Some 196 years ago, workers in the Nottingham district of England staged an uprising against the "satanic machines" that were endangering their livelihoods.

Claiming as their leader a mysterious "Ned Lud", club and axe-wielding textile workers roamed the area, smashing weaving frames. The authorities responded with brutal repression, as is usual in such cases. A mass trial was held in York, in 1813, at which hundreds of sentences were handed down for hanging and transportation to prison colonies. So much for the last rearguard action against the Industrial Revolution.

Go to the flea market on Waverly Place, just east of Washington Square Park in New York. On the sidewalk, amidst the junk and paintings you see the trademark of the place, a strange loose-jointed clown-manikin pumping furiously on his unicycle, which, for all his efforts, does not move. Look closer. A motor is driving the cycle. The pedals are transmitting the motion to the legs of the clown. Just so, the clown is not in fact pedalling the cycle, it is the cycle that is pedalling the clown.

Technology has made life better than ever. Truly? We jerk awake to a clockwork signal, consume a die-cut breakfast, are neatly packaged into steel capsules to be transported to computer-driven desks to become boss-driven production units. We suck up mass-produced entertainment from flickering pre-programmed picture boxes; we deposit the end products of our food into odorless, semi-noiseless, recoilless sanitary devices; we make love by the diagrams in a book. Are we not fortunate to have machines serving us? Or are we being pedalled by the cycle?

"The future is bright," we are told, "atomic energy will give us limitless power, will light the way." Yet does not this monster sink its teeth into our future even as it promises us riches in the present? This techno plaything seems destined to do us in, one way or another. It is a fine way of destroying people (or peoples), even aside from its uses as an instrument of National Policy, i.e., war. A small "accident" in a nuclear power plant would do very nicely, thank you, and for big-time crooks and terrorists, a do-it-yourself A-bomb is the "Saturday night special" of the future... A few "incidents" of this kind and we might well see the mob out to hang every scientist from the nearest lamp post.

Change begins with the individual. Make your own life a model for others. Therefore, consider the following.

Luddite Manifesto

• Do not let a machine do for you what you can do with your own hands.
• Do not blindly give your trust to doctor, scientist, professor, expert, intellectual, diploma-certified authority, or other high priest of the notorious false religion of scientism.
• Your work is the most valuable thing you own. Do not trade it away cheaply.
• Free yourself. No one will do it for you.

"Ned Lud was a person of weak intellect who lived in a Leicestershire village about 1779, and who in a fit of insane rage rushed into a stockinger's house and destroyed two frames so completely that the saying 'Lud must have been here' came to be used throughout the hosiery districts when a stocking frame had undergone extensive damage."