Creativity Quote by Juliana Hatfield

"I'm a neo-Luddite" lands like a punchy self-label from someone who lives inside the machinery of modern culture but refuses to worship it. Coming from Juliana Hatfield, a musician who came up in an era when guitar rock still had a clear pipeline (labels, radio, MTV) and then watched that entire infrastructure get swallowed by the internet, the phrase reads less like a manifesto than a defensive posture: a way to draw a line around attention, craft, and sanity.

The original Luddites weren’t clueless tech-haters; they were skilled workers pushing back against a system that used machines to devalue labor. Hatfield’s "neo" update keeps that moral charge while swapping textile looms for platforms, algorithms, and the always-on expectation that artists perform their personalities as much as their songs. The subtext is exhaustion with compulsory connectivity: the sense that technology doesn’t just distribute music, it dictates how music is made, marketed, and even felt.

It also works because it’s a deliberately unfashionable stance in a world that treats frictionless tech adoption as a personality trait. By claiming the label, Hatfield preempts the insult and turns it into an aesthetic choice: analog over optimized, private over performative, human scale over infinite scroll. In a music economy that rewards constant content and punishes silence, "neo-Luddite" becomes a small act of refusal - and a bid to keep the artist’s inner life from being strip-mined for engagement.