in Ohio last April, it is “a leaderless movement of passive resistance to consumerism and the increasingly bizarre and frightening technologies of the Computer Age.”

The membership of this movement is extremely broad. It (...)