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- [00:00]
A
And again, it was not the technology. It was the way that it was being used. It was the use to which it was being put, and it was the exploitation that it enabled. That's what the Luddites were railing against. They saw that it came as a package, and that's what they were fighting.
- [00:32]
B
Hello, and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week I have a fantastic conversation for you with a very familiar guest. Brian Merchant is a technology columnist at the LA Times and the author of Blood and the the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Brian has been on the show multiple times in the past, but this conversation is particularly special because Brian's new book is a very detailed history of the Luddites that goes into, you know, so much of what was happening back in the early 1800s when they were smashing the machines, also the other aspects of their life, how their livelihoods were getting more difficult, how they tried to appeal to political authorities, how they tried to get the industrialists, the entrepreneurs, as Brian puts it, of the time, to not roll out these technologies in such a way that was really going to affect their standard of living and basically make them worse off. And of course, as we know, they were not successful in that. Right. Like the capitalists won out. But they still set a very important example that we still look back to today when it is kind of miscast and demonized by the tech elite who just want to use them as an offhand example of kind of people who think backwardly about technology and just oppose technology without thought. But in reality, that is not who they were. Right? They recognized how technology was being implemented by capitalists to make their lives worse off. While these capitalists were gaining immense wealth, getting wealthier all the time, gaining increasing control over workers, including child workers, who were very poorly treated in these factories. And so especially at this moment where we're waking up to what, you know, the tech companies in our age are doing and the very real harms that they are causing in our society, it's more important than ever to look back at this example of the Luddites, to learn from their history, to learn from what was driving them and to see how, even though they lived more than 200 years ago, there's still so much in common with what we're experiencing today and what they experienced then. And there's a surprising amount that I think that we can learn from them, as Brian talks about in this conversation. So I really enjoyed this conversation with Brian. But honestly, there's so much from the book that we weren't able to get into. You know, we talked a lot about the workers and what they were doing, but there's much more detail about that in the book itself. And Brian also talks about what other important figures in that time were doing, people who were important to this larger narrative. And so I would say that if you are interested in this story, I think that Brian's book is one that you really need to pick up and you really need to read because it is so relevant to the conversations that we're having on the show every single week. And so, you know, no pressure, but I would recommend it, especially if you just read a book every now and then. I would say that this is one that you should pick up. So with that said, if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week. So I can have these in depth, critical conversations with people like Brian that bring these kind of histories and these stories to you so that you gain a greater understanding of technology in the tech industry as well. You can join supporters like Midori from California, Amanda Sparshot in London, and David from Makonda, Illinois, by going to patreon.com tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Brian, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us once again.
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A
Paris, always a pleasure. My favorite podcast. Well, I guess, yes, one of my favorite podcasts I have. I love a lot of podcasts, but, you know, special place in my heart.
- [04:27]
B
I would hope so, given that I believe you still hold the record for a person who's appeared on the show the most amount of times.
- [04:35]
A
That's right. And here we are, making that bar even harder to clear yet again.
- [04:41]
B
Exactly. There was that kind of dearth of Brian content earlier in the year, and so we're making up for it now by having you back on again.
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A
All right, well, I hope your listeners aren't tired of me yet.
- [04:57]
B
I don't think they are. And especially with the topic that we're discussing today, I think that they'll be really excited for this one. And so, you know, you have this new book that's out this week called Blood in the Machine that digs into the history of the Luddites and how that relates to today. And I think that many of the listeners of the show will be quite familiar with the Luddites and who they are, you know, because this is kind of a historical tale that we talked about on the show before, and that also comes up a lot in some of these conversations that we're having because of the inspiration that we're pulling from these people who, you know, really kind of had the first opposition to machines. And so what I really want to ask, to start off is, like, why did you want to write this book? Like, why? Of all the different things that you could have approached that you could have spent your time into researching and writing about, why did you want to go back and explore this history of the Luddites and learn more about these people in the early 1800s who started smashing machines and who we hear a lot about today, but often we don't hear about their story very accurately.
