The Shocking Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech’s Dominance by Brian Merchant

In “Blood in the Machine,” acclaimed author Brian Merchant fearlessly delves into the tumultuous origins of the rebellion against Big Tech’s oppressive grip on society. This groundbreaking book uncovers the hidden stories and pivotal moments that ignited a global movement to reclaim power from the digital giants.

Discover the untold history of the battle against Big Tech’s tyranny and learn how ordinary people fought back to protect their freedom and privacy. Keep reading to uncover the shocking revelations that will change the way you view the digital world forever.

Genres

Technology, Sociology, Politics, Business, History, Activism, Psychology, Privacy, Surveillance, Control

“Blood in the Machine” by Brian Merchant is a gripping exploration of the origins of the rebellion against Big Tech’s dominance. The book traces the rise of digital giants and the growing concerns over their unchecked power, invasive data collection, and manipulation of users. Merchant meticulously uncovers the key events, individuals, and grassroots movements that sparked a global resistance against the tech industry’s overreach.

Through compelling narratives and extensive research, the author reveals how ordinary citizens, activists, and whistleblowers bravely stood up to challenge the status quo. From the early days of the internet to the present, Merchant highlights the turning points that led to a collective awakening about the dark side of Big Tech’s influence on society, politics, and personal lives.

The book delves into the battles fought over privacy, surveillance, misinformation, and the erosion of democracy in the digital age. Merchant exposes the tactics employed by tech companies to maintain their dominance and the courageous efforts of those who dared to resist. He also explores the psychological impact of technology addiction and manipulation, shedding light on the human cost of Big Tech’s relentless pursuit of profit and control.

“Blood in the Machine” is a wake-up call for anyone concerned about the future of technology and its impact on society. It offers a compelling case for the urgent need to rein in Big Tech’s power and reclaim our digital autonomy. Through its gripping storytelling and eye-opening revelations, the book inspires readers to join the fight for a more equitable and transparent digital world.

Review

“Blood in the Machine” is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the complex relationship between technology and society. Brian Merchant’s meticulous research and engaging writing style make this book a compelling and accessible read for both tech enthusiasts and the general public.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its ability to humanize the struggle against Big Tech’s dominance. Merchant’s vivid portraits of the individuals and communities at the forefront of the rebellion bring the story to life and make the stakes feel personal and urgent. He skillfully weaves together historical context, technical explanations, and personal narratives to create a comprehensive and nuanced picture of the issues at hand.

Another notable aspect of “Blood in the Machine” is its unflinching critique of the tech industry’s practices and their consequences. Merchant doesn’t shy away from exposing the dark underbelly of Big Tech, from invasive data collection to the spread of misinformation and the erosion of privacy. His analysis is sharp, well-supported, and thought-provoking, challenging readers to question their own relationship with technology and its impact on their lives.

At times, the book can feel overwhelming in its scope and the sheer magnitude of the problems it addresses. However, Merchant balances the heavy subject matter with glimmers of hope and inspiration, highlighting the resilience and ingenuity of those fighting for change.

Overall, “Blood in the Machine” is a groundbreaking and essential work that sheds light on the ongoing struggle for digital rights and autonomy. It is a powerful call to action for anyone who believes in the potential of technology to serve the greater good rather than the interests of a few powerful corporations. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the past, present, and future of our digital world.

Recommendation

When you imagine a Luddite, you probably think of someone who foolishly opposes technological progress. But according to bestselling author and tech journalist Brian Merchant, that’s an unfair stereotype created by elites to dismiss employees advocating for their rights. The real Luddites were textile workers who saw their lives and families destroyed by automation and, when business and government refused to protect their rights, they rebelled. Though the Luddite uprising is a historical event, Merchant clearly shows that its power dynamics are deeply relevant in the age of AI and gig work.

Take-Aways

• Before industrialization, weavers in Britain enjoyed a healthy work-life balance and 30-hour workweeks.
• Society valorizes innovators, even when their inventions enable exploitation.
• The Luddite movement was a decentralized workers’ rebellion that protested dehumanizing labor conditions.
• Luddism inspired worker solidarity across industries.
• Today’s understanding of the Luddites is rooted in anti-poor stereotypes.
• The Luddites killed one person. The state and factory guards killed 40 to 50 Luddites.
• Humanity has entered a “New Machine Age” in which billionaires are failing to protect workers.
• Gig workers deserve to have a say in how new technologies will affect their lives.

Summary

Before industrialization, weavers in Britain enjoyed a healthy work-life balance and 30-hour workweeks.

Before the advent of the mechanical power loom in 1786, many of Britain’s weavers lived with their families in thriving rural communities, running their businesses from the comfort of their homes. In Yorkshire’s West Riding, for example, families worked together and divvied up tasks, such as dying, spinning, and weaving wool, against a picturesque backdrop of rolling green hills. Everyone in the family would contribute to the business. The days could be hard, but economic inequality was rare, and workers enjoyed autonomy, flexible schedules, long weekends, and 30-hour workweeks.

“Entrepreneurs and businessmen were mechanizing work in England’s largest industry, automating jobs that had been bound by tradition for generations, and building new monuments of power and production.”

