An eye-opening read traces today’s collective rage against big tech back to the Luddite uprising, says Jeremy Hsu
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NOBODY likes being described as someone who mindlessly opposes technology and is doomed to irrelevance. So imagine how the Luddites would feel knowing their name has been smeared with that meaning over the past 200 years.
The Luddite movement, which challenged factory automation in England at the start of the industrial revolution, was far more reasonable and complex than the bogeyman conjured up by governments and businesses, writes Brian Merchant, technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times. In his book Blood in the Machine: The origins of the rebellion against big tech, Merchant unspools a myth-busting historical tale interwoven with pointed comparisons to how modern tech giants are eroding workers’ collective rights and prosperity through an algorithm-driven gig economy, and attempting mass automation of jobs using robots and artificial intelligence.
Instead of naively raging against all machines, the 19th-century Luddites were motivated by clear-eyed recognition of how some local entrepreneurs – whom Merchant describes as the “first tech titans” – deployed waterand steam-powered technologies such as power looms to churn out lower-quality yarn and cloth, replacing skilled artisan weavers with low-paid factory workforces doing dull and dangerous tasks.
Those entrepreneurs knowingly chose to adopt automation for the sake of maximising business profits while destroying the “flexible and family-oriented” cottage industry lifestyle that had sustained hundreds of thousands of weavers and their families. “If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs,” writes Merchant. “Our bosses are.”
Facing mass unemployment, workers responded with a resistance movement focused on breaking machines with hammers. But such action only came after years of peaceful work strikes and local negotiations with factory bosses, along with petitions to the Crown that mostly went unheeded.
Luddites wore masks to hide their identities during raids and wrote anonymous warning letters signed “Gene