- [05:58]
A
Yeah, yeah, I think that was it. I think first it began with this allure of looking at a term or a group that conventional wisdom has sort of miscast so strongly. When I first stumbled upon, like, the true story of the Luddites almost ten years ago at this point, I didn't start writing the book that long ago, but I wrote a piece for Vice when I first went down the rabbit hole learning about the Luddites in about 2014. That piece was called you've got the Luddites all wrong. Because it was just at a moment. You know, I'd been a tech journalist for a number of years already, maybe five years or so, and I was never one of those journalists that was sort of very pro industry or booster ish or anything. But you do sort of coming up in that ecosystem and in that environment, you sort of accept certain tenets that, like, you know, the tech industry is generally a force for progress. It is. May have some bad actors, it may, you know, seek to maximize progress, but by and large, it was kind of accepted. You know, Google was trying to do the right thing. Apple was doing the world a service by building the iPhone, and Amazon was, you know, one of the first to kind of sour in public opinion, along with maybe Uber and the. The Rideshare app companies. But it was a long time that those more sort of deeper sort of fundamentals of what tech giants were actually doing were kind of getting a pass. And it was at a moment, I'm certainly not going to credit myself with turning that tide, but people started looking more closely, listening more carefully to the critics who had been speaking out about it for longer before it Sort of breached the mainstream media. But as you started to see a lot of these stories sort of make headlines about real labor exploitation in Amazon warehouses, problems with the gig economy after sort of that initial boom of venture capital sort of ran out and they started to decrease wages and rely on algorithmic gamesmanship. There was the suicide epidemic at the Foxconn plants in Apple. So all of these things started happening. And yet you would still hear the word Luddite used as this sort of derogatory term. For anybody who was criticizing tech companies are saying, I don't know about that, they were lumping people who, you know, are most invested in seeing technology and the tech companies advance at the fastest pace, would use this as a, as a word to sort of cast aspersions on the critics or lump them all together as people who don't understand what's going on. They're behind the times, they're backwards looking. So drilling into that term for me, you know, at first there was like the editorial angle where it's like, well, you didn't know this about the Luddites and in fact you've got it all wrong. But pretty quickly, to me it seemed to contain a sort of skeleton key to understanding the very real grievances, the very relevant grievances that people still have with the way that, that they experience technology and how it's imposed on them, how it's imposed on their workplaces, how it's used as a tool against them in a lot of cases. So once I started understanding that, and you know, at the time I was writing, you know, AI replacing jobs was kind of more of, you know, an ambiguous. There was a lot of automation theorists who were saying, oh, it's going to take just we need a UBI or something. But it was before the generative AI boom kind of really drove home a lot of those connections and kind of made it real. So I'm looking a lot in the book at sort of the rise of gig work, which sort of, you know, I also argue in the book sort of pairs with new AI service providers to sort of break down working standards to exploit workers at an even more accelerated rate. So now they're really facing two fronts. Sort of the precarity based model of the algorithmic, you know, gig, gig work economy combined with this onslaught of generative AI services and tools that managers and corporations are sort of embracing as another way of sort of mostly squeezing, you know, as we'll talk about, I'm sure they're doing less one to one replacing work than using it as a tool, as leverage to sort of squeeze workers and say, well, we do have this AI, so we normally pay you this much, but now that we could use the. If we wanted to, so now we have an excuse to pay you less. It's a threat. It's a way to sort of break worker power.
- [10:48]
B
Absolutely. And I think that many people will, you know, be aware of those connections and will be making those connections themselves. And I want to return to what we're seeing today and how that kind of harkens back to what the Luddites were talking about over 200 years ago. But I feel like the story that you told of kind of having this kind of moment of evolution, whether people are not journalists and have been in other fields or have kind of felt these technologies affecting their work themselves, I think that's a story that many people will relate to. Right. Kind of feeling a lot of hope around the tech industry and around these technologies, and then seeing the actual way that these things have been implemented and the really negative consequences that have come of a lot of these technologies. And had that moment like you had in 2014, where you were like, hold on, wait a second, this isn't really working out. And there's this story of people who in the past recognize this as well. And actually, you know, we're not really hearing about them. And so, you know, for people who might not be aware of who the Luddites are, you know, they might be rare. How would you kind of briefly describe them before we go into the deeper history? This book is kind of filled with really detailed stories and a really detailed history of these people and the people around them. Where did you find all of this kind of material to fill out this very in depth history that you've put together?
- [12:13]
A
Yeah, the Luddites were mostly, you know, cloth workers in industrializing England. It, you know, they were the largest sort of industrial base of workers at the time. England's economy was highly dependent on cloth production. And it's what sort of really kickstarts the Industrial revolution because there's so many people working in this industry. So the Luddites were cloth workers in different regions. They're making wool products, they're making lace and knit products, they're making cotton products. They recognize sort of changes in the industry coming. So these are people who had worked for literally generations, about 200 years in more or less the same kind of arrangement. It was called the domestic system, where they would work out of literal cottages. It was a literal cottage industry, was named after the way that they worked where you would have a loom in your house, maybe multiple looms, you would maybe employ a journeyman weaver, but you would work at home, family. You'd have a lot of autonomy over your life. You'd buy the raw materials and you'd sell it to a merchant, and you would expect kind of a fair price was the term. So everybody kind of agreed upon these fair prices. It wasn't perfect. Obviously, there was a lot of room for, you know, the frictions that go about in daily life. But by and large, you had a lot of control, you had a lot of freedom. And even if you weren't super prosperous, you could have a lot of dignity and pride in your craft and your skill, your skilled work. This group saw sort of the emergence of the factory system kind of guided by both, sort of fraction of the elites kind of really embracing Adam Smith's teachings at the time and the things like the division of labor and then applying that to what would become, you know, the factory system and sort of dividing labor, organizing it under one roof and using machinery. In some cases it had been around, in some cases it was new. But the thing that clothworkers started protesting was the way it was organized under one roof. And all of a sudden there was one person who was going to profit. You would be laboring for them. You would be standing, quote, at their command. That's what the Luddites hated most of all, losing that autonomy, losing the ability to set fair prices, to recognize those fair prices, and sort of watching the whole world of work and the community as they knew it sort of being changed against their will. Starting at the very beginning of the 18th century, the cloth workers recognizing the ways that this factory production and these new automated machinery and the old machines being put to sort of use doing automation, they started organizing. You know, organizing wasn't legal officially. So they started doing kind of, I guess you could call it soft organizing, where they would sort of just petition parliament to say, say, hey, we see what's coming. Our wages are going down. Our quality of life is going down. There are hundreds of thousands of us. Let's figure this out. So they went to Parliament asking for things like minimum wage protections. They asked for some support enforcing regulations that were on the books. So that's another important point. There were a lot of regulations and charters that governed these trades. And some of them were very old, and some people considered them a little outmoded. And the entrepreneurs, just like you might imagine, you know, Uber or Lyft or somebody doing today, took advantage of that and said, well, we're using the new machines and we don't have to play by all these old rules. We don't need to, you know, have an apprentice