Author Brian Merchant: Luddites are ‘more dangerous to the elites and to the rich than Robin Hood’

Luddites have been a great historical resource. Any showy enemy of something that looked like technological progress has been called a Luddite. Today, the word has been revived with generative artificial intelligence and its critics. Author and journalist Brian Merchant saw it coming and has written a book that summarizes the Luddite revolt in early 19th-century England and examines its similarities with current technologies: Blood in the Machine explores the origins of the current revolt against big technology.

Although the book appeared in the midst of the uproar over AI, Merchant began his research a decade ago: “Uber was getting big in the early 2010s and people were starting to point out the fact that it was having a nasty impact on taxi drivers, they were starting already to reduce wages. And so people were criticizing Uber and I remember the term Luddite floating around… The pro-Uber camp [was] saying don’t be a Luddite, and I was like, huh? I wrote this article called ‘You’ve Got the Luddites All Wrong.’” In his book he notes that the Luddite revolt was a labor struggle—not an anti-technology one—at a time when unions were prohibited. In a conversation with EL PAÍS from his residence in Los Angeles, Merchant explains the historical impact of the Luddites and the possible similar struggles being played out today in Silicon Valley.

1. The Luddites were not anti-progress

The labor revolt over the loss of rights was more important than the destruction of textile machines: “The biggest misconception about the Luddites…is that [people] think that the Luddites were anti-technology and anti-progress,” says Merchant. " They were against certain technologies because they recognized the way that they were going to be used in a social and economic context against them as workers… It was a labor movement, it was an anti-poverty movement. It was not an anti-technology or anti-progress movement. The British State… started casting them that way almost immediately. So, they had an interest in deriding the Luddites and making this case that they were anti-progress [in] much the same way that people in positions of power, people at tech companies make the case against tech critics or workers who are complaining about bad working conditions at tech companies or tech adjacent companies today. It’s the same story for 200 years.”

The book quotes a phrase from historian Eric Hobsbawm that explains this stage: “collective bargaining by riot.” According to Merchant, this tactic is very powerful in workers’ struggles for two reasons: “[First], it was symbolic because everybody understood that what they were smashing was not just a piece of machinery. It was also the specific piece of machinery that was being used to transfer wealth from working people to a factory boss. And [second], it was useful because they were able to destroy the piece of equipment that the factory bosses were using to generate those extra revenue streams.”

2. Why Robin Hood is more acceptable than Ned Ludd

Ned Ludd was a legendary character. No one knows for sure if he existed. According to popular lore, he was the teenager who broke the first machines at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In 1811, rebellious workers used his legendary name to sign letters and scare others: “Ludd likely never existed at all. But his avatar would become a mascot, an organizing tool, and a winking joke: a powerful nineteenth-century meme,” Merchant writes.

Like another legendary figure who has fared better in history, Ludd lived near Nottingham, U.K. That’s not a coincidence, Merchant argues: “[The Luddites] staged a very popular and powerful rebellion. At [the] time, people were writing folk songs about them. They were Robin Hoods. But it’s interesting that Robin Hood has endured in a positive light, while the Luddites did not. That suggests to me that the Ned Ludd myth is in some ways more dangerous to the elites and to the rich than Robin Hood, which is a little more nebulous and a little more open-ended. The Luddites are saying: go ahead, break the machinery of your oppression… Robin Hood is saying: steal from the rich and give to the poor. I think that’s a little bit more tolerable.”

3. How the Luddites’ problems are similar to today’s

The backdrop of the book is that the story of the Luddites resembles what is happening today in Silicon Valley, where a small group of corporations are dominating new technologies. “The way that technologies are developed and deployed has basically been unchanged. You have a smaller handful of people [with] access to enough capital or political influence to be able to build a factory and to use automating technologies. Back then the most aggressive [factory owners] did all of this without asking the communities [where] they were building factories. It wasn’t like they worked with the cloth workers that were already there in the community and said, ‘we have these new technologies, how do we figure out a way to make this beneficial to society?’”

