99% Invisible - 552- Blood in the Machine

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Brian Merchant is a tech reporter, and he'd been covering the industry for years when he started to notice a term that kept coming up. When he wrote a story that was critical of tech, he'd be accused of being a "Luddite."Like most people, Brian knew at least vaguely what the term "Luddite" meant. But as time went on, and as Brian watched tech grow into the disruptive behemoth it is today, he started to get more curious about the actual Luddites. Who were they? And what did they really believe? Brian has a new book out about the Luddites called Blood in the Machine. And it explores how English textile workers in the 19th century rose up against the growing trend of automation and the machines that were threatening their livelihoods.Blood in the Machine

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Brian Merchant is a tech reporter, and he'd been covering the industry for years when he started to notice this term that kept coming up, especially when we would report something critical about technology we would get charges of being bloodites. Like most people, Brian knew, at least vaguely what this term, bloodite meant. If we know them at all, we usually know them by this derogatory light. We usually understand the ledites to be technophobes or people who hate technology, or it

always been this kind of term that had just sort of lodged itself into the general consciousness. But as time went on, and as Brian watched tech grow into the disruptive behemoth it is today, he started to get more curious about the actual Luddites. Who were these people whose name gets thrown around so often today in our conversations about new technology? And what did they actually believe?

One day I just sort of decided to dig into the term and very quickly I stumbled upon an academic paper about how they weren't doles or just confused mouth contents. They were a powerful organization with some very, very good points about why they were upset about technology and they had a very good case to make against how technology was exploiting them. The story is so much more complex, so much more nuanced, and if anything we should be sympathetic to the Luddites, especially given all the lessons that we can learn about them and how they sort of illuminate a lot of the crises still ongoing today.

Brian has a new book out about the Luddites with a very metal title, it's called Blood in the Machine, and it explores how English textile workers in the 19th century rose up against the growing trend of automation and the machines that were threatening their livelihoods. The history feels honestly a little too relevant today, and so we wanted to have Brian on the show to tell us what we can learn from the original original Luddines. So let's set the scene. In your book, you say that the textile industry was sort of the first to be automated. So could you describe like what was textile work

like before automated machines? So it varied a lot, but textile work was often sort of, well, today we would kind of understand to be good sort of middle class work. A lot of times the cloth workers would work at home. They were some of the first work from home proponents in that sense. They would usually work about 30 hours a week.

They could take breaks when they wanted. They could walk in their gardens. A lot of them had little farms to provide a little extra subsistence or a little extra value. The children would help spin the yarn. It was a family affair. They would sing. It was hard work. It wasn't always totally great. They would haggle with the merchants who would come to buy the cloth, but they could work on their own terms. And they really built these communities. It was this way for 200 years. And it had really sort of brought together a bunch of traditions and norms and standards that until sort of the late 1700s, when you started to see some new trends begin to impinge on that,

that they had a very well-established, sort of, nice lifestyle. And those trends that you're talking about, they involved the introduction of a bunch of new machines that automated the weaving work that humans have been doing for hundreds of years. And perhaps the most significant of those machines was the power loom. Could you tell us about it? Yeah, it's a device that automates the process of weaving itself. Something that a lot of people thought was impossible for a long time because weaving was such skilled work, but the power loom once connected to a power source like water or steam,

it could automate the process of weaving and just producing the goods in the first place. And that is a big deal. There are hundreds of thousands of weavers. More than any of these other trades, the biggest sort of industrial workforce in England at the beginning of the industrial revolution. So huge, huge number of jobs stand to be automated. And when people start to get angry about this, there aren't even that many power looms in operation.

It's the idea. It's the fact that they're there, that entrepreneurs are beginning to use them, promising to use them. It's the long shadow that these things cast that really irks people. So you describe these technological innovations that led to increasing automation,

but there was also the rise of just the factory as a space where production happens, right? So can you tell us a little bit more about that? So the factory was still kind of a novel concept at the time that you could organize, labor more efficiently if you gathered it all under one roof, under one overseer, and just start lining the place with machines. And this had not been done before, the 1700s in a meaningful way.

So when it started happening, it immediately caused alarm bells to ring among cloth workers everywhere who saw pretty viscerally, what their lives were going to look like in the future if this mode of work took over their industry. I mean, it sounds like the factory itself is almost as important as any one of these new machines, like when it comes to changing the dynamics of work at the time. 100%. Yeah.

