The author accomplishes so much in this excellent essay. Among other contributions, he offers a broad historical perspective of the past 500 years which has seen the rise of a new class of people who claim "ownership" rights over technology and its applications. This has produced a dialectic between the social versus the private in societal development which is reflected in the history that has played out in various working class opposition movements over the past 500 years until the present day. He begins this story by telling the true history of the Luddites which he salvaged from the distorted history propagated by capitalist academics.
Those with power stamp a certain definition on historical reality, shaping popular consciousness and the meaning of the very words we use. Such is the privilege of power.