Merchant has been criticized for equating the big businessmen in 19th-century England with those in the 21st-century United States. But there are details he doesn’t see as dissimilar: “Strangely, the process of developing technology is somehow even more anti-democratic today than it was then. Because you have this immense pool of capital available to Silicon Valley innovators through the venture capital ecosystem. Uber was not profitable for 10 years, but they had access to this enormous pool of capital…Does anybody actually like this? Is this working for workers? Is this working for Riders? does that matter? We got some more money [and] we push on.

Artificial intelligence is just another stage in this process of an amazing new technology that survives for years until it finds a way to make a profit, says Merchant: " They’re doing some things that are flashy and they’re getting a lot of hype [and] a lot of investment…It doesn’t seem like a lot of people like it, but they’re pressing ahead because they have just an unfathomable amount of capital and resources and influence. So…here’s Sora, it’s gonna turn text into video. Is this a good idea? I don’t know but here it is. So, it’s this remarkably anti-democratic way of developing technology. As a result, history supports the fact that for 200 years technological development has been out of harmony with social and economic stability. We correct, we catch up, we figure things out, but why [is it that] for 200 years when there’s a big new technology, the answer is: ‘Oh great, let’s see how this benefits society,’ but we react with fear,” Merchant notes.

4. What is the price of progress?

The usual response from businessmen and economists is that these fears are the price of progress. Technological advances forcefully bring disruption and suffering. For the Luddites, this argument was not obvious from the beginning because even the elites did not know how it would end. “A lot of economists say, yeah, there’s some dislocation, it’s painful for some people but new jobs are always created. [Yes, the elites] are getting richer. It could be painful in the short term, but look at the future. but always look at the people saying that. they’re the economists who have either a job at a think tank where they’re making six figures or they’re tenured. The people who are waving away the short-term pain are always people in a position to do [so],” says Merchant.

Sometimes, the changes brought about by technological developments do not completely destroy jobs but erode them: “I do think the economists are right that it’s not really going to erase tons of jobs… In a lot of cases, it’s not going to be a blanket removal of jobs. In some cases, it may be. It’s going to be a further erosion of jobs that are already vulnerable carried out by vulnerable workers. In the industrial revolution with the luddites, it wasn’t like the weaving jobs disappeared. It’s that the factory owners were able to use the new machines as a justification for hiring children instead of skilled workers,” says Merchant.

For years, Silicon Valley has been debating a kind of basic income for humans for the future work that machines will do. Merchant sees it as papering over the problem: “I think universal basic income would be like a little tiny Band-Aid on a big structural problem. If the tech companies were serious about worrying about some of the social issues that their technologies might cause then I think you would see them lobbying for things like Universal Health Care or housing. It’s the way that 20 years ago or 15 years ago you’d see oil companies saying we support a carbon tax. They know it’s not gonna happen,” he says.

5. From the Hollywood screenwriters to the attack on a self-driving car

In February, a Waymo (Google) autonomous car in San Francisco seemed to have a problem and caused a small traffic jam. A group of people surrounded it and after a while they broke the windows and set it on fire, while others filmed it. This is the first major destruction of a machine owned by a major tech company since the 1970s, when student activists attacked Hewlett Packard labs. Will we see more similar cases? “The situation is so in flux that when I started writing this I would say, ‘no, we weren’t there yet, even though there was suffering being caused and people were very angry at Amazon and Uber and these conditions. We see a lot of anger at other places in the United States. I think if they are successful in automating a number of jobs or degrading working conditions for enough people, impoverishing more people, then you do wonder… That Waymo car attack [did] take me a little bit by surprise because it didn’t just happen in a vacuum. My guess is that it’s kind of a beacon for a lot of this more ambient anger that’s out there, that people are feeling at Big Tech and at the impact that it’s having on their lives.”

At the time, that attack was unheard of. But so was the first more or less successful strike and negotiation that included AI: the Hollywood screenwriters’ strike. “The really great thing about with the writer strike did is it just demonstrated how possible it is to win arrangements like that where workers have control over how AI is used within their own labor process. Again, especially in the [United] States, a lot of this stuff was kind of unthinkable, that you could…tell your boss how you’re able to use AI or keep your boss from [employing] potentially abusive uses of technology. It really shows that if you proactively organize around this stuff, then you can draw these red lines and say we refuse as workers to use AI or to have AI used by management on our behalf.”

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