Revenge of the Luddites!

"I'm absolutely a Luddite," the author and columnist Brian Merchant said the other day at an outdoor café in Brooklyn. He has long, brown hair and a goatee, and was wearing a plaid shirt over a T-shirt that read "The Luddites Were Right." On the chair next to him sat an HP printer. Merchant feels that the original Luddites, early-nineteenth-century cloth-makers who raided British factories and destroyed the new machines that were replacing them, have been getting a bad rap lately. Modern people tend to see them as fools who didn't appreciate the benefits of technology.