The association of Romanticism with the Luddites and, in turn, with the Luddites' presumed anti-technology philosophy is now widespread in popular culture. Romanticism is understood as essentially an anti-technological philosophy whilst the ecotopian project is to return us to nature--- to a pre-capitalist way of life. The image of the anti-technological/neo-Luddite fusion of "machinery" being smashed---televisions or plastic computers in the 1990s ---- is a reminder of the smashing of machines (stocking frames) two hundred years.

Between now and then lie fields of carnage and desolation, with various cultural possibilities, but these are all glossed and collapsed into the 'rage against the machines.' The conflation of Romantic literature and Luddism often assumed that the poets are able to express what the workers could only do.

The above understanding implies that Romanticists would not be found on the Internet, since a digital romanticism--ie., a romanticism on the net was a contradiction in terms. So what happens to those romantics who have gone digitial? They embrace the machine--their work stations--not smashrthem. We humanities' intellectuals use them to write about technology pervading every aspect of life---nanotech, biotech, genetic engineering, genetically modified crops etc ---leaving us no place of refuge and the way this enframing threatens dominion over our bodies and our subjectivies.