However, by the turn of the 19th century, automation — though no one would use that term until the 1940s — threatened to shatter many British cottage industries. In West Riding, mechanical “shearing frames” and “gig mills” threatened the livelihoods of skilled human cloth-cutters. Once machines partially automated cloth cutting, any unskilled laborer — even a child — could get the job done. In Nottingham, “wide frames” automated aspects of knitting and threatened local economies. In the past, knitters would create entire stockings at once, but the new wide-frame machines produced stockings in two pieces that simply had to be stitched together. Likewise, Edmund Cartwright’s 1786 invention of the power loom would destroy the livelihoods of skilled weavers across England.

Society valorizes innovators, even when their inventions enable exploitation.

From the late 1700s into the early 1800s, the London skyline became polluted with factories belching dark smoke, places that poet William Blake referred to as the “dark Satanic mills.” Textile factories stocked up on power looms and boosted productivity and profits by hiring thousands of children as cheap labor. The children usually worked 14 hours per day, six days per week, and they were often malnourished, had no education, couldn’t exercise outdoors, and were sometimes maimed by the machines. While life expectancy in the 1800s was already quite low — you were lucky if you made it past 40 years of age — workers were increasingly dying premature deaths, killed by the machines under which they toiled. Textile workers knew how bleak factory life could be, and they were desperate to protect their local businesses, as well as the health and well-being of their children, at all costs.

“The factory forecasted an oppressive life of monotony, danger, and illness. It represented a new concentration of power, produced not by bloodlines or by force of arms but from devices like Cartwright’s power loom.”

Society tends to glorify the entrepreneurs who disrupt industries, even when their innovations lead to the systemic exploitation of workers. For example, many call the 18th century’s Richard Arkwright the “father of the factory.” However, few discuss how Arkwright stole from other inventors the designs for his patented “water frame” — a water-powered wool-spinning machine — or how he intentionally built factories in remote locations to conceal the horrifying daily realities his workers faced. Similarly today, while many celebrated Uber founder Travis Kalanick as an entrepreneur, he also destroyed the livelihoods of taxi workers while fostering a culture that normalized the harassment of women. Both Kalanick and Arkwright’s actual claims to visionary status lie in their understanding that if you are sufficiently bombastic and unapologetic, you can convince people that your exploitation of labor is an “inevitable” part of progress.

The Luddite movement was a decentralized workers’ rebellion that protested dehumanizing labor conditions.

The Luddite movement gets its name from Ned Ludd, a folk hero who probably didn’t exist but who embodied the textile workers’ spirit of rebellion. As the legend goes, young Ludd was apprenticed to a clothmaker in a rural town in England’s Midlands in the late 1700s. His boss was quick to anger, and Ludd, like most small boys, did not enjoy the repetitive and demanding labor involved in using a knitting frame machine. So Ludd neglected his duties. A local magistrate declared his lack of productivity a crime, punishable by whipping. Ludd rebelled against this abuse, seizing a hammer and smashing the knitting frame machine. Like the mythical Robin Hood, Ludd then hid in the woods of Sherwood Forest.

“Wherever you were, General Ludd was there, an embodiment of the message: If the machinery of the rich and the powerful left you hungry and poor, you could choose to destroy it.”

Complaining that hundreds had lost their jobs and that food prices had doubled, workers and artisans petitioned Parliament peacefully for support, but the government refused to help. By the early 1800s, inspired by the tale of Ludd, decentralized groups of workers, or “Luddites,” began breaking into factories at night to smash the machines that automated textile labor. On November 10, 1811, a group of about 70 Nottingham-area workers took matters into their own hands, sneaking into a hosier’s shop to get their revenge. After one of the shop owner’s men killed one of the Luddites, John Westwood — the first fatality of the revolt — the workers smashed every single wide-frame machine, as well as all the doors and furniture. Such attacks became routine in the Midlands, with Luddites destroying about 50 machines per week, staging operations under leaders who all went by the moniker “General Ludd.”

Luddism inspired worker solidarity across industries.

The Luddites frequently pinned a warning letter to the doors of the factory they planned to attack, giving owners the option to cease automated production voluntarily. Failure to meet their demands resulted in the destruction of the owner’s means of production and exploitation. Luddites often referenced Enoch Taylor — a blacksmith in West Riding who built the frames for shearing machines, along with the hammers used to destroy them — by saying, “Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them.” The hammer, referred to as “Enoch’s hammer,” became a potent symbol of the Luddite movement.

“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.”

While the authorities described the Luddites as “rioters,” treating them like terrorists, ordinary working people cheered when they heard that the Luddites had infiltrated another factory and ruined more machines, or they stood by and watched while the raids took place. The textile workers weren’t alone in their fight to protect their livelihoods. The Luddite movement attracted bricklayers, farmers, hatmakers, shoemakers, and other small business owners. They also received backing — much to the government and courts’ confusion — from coal miners and railroad workers who benefited from the new inventions. Those looking to quash the movement failed to grasp that, at its core, Luddism was about exploitation and workers’ rights, not a rejection of the technology itself.

