The cartoon version of the Luddites is the one most people carry around: men with hammers, smashing machines, terrified of the future, doomed to be a punchline two centuries later. Don't be such a Luddite. The real Luddites were more interesting than that.
Here is what I just did.
I was holding my Plaud in one hand and talking into it. On the desk beside me, my phone was open to the Plaud app, and I was watching the words appear on the screen as I said them a half-second behind my mouth, like someone with a delay translating me back to myself.
When I finished, the file moved from the device to the app to a transcription service, which I will paste into a writing tool, which I will then run through an AI to clean up. By the time these sentences arrive at you, my one small observation will have passed through four pieces of technology.
The observation, for the record, was this:
I am using four pieces of technology to capture one thought.
That was it. That was the whole thing. I could have written it on a napkin. I caught myself, mid-sentence, watching the words travel from my mouth to the phone screen, and I thought: crazy, man, just crazy. Not the deep kind of crazy. The middle-aged kind. The kind that arrives when you notice you have been doing something elaborate for a long time, and you cannot remember when it started.
A Few Years Ago, I Wrote About the Luddites
A few years ago — December of 2022, to be exact — I wrote a piece about the Luddites.
The cartoon version of the Luddites is the one most people carry around: men with hammers, smashing machines, terrified of the future, doomed to be a punchline two centuries later. Don't be such a Luddite. The real Luddites were more interesting than that.
They weren't anti-technology. They were skilled textile workers who liked the new machines. What they were against was the way the machines were being used to circumvent fair labor practices, to push out trained workers, and to flood the market with shoddy products that the machines made possible and the manufacturers found convenient.
They didn't want the looms put down. They wanted the looms in the hands of people who had earned the right to run them, paid honestly, making something worth making. The Luddites, in other words, were not asking the question should we have this technology. They were asking what is this technology doing to us, and who is it serving while it does it.
In the 2022 piece, I had a cat named Ned Ludd. The cat didn't exist; I made him up because I needed someone to argue with in the kitchen.
The line I gave him was that we don't need to put the machines down. We need to know what they're doing to us while we use them. I wrote that four years ago and then mostly forgot about it.
Then I picked up a Plaud.
What Earned Its Place
Here is what I want to be honest about, because I’m writing this piece on the very stack I’m about to question, and a piece that doesn't admit that is a piece that has already lost.
The Plaud is useful. The app is useful. The transcription is useful. The AI cleanup is useful. Each individual link in the chain solves a real problem. I can capture an idea while I'm walking. I can find it later. I can turn the captured idea into a usable draft. I am not going to throw the Plaud in a fire. I'm going to keep using it. I'm probably going to recommend it to people. That isn't the question.
The question is whether the whole stack earned its place, or whether I assembled it because each piece arrived separately and made sense on its own, and now I am running an elaborate four-step apparatus for thoughts that used to fit on a Post-it. That is a Luddite question in the real sense of the word. Not should this exist. But what is this doing to me while I use it, and have I noticed?
When I look honestly at my Plaud-and-phone-and-laptop-and-AI workflow, here is what I find: Some thoughts genuinely needed it. A long conversation I want to remember. A meeting where I want to be present rather than taking notes. A walk where an idea arrived, and I knew I would lose it if I tried to hold it in my head until I got back to a keyboard.
For those, the stack pays for itself.
Other thoughts didn't need any of it. I’m using four pieces of technology to capture one thought, which is a thought I could have caught with a pencil. I used the stack because it was there. The marginal cost of using it felt like zero. It’s not zero. It’s the time I spent watching the words appear on the second screen, the time I spent transferring the file, the time I spent in the AI cleanup, the small mental tax of being inside a workflow when I could have been inside an idea.
None of those costs is big. All of them are real. Add them up across a year, and they are not nothing. This is what the Luddites were trying to get us to notice. Not the machines. The drift.
The Tax Hiding in the Toolkit
I think this is the version of the Luddite question that the AI era will make harder, not easier.
In the old industrial Luddite story, the cost of the machine was visible. You could see who lost the job. You could see the shoddy product. You could see the cottage industry dying. The harm had a shape.
In our version, the cost is paid in small, invisible currency: a second of attention here, a second of friction there, a habit of reaching for a tool because the tool exists, a slow rewiring of how a thought even arrives. We’re not losing our jobs to the machines. We’re losing the part of ourselves that used to be able to think without immediately handing our thoughts to a piece of software for processing.
That is a much sneakier kind of harm. It doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. It shows up as the slightly diminished quality of your own thinking, which you cannot benchmark, because you no longer remember what your thinking was like before.
I’m not arguing against any of these tools. I am arguing for the discipline the original Luddites were trying to teach us: use the machine. But know what it’s doing to you while you use it.
And every once in a while, ask whether this particular thought needed this particular tool or whether you reached for it because reaching for it is now what you do.
Some Thoughts Deserve a Stack
I will keep using the Plaud.
I will also, more often than I have been, put it in a drawer. Some thoughts deserve a stack. Some thoughts deserve a pencil. The mistake is using the stack for everything, because the stack is fast, and the stack is easy, and the stack is here.
The Luddites weren't asking us to give up the loom. They were asking us to know who it was serving and at what cost. Two hundred years later, in my office, with four pieces of technology spread across my desk to capture a single sentence I could have written on a napkin, I think the question still stands.
Ned Ludd doesn't exist, except when I need him. He's standing in the doorway right now, looking at the Plaud, the phone, the laptop, and the AI window I have open in the corner.
He's not telling me to throw any of it out. He's asking me, in the same dry tone he used in 2022: Did all of that earn its place this time, or did you just reach for it because it was there?
I'm going to think about that for a minute before I answer. Then I'm going to put the Plaud in the drawer and finish this piece by hand.
The Takeaway
The danger of modern technology is rarely the tool itself.
More often than not, it’s the unnoticed behavioral drift that comes with constant convenience.
At ThoughtLab, we know that the most powerful tools earn their place individually. The problem begins when an entire stack forms around us, piece by piece, until we are spending more energy servicing workflows than engaging directly with the thought, conversation, or problem the workflow was supposed to support.
The original Luddites understood something we are relearning in the AI era: the important question is not whether a technology works. It is whether we remain conscious of what the technology is quietly training us to become while we use it.
