Rage against the machine
For more than two centuries, “Luddite” has been one of the most effective insults to hurl at anyone seen as blocking the march of technological and economic progress. It would immediately bring to mind the familiar image of ignorant and deluded English peasants breaking the factory machinery that paved the way for modern prosperity. But history is always revisited through the lens of contemporary concerns. And in a new era of tech-driven socio-economic upheaval, when the labour-replacing “robots”—whether defined as mechanical looms or AI algorithms—are coming again, the Luddites are now getting the appreciation they’re due.
No one has better told their story than Brian Merchant has in Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Nor set out its modern-day relevance so well. “By understanding this story, what led to that first rebellion, and the cataclysm that followed,” writes the award-winning NPR science reporter, “perhaps we will be able to avert the need for another.”
In Industrial Revolution-era Britain, the Luddite movement was an all-encompassing issue in the first two decades of the 19th century. Those years began with a tenth of the British workforce involved in the wool trade, most men and women supporting their families by working within their own homes in the original “cottage industry.” And they ended with thousands of shattered mechanical looms, burned-down factories, industry wages slashed almost by half, an explosion of exploited child labour (since skilled and well-paid adult workers weren’t as needed), and the triumph of laissez-faire capitalism in a world of surging inequality. Along the way, the Luddites assassinated one hated factory owner, while the British state killed—by execution or armed repression—more than 40 Luddites, and imprisoned or transported abroad many more.
Compelling as the story of the resistance is, Merchant brings his book to another level with the lessons he draws from it. Far from being uneducated fools with an instinctive propensity for violence, the Luddites spent years petitioning Parliament to enforce its existing industry regulations before spiralling poverty pulled them into direct action. They understood, and often first developed, the machines in question: at one point, workers requested the presence of a machine that measured thread count and thereby established how much workers should be paid. The request was rejected by factory owners who wanted no part of mandated pay scales.
It was the factories themselves, Blake’s “dark satanic mills,” and not the machines that Luddites hated, Merchant writes, the places that took them from their homes, controlled them and turned them from skilled artisans into factory “hands”—a job title that says everything about the owners’ conception of their workforce. It wasn’t the tech but the uses to which it was applied that were immoral in the Luddite view, the embodiment of property rights trampling human rights. Merchant’s book is a powerful corrective to what has been the main lesson we have taken from the Luddites for generations, that it is both impossible and somehow wrong to block or slow technological change. What we should grasp instead, the author writes, is that technology isn’t taking your jobs, its owners are.
Blood in the Machine continually shifts perspective between Luddites, factory owners, Parliament and the world of arts and letters. In the latter, Lord Byron’s poetry and Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus—the story, Merchant notes, of “a monster forged of the reckless use of technology”—strongly sympathized with the workers. But most importantly, the author also switches throughout between then and now, demonstrating striking parallels.
The replacement of adult weavers in their cottages by factory-based children—often orphans turned indentured servants—leads Merchant to the autonomous delivery robots now common on American college campuses. They’re not truly autonomous—human hands are always needed to maintain the machines—but are remotely overseen by workers in countries like Colombia, for $2 an hour. The physical toll on the child labourers, often killed or maimed in their unsafe working conditions—the literal blood in the machines—leads him to Amazon warehouses with emergency vehicles parked outside waiting for distressed workers, because that was cheaper for the company than air-conditioning the buildings. The robots, whether devices or code, that promise to alleviate hard labour, Merchant argues, actually devalue it in every sense: less pay, less security, less respect.
And why has so little fundamentally changed in the way technologies come into our society since the first wave of tech titans devastated the lives and livelihoods of working-class Britain 200 years ago? Since then, writes Merchant, “every Silicon Valley philosophy—moving fast and breaking things, regulation as the enemy of invention, the gospel of “disruption” at any cost—are now deeply ingrained in our lives.”
READ UP
Check out our many other book reviews on topics such as the connection between mathematics and literature and white-collar crime. And find out how an intrepid accountant uncovered a huge financial scandal.
Photo caption: Blood in the Machine explores the true cost of technological disruption by way of the lives lost and industries overturned (image provided)