learn the trade for seven years before he can be employed. We don't have to follow this cloth count. That only applied to the old way of doing things. Well, all those regulations had held the trade together in some pretty important ways. You know, people could predict how much money they could expect to earn. They could sort of build their lives around certain assurances. And even if they weren't perfect, it allowed for a way of life that was very important to, you know, thousands and thousands of people. After the cloth worker sort of petitioned Parliament, sort of over and over to uphold the regulations, some basic protections, some welfare benefits in times that, you know, of economic distress. And they just got completely rebuffed time and again until, in 1809, Parliament just kind of wiped away all those regulations and said, we're siding with industry. Basically, industry is generating a lot of money and power for England. And in a sense, it was. It was generating a lot of money for sort of the lords whose land these factory operations were on and who got the taxes and stuff like that. But it was completely crushing the working class. So after going through all these channels, after really pushing for democratic and peaceful change in a fiercely undemocratic, you know, very conservative era, you know, Hobson, historians have said that it's like the most fiercely conservative period in sort of British politics. No protections, no nothing for working people. So in 1811, after, you know, push comes to shove, the Luddite rebellion rises up, led by the mythical figure General Ludd, or Ned Ludd, based on an apocryphal story of an apprentice weaver who smashed his machine after his master had him whipped for not working hard enough. And they target the factory owners who have begun using automated machinery to displace jobs, specifically to use it to justify lowering wages, who are also turning out shoddy goods and ruining the reputation and standards in the regions that are affected. And the Luddites begin this campaign where first they'll send a letter to a factory owner and say, we know you've got these machines. Take down these offending machines. I call them the obnoxious machines. Or you'll get a visit from General Ludd and Ned Ludd's army. And if they took down the machines, great, the Luddites would leave them alone. If they didn't, they would slip into the factory under the COVID of night at first, and increasingly emboldened as it became pretty clear how popular and how cheered they were by most British working class people. And they would break the machines. They would break the machines. Just those machines that were obnoxious to them, old machines that were used in a way that wasn't creating a disparity or leading to a skewing of the balance of power or accelerating inequality. They would leave those alone, they would leave a note. Usually they would say, usually, okay, if you bring back the automated machinery, if you try it again, we will return and we'll burn the whole thing to the ground. But it was a very clear message and it was very effective. And it soon sort of swept the cloth producing regions of England like wildfire. We can talk about how that happened more. But yeah, it was a mass movement every day. There were huge operations, frames being broken, hundreds of frames every week. Hundreds of machines shattered by the giant sledgehammer they called Enoch. It was quite a rebellion.
- [19:32]
B
Yeah. And it's such a fascinating story and you talk about it in such detail. But I think what you outline right there is really important because it goes against this kind of general story that we have about the Luddites. Right. When we hear the Luddites in common conversation today, or when it's kind of deployed out there, the idea is like, oh, the Luddites, they're just anti technology. They saw these technologies and had to smash them because they hated them. And what you're describing is actually a much more complex and much more nuanced approach to that. Right. Over the course of many years, they're campaigning to say parliament, like, we see something happening here, it's affecting us directly. Can you please step in and do something? And then after being ignored for so many years, they're forced to kind of take that action into their own hands to try to force, you know, some sort of change to try to protect themselves. Because, you know, as you say, the combination acts were passed. They were not allowed to unionize, they were not allowed to organize officially. And so they had to find ways to kind of get around that. And smashing the machines, and particularly the machines that were going to really damage their livelihoods was the way to do that.
- [20:41]
A
Yeah, I mean, they were like Robin Hood. They also hailed from the same region of like, the first outbreak of Luddism was in. Was in Nottingham or the towns around Nottingham. And you can kind of, you know, Ned Ludd and Robin Hood. Ned Ludd, Robin Hood. You can kind of see, you know, maybe some of the similarities there that may have inspired them. So there is a Tradition of dissent. And there is a tradition of. Of sort of speaking out or. Or pushing back against conditions that. That they find onerous. And they really tapped into that. And absolutely, you know, the biggest myth about the Luddites is that they. That they wanted to stop progress or that they hated machinery. They were, as I often say, technicians themselves or technologists even, we might say they had their machinery at home. A lot of them would mod it or try to develop it, try to improve it, but on their own terms, not so it could profit a boss. And that they would, you know, that they would be forced to just kind of work away like a drone in a factory. That was their fear. You know, they did all of these amazing things with technology that sort of has completely been wiped away. One of my favorite examples is, is that they developed a technology that could determine the cloth count and therefore sort of, you know, give a good indication of how valuable a piece of cloth was. And they brought it, you know, to the bosses, to the merchants and some of the folks who are becoming factory owners and said, hey, what if we use this to determine how much you should pay us for. For extra fine work, because this is extra high quality? And what do you think happened? It was rejected because it would have lost the entrepreneur's money. So they did come up with a bunch of really interesting technology. In fact, one of the. One of the. He was never officially confirmed to be a Luddite, but almost everybody thinks that he was. Gravener Henson, who is one of the characters we follow in the book, who both kind of was. Kind of assumed was organizing these raids and was a very popular figure. He was really smart and literate and a good writer at a time when not a lot of, you know, working people were educated or good writers and sort of good thinkers. So he became kind of a leader of the Nottingham cloth trade. And he, during the Luddite uprisings, was also sort of trying to petition parliament again for some protections for the trade that they could meet, you know, halfway with the factory owners and the posers, they would call them at the time, and the bosses. So he also. One of the things he did was write this sort of. Of encyclopedia of technology, of all of the things that working people did to sort of improve the technology over the years. All of the amazing inventions that are mostly lost to history because they weren't commandeered by a factory owner who got fabulously wealthy, like someone like Richard Arkwright, who became the, quote, father of the factory, you know, And I write about in the book, he's kind of like this weird composite of Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos and that he kind of, you know, as Steve Jobs said, you know, good artists borrow, but great artists steal. That Picasso quote that Steve Jobs sort of embraced as an ethos, well, Arkwright beat him to the punch by 200 years, kind of lifting patents and technologies into his own amalgam to make the water frame. And in fact the courts later invalidated his patent. But he became known as this sort of great entrepreneur who built technology, put it in a factory and was producing a bunch of cloth. Also written out of a lot of the history is that he was using tons of child labor. So it was less his ingenuity, it was his sort of relentless dedication to organizing labor to attend to that technology and then exploiting it using children. It was really grim. And he was able to become fabulously wealthy in the process. And he ends up being kind of the guy above all that the entrepreneurs of the early industrial revolution emulate. And that I say is half Jeff Bezos, half Steve Jobs, because he kind of lifted the technology on one end and then does this relentless pursuit of sort of technologizing labor in the way that that Bezos has done with Amazon. So those are the guys that they're up against. Those are the guys that the Luddites are really looking at and saying this is going to be bad for society. This is going to be not just for us, but for the way that we live in general. And again, it was not the technology, it was the way that it was being used. It was the use to which it was being put and it was the exploitation that it enabled. That's what the Luddites were railing against. They saw that it came as a package and that's what they were fighting.
- [25:25]
B
Exactly. And just to back up what you're saying, you quote a source in the book that says that weavers wages were 25 shillings in 1800 and had declined to 14 shillings by 1811. Just to illustrate, you know, how these people were having their kind of day to day lives affected by the way that these technologies were being deployed into their communities and you know, into their workplaces basically. Right. And I feel like one of the points that really stands out for me as I was reading your book was how I think one of the things that are quite distinct from today versus back then is that you, you write that automation was not a given at the time and that technology didn't inherently mean progress and capitalism itself was not fully formed, let alone accepted or celebrated. Right. We were in this very different period where these things were still very nascent, these ideas were still kind of being created and being formed, whereas today they're much more kind of integrated into our society and into our ideas of how society should work. How important important was that to, you know, I guess shaping what the Luddites were doing and the conversations that were happening in that time.
- [26:32]
A
Yeah, it was called the machinery question at the time. It was like sort of the. Are robots coming to take our jobs of, of today? But again with a different set of assumptions in a different context. People would debate in pubs, you know, is the machine, you know, a good thing for society? And I illustrate that by sort of calling back to a conversation that was recorded by an oral historian who has some of the sort of the best textual representation of the, of the Luddites, of Frank Peel oral history. That's, that's really great. But if flawed, you know, historians find it flawed just because it was recorded after the fact. This was an intensely secretive movement. You could be hanged for being a Luddite. So they didn't leave a lot of documentation around. But yeah, there's this great conversation between one of the clothworkers who winds up kind of becoming a leading Luddite and one of his friends who's, who's also a laborer but is also kind of a disciple of Robert Owens, who is sort of advocating a different path for technology. And they have this debate over. It just rhymes just so perfectly to the debates that we're having now where John Booth, the sort of the proponent of developing technology, but then letting everybody kind of of share the benefits, is saying, well look, if society were differently constituted, machinery could be a great boon. We could build all of this great, you know, infrastructure. It could save a lot of toil and everybody could benefit. And I just always think of this moment in my mind, it always comes back because George Mellor, the, the who ends up becoming his local general Ludd, responds by going, if, if, if, you know, if society were differently constituted, but it's not. And what makes you, you think that at this moment it's going to change or anytime soon. So you have this almost this debate between today, which would be like fully automated luxury communism or something, and modern Luddism, which is, do we sort of legislate and organize to try to claw back some of the economic gains that are currently being enjoyed by an elite few who own all the machinery and we have to work at their whimsical for now, or do we resist right now because we can see the ways that these technologies are being used to exploit us, to extract from us, to sort of tear apart our communities. So that was sort of the debate at the time, and it was intensely important. And one thing that Luddism did, in fact, was just clarify for a lot of people in England just how much anger there was at the way machinery was being used. When you could have a polite debate about, you know, the pros and cons of machinery. But when you look out your window and there's a troop of masked men who are smashing machinery because they can no longer afford to feed their families because work has been consolidated under a factory owner who's profiting at their direct expense, it sort of clarifies the equation for you. It's not just an abstract, it's not just, well, you know, one day machinery could be great. Well, in the short term, it's really being used in a way that's destroying people's lives. So I think that that has a lot of ramifications for how we talk about it again today. And that said, I don't think anybody necessarily disagreed completely with John Booth or thought, you know, the things that Robert Owens, in some context were trying to pursue were a bad thing. It's just that allowing that to just kind of be a latent hope and to have that sort of be put on the back burner was not acceptable. I think that today, you know, we see echoes of this too, with a lot of AI proponents saying, like, oh, well, one day, you know, we'll have an AGI that will be benevolent and it will organize our economy in more efficient ways than we can ever dream of. It'll solve climate change, it'll reduce inequality. But the people in the trenches who are seeing the way that AI is being introduced into their workplaces are saying, hold on a minute, that's not how it's affecting my life at all in the short term. And to sort of, you know, give too much credence to that idea is going to do us a lot of harm in the short term if we don't push back.
- [30:54]
B
Yeah, you can see how these same conversations are still so relevant today, you know, happening over 200 years ago and still like being debated in the moment. And I feel like, like in the past, two answers that you've given where you've talked about how these workers were developing technologies but were not kind of in the interests of capital, so were just discarded and not adopted, and then at the same time being very clear eyed about the effects of technology on them in the Moment it really brings to mind the work of David Noble and how he was focused on both of those things, right? Calling for the need to focus on technology in the present tense, instead of just always talking about this kind of future possibility that technology offered, but also how capital shaped the development of technology in such a way to always push aside the technologies or the innovations that would empower workers instead to adopt those ones that empower bosses of management, even if they're less efficient and more expensive and all this kind of stuff.
- [31:54]
A
Yeah, David Noble, I think he says even that the Luddites may have been the last group that could really fully and effectively see that technology in the present tense. It again, as you mentioned earlier, all of these sort of expectations and assumptions and norms about technology being this inexorable progressive force that is just always being, that was not there yet. You know, for all the similarities, that wasn't there yet. So the Luddites could look and it wasn't just like, oh, is this, this piece of machinery going to be more productive and produce more pieces of cloth per input than the previous version? And could that, you know, increase Britain's GDP if we use it? That wasn't the question. It was how is it going to disrupt their very own livelihood? How is it going to affect the way that people lived? It wasn't an abstraction. It was completely real and it was completely sort of well understood. Like nobody knew better than the Luddites what technology was capable of and what would happen if it were organized in a way to oppose their interests. So, yeah, David Noble's work is really great and was an inspiration for this book. And you know, I think what, you know, he did, he did a lot to keep the Luddite torch alive in his, in his time when, you know, the, the winds were blowing even, even more strongly against them. You know, in the 80s and 90s especially, the big first Silicon Valley boom happened. And you know, if we had listened and looked more critically at some of these tendencies that were taking shape, I think we could have prevented a number of the jams that we're in today. But here we are and now it is much more roundly understood that that technology can be a force for exploitation and a force for ill in very specific ways, not abstract ways. You know, I think that the so called tech lash kind of primed the pump a little bit. It was clearly not enough. But now we're seeing people organize, push back, articulate grievances with technology in a way that was not happening 10 years ago. And I think you know, ultimately society will be better for it, for all this, you know, especially if those voices can win some of these battles and gain power and make their way up the chain.
- [34:26]
B
Yeah, it's really exciting to see that development. Right. And to see the kind of rejuvenation of the Luddites over that period to such a degree that there's a huge book like yours coming out right now that is receiving a bunch of attention. And, you know, I think it will be very positive attention. You know, we're, we're early right now, but I have, I have high hopes for it. Before we kind of talk about those kind of modern similarities to what's going on, I want to ask one more question about that history. Right. Because one of the things that you have talked about is how like they were pushing back, they were going in and smashing these machines to kind of let these industrialists know, like this was not acceptable because, you know, Parliament had kind of left them hanging. Right. The political system had not worked for them because it was really not concerned with the interests of the poor and the working class in England, especially outside of London in that moment. And so as they were breaking these machines, kind of what successes did they have, but also what was kind of the end result of this? How did their campaign ultimately end?
- [35:29]
A
Yeah, so the Luddites saw short term successes through their tactic, which has been famously called collective bargaining by riot. I think that was Hop Swan that coined that term. But they were able to get a number of the bosses to restore wages to the levels previous to the use of automation. They were able to get certain assurances and protections. They saw a lot of entrepreneurs who quite frankly had felt their hands forced into this new regime as well. A lot of the businessmen and the merchants and those hoziers whose job was to sell finished cloth goods or finished knit goods, I would say the majority of them were, were happy with the old arrangement too. They were members of the community, they had good relationships with these workers, with these people. They were all sort of pretty tightly knit in this ecosystem together. But when a handful of those entrepreneurs, you know, nation entrepreneurs, this was really the first decade that the word was even in use, decided that they could make a lot of money by basically tearing up all those social contracts, all those sort of, you know, standards and norms that had governed these communities for hundreds of years, only then did a lot of the other entrepreneurs feel forced to sort of follow suit. Otherwise they, they felt like they would have their lunch eaten, they would lose money, they would go out of business and In a lot of cases, there was some truth to that. So it was a really difficult decision for a lot of people in the position to either become sort of small factory owners and sort of join this reorganization of work or this move to reorganize work, or to sort of resist it and try to help maintain the domestic system, or to try to maintain good relationships with these workers and men they'd known all their lives. And it wasn't always an easy decision. I think in the book I document one case from a different sort of oral history in which the master weaver decides not to buy more automated machinery. He decides to stick with the workers because his pastor warns him. He says, you're basically giving into greed and that is making your fellow man go hungry is ungodly, basically. And so he agrees not to. A lot didn't. And so those people, when Luddism sort of first erupts, the people who are sympathetic to the workers, a lot of them just said, okay, okay, you've given us a reason, great, we'll raise prices. Hopefully everyone else will too. So that works for a while. But it doesn't last, of course, because there are these bigger factories and staffed by less sympathetic, more aggressive figures, you know, who have either sort of bought the Adam Smith, you know, line that, you know, that it's a virtue to sort of make as much money as possible, to sort of throw everybody else to the whims of the invisible hand of the market and to really embrace the division of labor. Those guys, again, whether it's just adopting that for greed or because they believed it or whatever, they are sort of the ones that are ultimately, you know, hitting the gas on the industrial revolution in general and towards factorization and, you know, ultimately the other, you know, merchants and bosses have to compete with them. So they draw the line. Of course, they, a lot of them refuse to negotiate with the Luddites. They refuse to make any concessions. And in fact, they call in the army, they call in the state. So the second part of the question was how this ends. And well, it ends with force. So first the state decides that they're. They're going to side with the industrialists, and then that these men are. Their line is that they're deluded. They don't understand. They're breaking the machines, the hand that feeds them, they're breaking that. You see some of the first sort of deliberate misunderstandings or propaganda, I guess, against Luddites emerge at this stage, casting them as backward looking dummies. They've been like hypnotized by some malign influence or something. And they use that as an excuse to pass into law the framework bill, which says it's a capital offense to break a machine. And so that goes on the books. So being a Luddite, breaking a machine is now punishable by death. Meanwhile, they're sending thousands of troops to occupy the industrial districts where the Luddite raids are going on. They're basically lending state power to the factories, to the factory owners and saying, you know, instead of doing what the Luddites or the clothworkers asked, which is giving them minimum wages, giving them, you know, some, some basic means of subsistence, you know, some government support at all, they deploy the troops to fight against them, to crush them, basically. And if we see for one of the first times this alliance of state and industry sort of banded together with the common goal of crushing sort of the, the worker movement, that is, it's a threat to this new organization. And they want to demonstrate that they have sided with the mode of factorization, they've sided with this very top down, sort of laissez faire regime of production. And they wind up gunning down dozens of Luddites. They wind up hanging dozens of Luddites in a show trial that is meant to demonstrate the cost of rising against machinery or the factory or the crown. And you know, the Luddites also, they become desperate and there is an episode where they, they assassinate a factory owner in cold blood when they feel like this particular Luddite feels like his options have run out. And that causes popular opinion to move against them as well. And the combination of sort of the loss of popular support driven by state power and the relentlessness of the most ambitious tech titans of the day basically snuffs the Luddites out.
- [41:32]
B
Yeah, it's a really significant story and development.
- [41:35]
A
Right.
- [41:35]
B
And it shows, you know, if we're thinking about today as well, it shows how those kind of long standing relationships between industry and the state have always been there. Right. Even as we've had this kind of narrative over the past, you know, couple of decades that, you know, the, the tech companies were really separate from the state and even pushing back on the state to protect like individual rights and all this kind of stuff, when really those relationships were always there and we see them really reemerging in this moment. But I feel like, you know, as I was read through the book, one of the things that really stood out to me was one of these parallels between the Luddites and the workers trying to get the state trying to get the government to pay attention to their demands, to what was happening to them as a result of how capitalists were rolling out these technologies in the first decade of the 1800s. And then the Luddite movement of smashing the machines really emerging after basically a decade of doing that in 1811, because they felt like that was the only option left to them. And then when I'm thinking about kind of what has happened more recently in our times, right through the 2010s, we had the emergence of, you know, the gig economy, you know, the kind of proliferation of a lot of these digital technologies in a really novel way. And, you know, the kind of common narrative that we had about this was really kind of hype filled and kind of boosterish and, you know, as you were talking about, this is all positive, this is progress, blah, blah, blah. And now it seems like after a decade of that, after not responding to kind of the early concerns and criticisms of gig workers, Amazon factory workers, things like that in that earlier period, it seems like we've reached a moment about a decade into that shift where the workers once again are demanding that something be done. Maybe they haven't gone as far as smashing the machines, but there does seem to be kind of a tangible shift that's occurring there.
- [43:28]
A
Yeah, you know, they don't. They're not smashing machines because they don't have to. The most effective and most sort of, of well known sort of battles against AI right now are taking place in union shops, right, where like SAG and WGA are sort of drawing a red line in a contract. And I think it's a Luddite tactic to say, no, you cannot use this to generate a script. You cannot use AI to replicate my likeness. That's just a hard no, and we're leaving it at that. So it still remains to be seen whether that will be effective. Again, it's extremely popular. The support of the writers and the actors vis a vis the studios is just immense. So I think that it has that in common as well. We also have a democracy for the most part, but they had a completely authoritarian government in the Luddite time that they could basically write letters, show up, sign petitions, try to track down a lord and, you know, make your case. But they weren't elected. You know, there was. They didn't get thrown out of office if they didn't listen to you. So it was a lot steeper hill to climb. And, you know, you can see why, you know, Luddism would be more like something of a tactic of last resort. But yeah, I think you're completely correct. Like, I think the spiritual linkage is there for sure.
- [44:58]
B
Yeah. And so I wonder like, like what you see in, you know, what is going on now that seems to be learning from the Luddites or what you see as kind of their lasting impact being and what people can learn from them today, as we look back at that history and as we all read your book to figure out more of that.
- [45:18]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a number of things. I'll start with the biggest picture and I think to me we're running into a lot of these same problems over and over again. And the nature of these problems is so similar 200 years later, like right down to sort of the way that the arguments on both sides are formulated, the grievances are so similar because number one, we just still have this mode of top down technological development wherein an entity that has access to resources, access to capital, access to power, gets to build the technology and then dictate how it's used. That at sort of the most basic level is the crux of this issue. Back in their day, it was people who could get investment or sort of sidle up to the lords and curry favor with the magistrates and then build these giant factories and then as we just saw, get that backed by state power. Today it's somebody who can go to Silicon Valley and get hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital that they then get to build whatever product that they see fit and then sort of unleash it onto the public, you know, without the public getting any real modicum of input onto how it's going to affect their life or their working life. And you know, the common pushback to that is that, well, the market decides. Except no it doesn't, especially not with enterprise software stuff that's being used by businesses, stuff that if you want to keep your job, you don't have a lot of say about how it's going to be used. And that's how the bulk of generative AI is going to be used. That's how we're going to interact with it. I mean, people might Mess around with ChatGPT or be wild with it, or have fun with it, and that's all great, but we've already seen sort of, you know, the consumer tier use of ChatGPT decline month on month for the last three months. No, it's going to get injected into workplaces where managers think that it can streamline a process, you know, replace a task, eliminate a job, maybe a whole department if they can get away with it. And again, this is a company that was founded, you know, in part by Elon Musk or some of the other biggest, most well heeled tech giants of our time that then sort of are funding, incubating and deciding how this technology gets used. We gotta change that. That's number one. So I think, you know, friend of the show at Anguisha junior Had a piece and has been sort of following this, pulling at this thread of, of the need to sort of rein in venture capital or as he puts it, abolish it altogether. That's one way that we can sort of limit that in the near term is find ways to rein in venture capital to prevent sort of those pools of resources from getting so gargantuan. But there's a lot that we can do. But the bottom line is we need more democratic inputs on how technology is developed and deployed, especially with regards to our working lives. You know, beyond that, the lessons of the Luddites are numerous. And the Luddites show that you can be incredibly effective in tight knit groups of people with a lot of solidarity and a smart media campaign. Basically, that's what it was. The general, you know, Ned Ludd was basically a meme. The Luddites of the different regions didn't know each other. They didn't have a central organizing committee. They just saw how effective it was to take on this, you know, the nom de plume of, of General Ludd, send that letter to a factory owner, get results, and if not, you know, do an action that rouses the public to your side as the new Robin Hood. It started in Nottingham. Well then people in, you know, the West Riding of York said, oh, that's, this is a good idea, let's do it. And they formed their own general Lud driven sort of cells. And then in Manchester, wherever there was cloth production, basically. So that's one of the fascinating things about the Luddite movement is it really sprung up powerfully and organically and they really used an interesting use of media technologies to do so. You know, that needs to be paired with a more sustained, organized effort to also push for more durable, you know, legislative and institutional change as well. And they tried, I think, just no matter what they did at the time, the odds were so stacked against them that I do think that they were doomed to fail. But again, as folks like E.P. thompson, the historian, great historian, Making of the English Working Class, great book. Everybody should read it. It's long, but it's wonderful. The Luddites were instrumental in sort of building this moment of class consciousness where the Luddites, again I mentioned earlier how they articulated this grievance against machinery and the way it was being used to exploit them. They also articulated this broader grievance against bosses and made it very clear that there was one class that was exploiting another. And E B Thompson sort of dedicates over 100 pages to the Luddites in making his case that they were an instrumental part of the very formation of the working class. And sort of some of the Luddite adjacent groups went on to agitate for and successfully finally get some level of reform in, in Parliament. They convinced the parliamentarians to finally, it sort of roll back the combination acts, allow unionization, and sort of made inroads to more durable forms of worker power. So I think that's, that's another really good lesson. And you know, finally we can take the lesson of what was basically their philosophy, which is that sometimes it is not just okay, but morally just to resist a technology, an exploitative technology. And we're seeing a lot of that today day. We're seeing the use of generative AI, you know, in our workplaces, in our working lives kind of being foisted upon us. And a lot of times a lot of people are gig workers out there and they know what it's like to have your algorithm be a boss. We see workers surveillance in places like Amazon factories and delivery drivers. So what the Luddites teach us is that it is 100% okay and even morally, just as I said, to oppose a technology that's exploiting you, just to say no, that's such a powerful thing that we didn't really have in our arsenal. You know, over the last number of years, as the most recent tech regime has come to power, just saying no has immense power. And we're seeing, and with examples like the writers strike or the open letter from, from Molly Crabapple, that there's a lot of support behind it. The Authors Guild saying no to authors work being subsumed by machine learning programs unless they're compensated and they consent to it and that kind of thing, these are all tactics that are very reminiscent of Luddism, if not outright Luddism themselves. And just remembering that we can resist technology at this time and we can improve our lives demonstrably if we do so, is something we should take away from the Luddite struggle.
- [52:14]
B
Those are all great points for people to keep in mind. And I feel like throughout this conversation you've given us so many insights into this history and what we can Learn from it. And I wonder why you think that this is a history that we don't know very much about when it is so, you know, prescient for what we're dealing with today and such an important piece of the history of kind of what the working class, of the history of technology and all these sorts of things. Why don't we know this as well as we should?
