Blood in the machine The origins of the rebellion against big tech

Review by Booklist Review

In the early 1800s, textile workers across the north of England faced worsening labor conditions and economic precarity, as the rise of machines began to displace skilled workers. Their response was to form a movement--the so-called Luddite rebellion--to break the machines most culpable for putting them out of work. To the extent that the Luddites are remembered today, they are treated as a punchline: a bunch of unsophisticated rubes who mindlessly opposed the march of progress. But technology journalist Merchant (The One Device, 2017) argues that the Luddites understood very clearly how the new "laborsaving" machines would be used to undercut their wages, bargaining power, and quality of life, enriching factory bosses at the expense of the workers. Drawing direct parallels to today's tech companies and the government's failure to regulate their exploitative labor practices, Blood in the Machine tells the story of this rebellion and the eventual government repression that put an end to it. As American unions gain power and support, this book is a welcome parable of worker solidarity and resistance.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist Merchant (The One Device) offers a stirring account of the Luddites' "messy rebellion" against new technological innovations in early-19th-century England. Merchant traces the narrative arcs of several groups, including the Luddites, skilled workers in the cloth industry whose lives were irreversibly overhauled by the arrival of new machinery (such as water-powered yarn-spinning machines and looms); the prominent cultural and literary figures, such as Lord Byron, who took an active interest in their grievances; and the factory owners who lived in fear of their nighttime attacks. The portrayal is one deeply sympathetic to the Luddite cause; Merchant is keen to deconstruct the modern, negative connotations of the term "Luddite," emphasizing that they were driven to act not by some blinding, stubborn hatred of technology, as is often assumed, but rather by a deep understanding of its potential pitfalls and a distaste for the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small number of privileged overseers. Merchant draws astute comparisons to technology's disruptions of jobs and livelihoods in the 21st century, using the rise of Uber and AI as prominent examples. This is a significant contribution to the history of the Industrial Revolution and a strong warning against complacency in the face of technological change. (Sept.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Many people today worry that technology threatens their way of life and very livelihoods--just as the Luddites did in early 1800s England, leading them to smash machinery in numerous factory raids challenging the personal costs of the Industrial Revolution. Wired/Vice contributor Merchant, whose The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone was a USA TODAY best seller and Financial Times Business Book of the Year finalist, revisits the Luddite rebellion with an eye to discovering what it can tell us about our tech worries today.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A history of the 19th-century revolutionaries who fought against the machine. In 1812, writes Merchant, the author of The One Device, British workers watched as power looms began to displace them, then rose up in a movement named after a young rebel named Ned Ludd, leading the UK to "the brink of civil war." Two centuries later, advanced digital technology in the hands of capitalists threatens human livelihoods in many fields, occasion for a new Luddite revolt. Merchant chronicles how the British militants didn't necessarily object to labor-saving devices, but instead to how they were used--namely, to enrich a small handful of industrialists at the expense of a great mass of skilled workers. Indeed, Merchant adds, when textile workers asked that a machine be put in place to measure thread count, an index of quality, the owners refused, "preferring to retain the unilateral power to determine the quality of a garment themselves, and to offer workers the prices they approved of." Under such conditions, weavers' wages fell by nearly half between 1800 and 1811, good reason for protest. At times, those demonstrations turned violent, with factories burned and one particularly hated capitalist murdered. Some reforms ensued, but the supremacy of the bosses endured. Just so, Merchant writes compellingly, while today's gig workers may object to the whims of employers who offer few benefits and jobs that "are subject to sudden changes in workload and pay rates," it seems unlikely that those bosses will change their ways short of a mass uprising. After all, Merchant charges, Jeff Bezos determined that it was cheaper to keep emergency technicians on hand to treat heatstroke rather than air-condition some of his warehouses. "And since Amazon does it," writes the author, "everyone else must make their employees machinelike as well, if they hope to keep pace." A well-argued linkage of early industrial and postindustrial struggles for workers' rights. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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