This means laying out as clearly as possible the costs and consequences of our technologies, in the near term and long, so that even those overwhelmed by the ease/comfort/speed/power of high-tech gadgetry are forced to understand at what price it all comes and who is paying for it. What purpose does this machine serve? What problem has become so great that it needs this solution? Is this invention nothing but an improved means to an unimproved end?
It also means forcing some awareness of who the principle beneficiaries of the new technology are --- they tend to be the large, bureaucratic, complex, and secretive organizations of the industrial world --- and trying to make public all the undemocratic ways they make the technological choices that so affect all the rest of us. Who are the winners, who the losers? Will this invention concentrate or disperse power, encourage or discourage self-worth? Can society at large afford it? Can the biosphere?
Ultimately this "great debate" of course has to open out into wider questions about industrial society itself, its values and purposes, and its sustainability.
Much there is to be learned from the experience of the Luddites, as distant and as different as their times are from ours. It may be that even those who do remember the past are condemned to repeat it, such is the regularity of the human condition, but at perhaps those with an understanding of the past, and who learn from it – may triumph the second time around – allowing them to be rebels against the future?
Just as the second Industrial Revolution itself has its roots quite specifically in the first - the machines change, but the machineness does not - so those today who are inspired in some measure to resist or even reverse the tide of industrialism might best find their analogs, if not their models, in those original Luddites. As I see it, these are the sorts of lessons one might, with the focused lenses of history, take from the Luddite past :
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Technologies are never neutral, and some are destructive
3. Only people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines