Blood in the Machine/The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
A timely book review
You know who a Luddite is, right?
Merriam-Webster does: Anyone who shuns new technology.
Dig a little deeper, and the word Luddite goes back to early 19th-century England and an uprising against newfangled textile machinery that was killing the livelihood of an entire class of skilled artisans.
But, as it turns out, like just about everything else we’ve been told, that’s not the real story. In Blood in the Machine, a history of the Luddite uprising—and what it means in our age of artificial intelligence and other job-killing technologies—author (and L.A. Times columnist) Brian Merchant reveals that the Luddites weren’t protesting technology per se.
It went deeper than that. Merchant writes:
There are few structures that have embodied an arriving future as powerfully as the factory did for the cloth workers of the eighteenth century. Imagine looking at a building and feeling in your gut that your future will be bent toward it. That was how artisans saw the factory at the onset of the Industrial Revolution: a harbinger of a colorless, grindstone tomorrow.
Large, dull, and often rising multiple stories above the hightest buildings in town, the factory looked like a monolith. It most closely resembled a poorhouse, where debtors were sent to be punished, or a jail. It looked like a dramatic, forced shift from one way of life to another marked by surveillance and subjugation. It looked like imprisonment.
Machinery, or technology, gets painted as the main target of the Luddites’ hatred and attacks, but the ultimate source of their rage was the factory system that those machines made possible. It was not the gig mill alone, nor the wide frames or power looms—it was the specific mode of domination over workers that the factory created that they felt such deep trepidation and anger toward.
This is where reading history—not the lies and fables from school, but real history about the way events actually unfolded—opens new doors. While the Luddites were ultimately defeated (and not just historically buried—“Luddite” became an epithet for anyone who dares to question technology), their struggle against the Tech Bros of early 19th-century England is strikingly relevent today.
A quick example: the taxi industry, which was swamped and virtually wiped away by Uber and its algorithm that flooded the market with independent drivers. Here’s Merchant:
Now, two hundred years later in the United States, we’re edging up to the brink again.
Working people are staring down entrepreneurs, tech monopolies, and venture capital firms that are hunting for new forms of labor-saving tech—be it AI, robotics, or software automation—to replace them. They are again faced with the prospect of losing their jobs to the machine.
Today, the entrpreneur who takes a risk to disrupt an industry is widely celebrated; venture capital firms look for unicorn ideas that shrink a market while consolidating their control. And automation is often presented as an unfortunate but unavoidable outcome of “progress,” a reality that workers in any technologically advancing society must simply learn to adapt to.
But in the 1800s, automation was not seen as inevitable, or even morally ambiguous. Working people felt it was wrong to use machines to “take another man’s bread,” and so thousands rose up in a forceful, decentralized resistance to smash them. The public cheered those rebels, and for a time they were bigger than Robin Hood, and more powerful.
So there you go: history for adults that’s not in black and white. The Luddites weren’t machine-breaking fools taking a futile stand against the inevitability of technological “progress.” They knew what they were up against, and they knew what they were doing.
And they almost succeeded. While ultimately the Luddites were defeated (primarily in 1813, after 17 Luddites were publicly hanged), their struggle had an effect on literature: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” as well as on Lord Byron, Charlotte Bronte, William Wordsworth and William Blake. The Luddites also created a model for resistance to industrial exploitation. Merchant writes:
The Luddites assessed fully the implications of how a particular technology would impact their lives and responded decisively. They clarified the source of exploitation, too: not the machines themselves, but the factory-owning class….This is why they were, for a time, so popular, supported, and feared. They forcibly thrust a living example of the so-called machinery question into the front of public discourse, and, in so doing, they opened a debate about working conditions, technology, and exploitation that continues to this day.
Yet the question remains: How do we resist job-killing and soul-smothering technology? Merchant’s answer:
If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are.
Robots are not sentient—they do not have the capacity of coming for or stealing or killing or threatening to take away our jobs. Management does. Consulting firms and corporate leadership do. Gig company and tech executives do.…Automation is, quite often and quite simply, a matter of the executive classes locating new ways to enrich themselves, not unlike the factory bosses of the Luddite era.
Frame the question correctly and solutions materialize: It’s not technology. It’s the system that allows technology to run roughshod over workers (which, last time I checked, was almost everyone).
Speak up. Organize. And answer novelist Thomas Pynchon’s question, Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?1 with a resounding yes.
Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. Little, Brown and Company (2023), 465 pages.
His 1984 essay in the The New York Times Book Review. A synopsis by AI (it has its uses): Thomas Pynchon explored the complex relationship between humanity and machinery, arguing that Luddite skepticism was not merely irrational technophobia but a politically and materially conscious response to the concentration of capital and job displacement caused by industrialization.
A good description of factories : prisons. Where the slaves work. I remember a book about weavers and spinners, and how they destroyed the newly developed Mule Jenny (replacing a row of spinners). Like you, I don't think robots will ever take over - I remember long ago how at the car factory dad worked robots were installed, but they needed more maintenance than the humans they replaced. Finally the people who remained became too costly and the factories moved to poor countries. Yes, the only ones profiting are those that already have way too much money to remain sane.
Count me in, living close to the Blackstone river and the paved path from Worcester to Providence ri. There are many kiosk near the old factorys and villages built for the workers. And the agreement made within these town for churches schools and other benifits for town people. You get a sense of how all these town came to be. Now when Amazon comes in a provides jobs not well paying. Rents go up considerably plus the traffic congestion. I see no benifits and plus they get huge tax cuts. Exploit the population and provide nothing . We are backed into the corner and will continue to make it impossible for change. Truly sorry!