- [52:42]
A
Yeah, I mean, this is one of those cases where you can, you know, sound conspiratorial if you say it in the wrong way, but it's. They don't want you to know, man, but they really don't. So from, you know, we talked a lot about the way that state power sort of put down the Luddites. But at the same time, that was paired with this, you know, this campaign from the highest rungs of power. You know, it was in proclamations issued by the Prince Regent who was ruling England at the time. It's in the trial of the Luddites. The prosecutors are using this language, painting them as backwards looking. They know not what they do. They're depredators. They've fallen under the malign influence of deluded men or whatever. It is a construct that has proven so useful to the leaders of industry, to the state, to the tech titans of whatever era that they are in to discard. They need this. There's a great quote from Theodore Roszak, who wrote about the LUDs back in the. In the 90s, I believe, believe. And it's that if the Luddites didn't exist, their critics would have to invent them. They need this boogeyman. And in fact, you know, as I point out in a chapter about kind of that examines this very issue, the critics did basically invent the Luddites. They used the word and a real historical episode, but they completely miscast it. They completely misrepresent it. So it serves their interests. That's why we think of Luddites as opposing progress, as not understanding technology or just hating it like simpletons. Because you need something to position as a boogeyman in opposition to whatever tech, product or service or, you know, new technological regime that you want to sell en masse. Anything that you want to go through. If somebody says like, well, wait a minute, that's a bad idea, it's sure handy to be able to sort of slander them by calling them a Luddite. And since the Luddites lost violently and quite publicly, so they look from the eyes of history like losers. And nobody wants to be a Loser. Nobody wants to be backwards looking. So it's a way to cow people into not resisting, into not speaking up. And you'll see it today. I just. Yesterday I was been arguing with some of the free market fundamentalist guys at the Cato Institute with President Trump's chief technologist of the FTC, who are just so stubbornly adopting this cartoonish version of the Luddites because it serves their interests. So it needs to be known that that is not the truth. And there's so much more to the Luddites. And knowing the truth about the Luddites can really help us navigate this very complex and difficult but also promising technological moment.
- [55:17]
B
Yeah, you know, I completely agree with you on that. I think. I think you've nailed it in not sounding too conspiratorial, but still laying out the reality of how that was works for us. There were so many insights in this conversation, but there's so much more I could have asked you about because there are just so many fascinating details in this book that you've put together that really goes through the history that has, like, so many intriguing characters among the Luddites and the workers themselves, but, you know, among the higher society, you know, even Mary Shelley makes an appearance. I know.
- [55:47]
A
We didn't even talk much about Lord Byron, who, you know, he's becoming famous at this moment. He's a big Luddite defender. Yeah, that's why it's kind of interesting. I hope you'll all read the book, of course, But a lot of people are kind of surprised to find that I structured it like a narrative where we follow the Luddites and we see what they were dealing with in their daily lives, why they became Luddites, why the factory owners became factory owners, how they opposed them. And it really. It turned out to be such a dramatic story that I just kind of wanted to tell it at that level where I felt like it might resonate most if you can really relate to them, because it just, you know, George Mellor could be living today. A lot of the things that he says are just as true today as they were 200 years ago. So. Yeah. Well, thank you for all the kind words about the book. I hope people can learn from it and enjoy it and so on and so forth in this new moment rife with Luddism. I hope it does its part.
- [56:40]
B
Absolutely. And I'm excited you came on this Luddite podcast to talk about it.
- [56:44]
A
We didn't even mention how you're in the book. There's a section on New Luddites. And our fine host Paris makes an appearance as a standard bearer for Luddism. You can see some familiar faces and it is really important, I want to say that this podcast has done such an important job and has had such an important role in bringing, you know, a more critical view of tech to more and more people. And it just blows me away every time I see it on the top tech podcast list, like in between, like TED Talk tech or, you know, or, or something or other. It's just climbing. So you are part of the Luddite vanguard and I think ultimately we're all better for that. So thanks for that too.
- [57:25]
B
Thanks so much, man. I don't like to make the story about me, but I appreciate you bringing it up and saying some nice things about the show.
- [57:33]
A
You're in this story, so no way around it.
- [57:35]
B
Yeah. But I would say everyone needs to go pick up the book to learn about all the things that we weren't able to talk about because this is such a fascinating history. And if this is a podcast that you enjoy, if you enjoy these critical conversations, this is absolutely a book that you're going to enjoy as well. Sure, it might take you a little while to get through it. It's a little long, but it's worth it. You're going to enjoy it. And you know, on that note, Brian, we also have something exciting coming up in October. Do you want to inform the listeners about that?
- [58:06]
A
Yes. Another Luddite dream team has been assembled. So if you're in New York City on October 12th, that is a Thursday, come to Starbar the details online. I'm sure you can throw it in the show notes, but we're convening a Luddite Tribunal where Paris, myself, Ed Anguasso Jr. From this Machine Kills Aunt Molly Crabapple, a great, wonderful artist and modern day Luddite herself. And the Jacobin labor reporter Alex Press is going to convene. We are going to discuss the series Resurgence of Modern Luddism. And we're going to subject modern technologies to the Luddite Tribunal. So say a ring camera or a ring doorbell. Is this a technology that serves society? Or does the exploitation and harm it cause outweigh the justification for its existence? So we will debate each piece of technology and if it does not meet the threshold, if it is found to be exploitative by the tribunal, then like a good old fashioned Luddite, we shall smash it with a sledgehammer. We're just, we're gonna have some fun with it. If you are in New York City. Bring a piece of technology, bring a piece of tech, a product, something that you would like to subject and don't mind having obliterated. It should be a great time and I hope to see you all there. Cheers.
- [59:32]
B
Yeah, I was so excited when you suggested it and it's gonna be a lot of fun. If you're in New York City, feel free to come out and join us. I'll have the information in the show notes where you can find it. And of course, Brian, thanks again so much for taking the time to come on the show. Thanks for writing this brilliant, fantastic book that everyone should buy. Always love chatting with you, especially when it's about the Luddites.
- [59:52]
A
Always my pleasure, I'm sure. Well, we'll meet again soon in New York, but I'm sure I'll be back. You can't get rid of me, but I always love it. Thanks so much, Paris.
- [60:04]
B
Brian Merchant is a technology columnist at the LA Times and the author of Blood and the the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. I'll have more information in the show notes about the event in New York on October 12th. If you want to come out and join us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com techwonsave us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.