Created by: Jay Hailey, Garry Stahl
Appearance: Bendross Stories.
Number of Members: Never exactly known, in the thousands.
Nature of Members: Humans against things.
Organization: Cell
Game Role: Destroy things and be a pest.
World Role: Keep that nasty man critter from spreading.
Relative Influence: Minor, but larger than their numbers.
Public or Secret?: Public action, secret activities.
Publicly Stated Goal: Keep man out of interstellar space.
Relative Wealth: Poor, but they got atom bombs from someplace.
Group advantages: Secret, no one knew when or where.
Special Abilities: No inconvenient morals.
Group disadvantages: Most megacorps had "kill on identity" polices
Special disadvantages: Megacortps didn't have any inconvenient morals either.
Those who favor them: Those who believe that Man's grasp had far outgrown his reach.
Those opposed to them: Sane people living quiet lives, megacorps.
Area of Operation: Earth and the Sol system.
Headquarters Location: Unknown
Public Face: Get back in your cave you monkeys.
Notable Members:
- Brock Samson -- The only truly well known public figure the movement had. He strongly advocated rolling back both space and computer tech. He was not real sure about air conditioning. His position could be be called a Radical Green. Beat mankind back to the stone age to save the planet. He was assassinated by megacorp "runners" in 2042. After that they kept their heads down and bombed more. Brock Samson was elevated within the organization to a position "enjoyed" by Che Guevara among Communists of the previous century.
- Corby Peters -- Spokesperson of the later anti AI and robot lobby. He was getting fairly shrill when he got proven right in the worst possible way. No body was ever located.
History of the Organization: The Neo-Luddites as a group started to jell after the Pestilence of the Naughts. They blamed all the war and trouble of the past to decades on the rise of technology. They wanted restrictions on AI computers, a turning away from technology and space travel. They found the idea of man spreading to the stars abhorrent. They opposed the Mega Corporations as those pushing the technology and the ones abusing people with it the most.
This remained the situation until Brock Samson started to get a public following and some political clout. Rather than fight the possible sanctions by near morbid government looking to get leverage to control them, which is how they saw Samson, the Corps had him murdered.
It shut the Neo-luddites up as a political body, but made them over as a terrorist group. They stopped talking and started to bomb and kill instead.
The political arm started to heat up again in the 2060s. they tapped into the rising fear of intelligent machines and got several anti AI laws passed. Two distinct groups formed, the terrorists, and the anti AI faction led by Corby Peters that was making political headway.
One of their true real wins was the destruction of the Bendross II colonizing mission.
Both sides got beat down in the AI War. The Anti AI lobby firmed up as it crawled out of the rubble with everyone else, and still has a little influence in the 25th century on Earth.
The terrorists were beaten down and eliminated during the formation of the Earth Alliance, along with other violent splinter groups like the Church of the New Revelation.