Blood in the Machine: one year anniversary
A bold new history of the Luddites carries contemporary resonance in the age of AI
Space is at a premium on our home bookshelf. It’s bursting at the seams from holding too many words, worlds, and dreams. Gone are our plans to add decorative flourishes here and there with little ornaments, house plants, or fancy bookends. Every slice of available space is taken up by the alluring spines of books and graphic novels that my wife and I feel compelled to own in physical form. There is so little space that I begrudgingly read on a Kindle device more and more.
But Brian Merchant’s handsome tome was published one year ago (happy Bookaversary!) and takes pride of place on my jam-packed home bochord (an awesome medieval word we should revive: look it up). Blood In The Machine (2023) is a triumphant battle cry for the ethical technologist: excellently researched, delightfully narrated, and published exactly when we needed it the most.
Blood In The Machine struck our moment in the zeitgeist with perfect timing and received numerous accolades. BBC chose it as a Book of the Week, while WIRED, the New Yorker, and the Financial Times named it as one of the best books of the year, and it was also longlisted for the FT and Schroeders Best Business Book of 2023.
Blood In The Machine came into my life by way of Paris Marx’s excellent podcast, Tech Won’t Save Us, specifically this episode from September 2023. After listening to that interview I immediately ordered the book on Amazon (I wonder how much blood is in their machines?) I found myself educated, inspired, and intellectually vindicated by Merchant’s accounting of the Luddite uprising against factory owners in 19th century England, which he once described as “a hybrid of narrative history, tech analysis, labor reportage, with a little polemical soapboxing thrown in because I couldn’t help myself.”
As a book, it does a marvelous job of explaining the true story of the oft-vilified and commonly misunderstood Luddites, who organized under the banner of (fictional) Ned Ludd in the north of England to (literally!) smash machines designed for textile industry automation—because of their economic squeezing effect on workers when brandished by greedy and unethical business owners. This is the nail in the coffin for anyone who would misuse the term “Luddite” to describe someone who refuses to adopt or adapt to technology purely out of ignorance or obstinance.
But it‘s as a catalyst for a new movement of neo-Luddites around the world today where the book really transcends the paper it’s written on. As Merchant noted in his publication anniversary post, the book has galvanized many readers into a fuller, richer understanding of the effect that today’s technology and tech companies are having on society through the parallels we can draw between what’s happening today and what happened in the 1800’s. Merchant tells us that he hopes “the true story of the Luddites — not the derisive myth of technophobic rubes — has made its way into the mainstream, where it, hopefully, can offer a critical lens for thinking about things like AI and gig work.”
Merchant has his finger on the pulse of history. Factory automation, the gig economy and the erosion of work stability, algorithmic computation, artificial intelligence, robotics — these innovations, just like the Spinning Jenny or the Gig Mill — have all had undesired effects on worker autonomy, worker rights, worker pay, and work-life balance. Recent innovations like generative AI now threaten most if not all the basic precepts of work self-efficacy and self-determination as we know these values today. Capitalism itself may not suffer any losses from disintermediating the workers: but our daily experience of life will be degraded.
Just as in the era of the Luddites, short-term gain can lead to long-term pain. Thanks to Brian’s work, we can now recognize it’s not the machinery itself that is at fault, but the selfish, profit-at-all-costs mindset of the business owners, profit-seeking investors and their puppet CEOs who so vehemently impel us to buy or use their inventions, regardless of the human cost.
Brian Merchant should be proud of his accomplishment both as an author and as a leader in reviving the spirit of standing up for human rights in the face of dehumanizing tech and callous tech leadership. Different time, different cast of characters, different machines, but the Blood In The Machine could end up being our blood if we don’t think critically and act responsibly when contemplating or building our uncertain future.
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