The Luddites, who smashed machines in the 19th century, in an organized effort to resist automation, are often portrayed as uneducated opponents of technology. But according to Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant, “The Luddites were incredibly educated as to the harms of technology. They were very skilled technologists. So they understood exactly how new developments in machinery would affect the workplace, their industry, and their identities.” In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with Merchant about the history and legacy of the Luddite movement, and what workers who are being oppressed by the tech titans of our time can learn from the era of machine-breakers.

Music by Son Monarcas & David Celeste

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. As Big Tech continues to devour industries and devalue human labor, we are going to take a look back at some of the earliest worker struggles against automation, and talk about what we can learn from the machine breakers of the 19th century known as the Luddites. We will be hearing from Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. His latest book shows us that we have a lot to learn from the Luddites, who banded together to commit acts of sabotage in defense of their lives and livelihoods.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Brian Merchant, welcome to the show.

Brian Merchant: Thanks so much for having me, Kelly.

KH: Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your work?

BM: Yes. I am a tech journalist and author of some books generally in the orbit of technology, most recently of Blood in the Machine, which is a book about the Luddite uprising of the early 1800s, when workers struck back against entrepreneurs and factory owners who were using machinery to degrade their jobs and exploit their labor. So the book’s about that and what might be relevant today from that happening. And until recently, I was the tech columnist of the LA Times, and now I have a newsletter also called Blood in the Machine, where I do some of this work online.

KH: Well, I love your newsletter.

BM: Oh, thank you. I’ve been trying to keep it… a newsletter, it’s all sort of self-motivating. So you do your best to keep it going without somebody saying, “Okay, you got to get it, you have a deadline.” I’m used to that for most of my career, the nagging editor. I am grateful for that nagging. But yeah, it’s a whole different beast being out in the wilderness, but in some ways better, right? Freedom.

KH: That’s one word for it. And I feel you, I also really miss having an editor around when I work on my newsletter. That dialogue and collaboration can be so important. With a newsletter, your only dialogue is with your readers, so I am always grateful when people want to engage with the work or talk about it, because we’re out here on our own and we need the feedback.

BM: Yeah, and you had a great newsletter too.

KH: Thank you. I really appreciate that.

I am excited to talk about your book, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, which tells the story of another era in which business titans used machines to replace human workers or to place workers in more dangerous, precarious and low-paying jobs. You chronicle the Luddite movement and discuss what we can learn from their rebellion against the automation of their work. The history you explore in the book is just fascinating, and I was really grateful to have the opportunity to read it. So as a jumping off point for our listeners, can you tell us a bit about the history of the Luddite movement and why you wanted to write a book connecting their history to the struggles of workers today?

BM: Yeah. I’ll start with the second part of that question because I found my way into it sort unexpectedly, and I was just blown away by how relevant a lot of what happened 200 years ago was to what happened now, and at many other junctures in our history of labor and technology. I came up as a tech journalist in the late aughts and 2010s, and as a tech journalist, you hear this term bandied about now and again, the term “Luddite,” and what that means when it’s used usually by a tech company, a PR person, or somebody who’s an ally of the tech industry or is in Silicon Valley, and they mean it as a derogatory term. It’s like, “Oh, this Luddite doesn’t get Uber.” Or, “Oh, this Luddite is just against any progress, has this knee-jerk reaction to any technological development.”

And I was hearing it in the context of Uber specifically. There were people early on raising alarm bells saying, “Well, if this takes root, it could have a bunch of disastrous social and economic consequences.” And they were going, “Oh, you Luddites.” You’re hearing all these tech executives and PR people and allies and boosters of the industry constantly denigrating the Luddites and using it as an insult and calling anybody who is even remotely critical of technology, a Luddite, as a means of just waving away any of the very legitimate concerns that they might have, and especially as it pertained to the rise of the gig app algorithm and this new way of breaking down standards of work and “disrupting” that profession. And what disrupting means, of course, is to hollow out any protections or norms or standards that may have served as a bulwark for workers for a long time, and making that kind of work, in this case, taxi driving and anything else that could be organized through a gig app that we’ve seen, food delivery, handyman tasks, carpentry, whatever. It’d all been hollowed out by this structure of work.

Anyways, anybody who’s protesting any of that stuff, they can just be called a Luddite and have all of those legitimate concerns about worker dignity or health kind of waved away. Same goes for any number of other conditions that people might have opposed these new technologies creating. And it just has served for a long time as this very convenient epithet, to just minimize and box people out of the debate and allow the owner and entrepreneurial elite class the power to dictate where technology is going to go, who it’s going to serve. And when I started looking into the real history for VICE, where I was working at the time, it became quite clear that it was anything but. This was almost the opposite of what Luddites actually were.

The Luddites were incredibly educated as to the harms of technology. They were technologists themselves. They used this stuff in their homes and in their workshops every day. They were very skilled technologists. So they understood exactly how new ways of organizing machinery, new developments in machinery would affect the workplace, their industry, and their identities. So the Luddites fought back in this intensely organized and deliberate and tactical manner. Before they became Luddites, clothworkers of England, who were being squeezed by conditions of the emerging industrial revolution, and by these factory owners who were hoping to profit off of it in particular, they first, for a decade before they became Luddites, they went to Parliament. They did things “the right way.” They said, “Hey, give us minimum wages. Hey, give us some protections. Hey, protect us from fraud.”

A lot of these machines are being used just to create subpar, even fraudulent goods that don’t meet the standards of the industry, and sometimes the legal standards of the industry. They’re using it to get rid of apprentices, which is illegal by the code of law that we’ve been operating according to for many decades. And they tried to get the British Parliament to uphold these laws, and they were essentially laughed out of town, even though this was the biggest industry in Britain, apart from agriculture, the cloth industry, where all these proto-Luddites were working. It didn’t matter to the elites who had become quite enamored of new laissez-faire ideologies and letting the market work and letting the factory owners profit from these new machines. So after 10 years of really protesting, doing things “the right way,” getting laughed out of town and seeing their working conditions just steamrolled, the wages fell by 50% in just like a 10- to 15-year period for a lot of these weavers.

A lot of them couldn’t feed their families anymore. They tried protests, they tried negotiation. They tried approaching Parliament and going the legislative route, but there’s no democracy. There were no unions at the time. It was illegal to organize officially. So they didn’t have a lot of tools. And then finally, they had to rise up and become Luddites for again, very justified reasons. And one telling thing is that the Luddites were extremely popular when they first arose. They are cheered in the streets. They’re folk heroes. They’re like the new Robin Hood.

They organized under the banner of Ned Ludd, who’s this apocryphal Robin Hood-like figure who was an apprentice, who was exploited. So he smashed his master’s machine and fled into Sherwood Forest just like Robin Hood before him, and organized this mighty rebellion. So yeah, that’s the real Luddite movement, a group of workers who had real and resonant grievances with the machine-owning class, and struck back powerfully at the time, much to the chagrin of the elites and the capitalist class of the day.

KH: Reading about the central role that sabotage played in this movement was so interesting to me. I found myself thinking........

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