Today’s understanding of Luddites is rooted in anti-poor stereotypes.

The Luddite uprising wasn’t born in a vacuum — weavers, cloth workers, and croppers spent more than a decade trying to get support from Parliament in response to deteriorating working conditions. But Parliament ignored the workers, and the authorities framed Luddites’ initially peaceful attempts to organize and enact change as illegal agitation.

“If a person must work to survive, and their job becomes automated, you would have to be either deluded or willfully disingenuous to be surprised when they fight to keep it.”

The Nottinghamshire representative, Colonel Eyre, characterized the Luddites as “deluded” — too ignorant or willfully blind to understand the vast benefits of the machines they abhorred. Historian William Leman Rede agreed with Eyre, describing the Luddites as simple, uneducated brutes who drank too much and then, urged on by their fellows, engaged in “the most dreadful crimes.” When Home Office Secretary Richard Ryder proposed a bill that stated anyone caught breaking automation machinery would be put to death, the House of Lords swiftly passed his bill into law.

These faulty characterizations of the Luddites as “mobs of unthinking poor” or progress-hating simpletons persist today, particularly when present-day workers unite to protect their interests. The term “Luddites” is inaccurately used to describe someone who opposes technological progress, rather than someone advocating for more humane working conditions and the right to earn a living wage.

The Luddites killed one person. The state and factory guards killed 40 to 50 Luddites.

Twenty-three-year-old George Mellor led one of the most famous Luddite uprisings, the Battle of Rawfolds Mill, in April 1812. Mellor led men armed with muskets, hatchets, pistols, and pikes in military formation toward a Huddersfield factory to destroy its machines. However, the factory owner was prepared for the raid, and armed men were waiting for the Luddites inside. A bloody fight ensued. Many Luddites suffered injuries, and at least two — John Booth and Sam Hartley — died from their wounds.

Mellor was enraged that the authorities deemed the homicides “justified” — legally equating the Luddites’ attacks on inanimate machines with attacks on the factory owners themselves. Deciding he needed to set his sights higher than machine-breaking, Mellor enlisted the help of two comrades, William Thorpe and Thomas Smith. The trio killed William Horsfall, a factory owner renowned for mistreating the poor.

“The Luddites knew exactly who owned the machinery they destroyed. They saw that automation is not a faceless phenomenon that we must submit to.”

In January 1813, Mellor, Thorpe, and Smith faced trial at the York Castle courthouse. All three made not-guilty pleas before being sentenced to death. Before his execution, Mellor refused to confess to the priest, claiming he’d committed no sin. The trio’s execution was just the beginning. The authorities knew just how close the Luddites were to winning their battle against automation and were determined to quell the masses once and for all. While Horsfall was the only person who died at the Luddites’ hands, between 40 and 50 Luddites received the death penalty in the winter of 1812 and 1813. The severity of the punishment was intended to incite fear — and, in the end, the tactic worked.

Humanity has entered a “New Machine Age” in which billionaires are failing to protect workers.

Though the Luddite uprising ended in 1813, their concerns are again relevant, as automation and AI disrupt industries and those in power threaten workers’ livelihoods. As historians J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond explain, when new technologies emerge, the greatest proportion of gains tend to concentrate in a tiny percentage of the overall population, increasing inequality.

“If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are.”

Take Amazon, for example: The company leverages cutting-edge technologies in its workhouses at the expense of its human workers’ well-being. Amazon workers have complained that it’s so hard to meet their productivity goals they have to forgo bathroom breaks. The company reportedly surveilled its employees’ private email listservs and closed Facebook groups to prevent them from unionizing. American labor organizer Chris Smalls essentially advocated for modern Luddism in 2022, telling a group in Los Angeles that to fight the Big Tech overlords successfully, workers must unite and battle for their right not to be replaced by a machine.

Gig workers deserve to have a say in how new technologies will affect their lives.

Today, gig workers — whose labor translates into profits for the tech titans who own platforms like Uber — face a situation that bears remarkable similarities to that of the Luddites. Many gig workers are skilled, but because they are not considered employees, they can’t claim unemployment benefits if they lose their positions; legally, companies can avoid giving them health insurance and other protections. New technologies — including the rise of generative AI — are accelerating the demise of a host of formerly well-paid jobs in fields like law, content writing, illustration, and security, among others, and preventing upward mobility.

“If ordinary humans and working people are not involved in determining how these technologies reshape our lives, and especially if those outcomes wind up degrading their livelihoods, time and again, the anger will be acute and far-reaching.”

Modern decentralized movements like Occupy Wall Street have demonstrated that the Luddites’ spirit remains alive and well. If Big Tech fails to treat workers well and instead attempts to quell dissent through tactics such as surveillance, it must brace for the day when the oppressed workers will, once again, pull out their proverbial Enoch’s hammers and fight back against injustice.

About the Author

Brian Merchant is the author of the bestselling book The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone and a technology consultant for The Los Angeles Times. He’s also the co-founder of Vice Media’s science fiction outlet, Terraform, and the founder of Gizmodo’s Automaton project, which examines the future of work and AI.