The Luddite has now existed for a year.
In that year, we've released 36 posts, about 2 posts every 3 weeks, totaling some 88,738 words, roughly the length of a short novel. On the average day, The Luddite's RSS feed gets somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 downloads. Yesterday's total was 3,681. I have absolutely no idea what that means. It seems safe to conclude that there are at least some of you out there, if not reading this, then at least downloading it for reasons known only to you.
The single most-read post is the original Technological Antisolutions post, in large part because it was featured on several prominent blogs, including those of Cory Doctorow and Jamie Zawinski. I've seen the concept credited to both of those people various times, an extremely flattering misattribution. The extended version was also cited in a paper about permacomputing (citation 57), an idea in which I've grown very interested.
The Luddite, like so many things, was born of frustration. The vast majority of tech journalism tends to be painfully uncritical (looking at you, Wired). Those tech journalists that are critical, like the increasingly-popular podcast Tech Won't Save Us, play an important and necessary role in critiquing the tech industry and tech culture, but, as far as I can tell, virtually none of them make tech. I write code for a living, as I have for over a decade. I developed the Technological Antisolutions framework to communicate with my clients that are interested in social impact. I was able to pick apart the ridiculous study claiming that AI can be an entire tech company because I've actually run a tech company. I frequently draw directly from my experiences interacting with venture capitalists, or making things people actually use. I think this is largely a missing perspective, especially on the left, since so much of the tech workforce is constantly inundated in the Californian Ideology. I hope, in part, to reach my fellow tech workers, and convince them that tech doesn't have to be this way.
In short, I think The Luddite has something to say. In fact, there's currently a backlog of 30+ post ideas — an entire year's worth. It seems you all agree, since readership has steadily grown over the last year.
So, now that we're all here, I want to hear from you. Give me your feedback. What are your favorite posts? What are your least favorite? What more would you like to see on The Luddite? Send me your ideas and suggestions, from the banal to the outlandish. Would you like more frequent updates? An audio version of each post? Merch? Maybe prints of the illustrations? Would you like more guest posts, so that you can hear from other kinds of people, or do you actually hate the guest posts? Maybe you like The Luddite exactly as it is now. That's extremely useful feedback, too. Unlike capitalist firms, we're under no obligation to grow forever.
You can reach us at feedback@theluddite.org. I have absolutely no idea how many emails we'll get. We plan on responding to all of them, but in the (unlikely?) event that this gets inundated, that may not go as planned.
Finally, whether or not you write in, thank you all so much for reading.