In fact, the the Luddites and the people who would become Luddites had a saying, and that was what they hated most of all was to, quote, unquote, stand at their command. They hated this idea of becoming subservient to anyone, to an overseer, to a factory boss. When they'd lived their whole lives with autonomy, you know, working hard, but with flexibility and with dignity, if they had to stand at the command of somebody else, all that was out the window. It's the difference between working at home with your family, with your friends,

taking breaks to walk in the garden, and sitting in a six-story building with worrying machinery and cloth fiber choking your lungs, and somebody telling you when you can and cannot stand up to take a break. One of the things I was really surprised by in your book is the role of that automation plate in creating child labor. Could you talk about that and why one led to the other? Yeah, so you don't need as much skill to run these new machines and so one thing you could do is you could hire children, women, hard-up

weavers who used to be more gainfully employed. And in these conditions that are sort of out of the public eye, they're these great big buildings, and they were purposefully built outside of major towns and cities because they knew people would both protest the jobs that they were taking. And soon enough, they knew that they both protest the jobs that they were taking, and soon enough, they knew that they would protest the conditions inside. And it's truly dangerous, brutal work. The limbs are lost frequently, children are pulled into the machines, disease would spread through the dormitories, and so many children died,

that they had to ship them out of town and distribute them to different, on marked gravesites, so because they were afraid they would attract too much attention if they started filling in these mass graves right next to it. Truly awful, truly awful disturbing stuff. And that is one thing that cloth workers, the middle class, everywhere is seeing,

and they're saying, this is what the factory does. This is what automated machinery is leading us to. It's doing this to the most vulnerable of us, but we're all vulnerable here. So we see this rising discontent about automation. So from there, how did the Luddite movement begin? And when does it start to coalesce? So at the end of the 1700s, in response to the French Revolution, a lot of the British working class start to build a class consciousness and start to sort of agitate for reform and better conditions. The crown response in quite an authoritarian manner and one important thing they do

is they ban the act of combining or organizing or forming a union as we would understand it today. So that option is off the table. Workers cannot agitate collectively for change. That is illegal. They can be brought in and arrested if they do that. So as we enter the first decade of the 1800s and we start to see those big factories spring up, buying machinery, The workers don't have

that option of coming together and saying, hey, how are we going to deal with this? They try to anyways. So they form this nebulous trade organization. They go to parliament. They say, hey, these entrepreneurs are wrecking our trade. They are ignoring laws that are on the books. Can we deal with this? Can we deal this in a democratic way so that we all benefit a little bit from this new immense economic boom that's happening and so it doesn't just get concentrated

at all at the top and we're just off their whims and they get denied. And finally, the British parliament at the time just says we've had enough of this. They wipe all those regulations off the books. So now they don't even have nominal regulations or laws to appeal to. You know, they go to their employers. They say, hey, let's work out some deals. Let's find a way that we can sort of introduce this technology more gradually. So it's not so sudden they get rebuffed there too.

So it sounds like workers are trying to stay ahead of this trend towards automation. Like they're trying to push back, but they're just not having much success. Yeah, and finally, at the end of the decade, around 1809 out of 1810, we have this sort of crisis point. When the entrepreneur class recognizes that they have an advantage and they can sweep in and they begin introducing this automated machinery, and that is the final spark that lights this big flame. So let's talk about the name Luddite. It comes from this character named Ned Ludd. Who is he?

Nedlod, who is he? Nedlod was a mythic and probably apocryphal figure. It's unclear where the name sort of came from first, although there's been a lot of speculation, if you say Nedlod, Robin Hood, Nedlod Robin Hood, it's kind of in the same vein and Nedlod originates in Nottingham, right next to Sherwood Forest, so there's the spirit of rebellion.

But the first time that Ned Ludd appears is in a newspaper article that sort of details this backstory of an apprentice named Ned Ludd, who was a boy, forced to work on a machine, he didn't want to do his work because he's a boy. But the magistrate demands that he be whipped because he's not being productive enough, so the factory owner who's overseeing him whips him. Ned Ludd revolts, smashes the machine with a hammer, and flees into the forest. This is the legend of Ned Ludd, and it's either created or adopted by the cloth workers who, in 1811, finally decide that they've had enough and they organized a rebellion against the factory owners. So this marks the beginning of the Luddah movement

and their hallmark becomes that they destroy machines in the same way that mythical Ned Ludd did. Exactly. Their campaign is very organized, very pointed, very specific. First, what these followers of Ludd would do This very organized, very pointed, very specific. First, what these followers of LUD would do is they would send a letter, a threatening letter to a local entrepreneur or factory owner, and they would say, if you don't take down

these machines that you are using in this way, you're going to get a visit from Ned LUD's Army. you're going to get a visit from Nedlod's army. And it would be signed by Nedlod or General Lod or King Lod. And sure enough, if the entrepreneur didn't take down the machines, they would be targeted by a nighttime raid. They would either slip in through the windows and smash the machines that were doing the automation. And it's important to point, they would only smash those machines. There were a number of machines that had been used for a long time. Those machines would not be broken, hand limbs, not not broken. They would smash the wide frames. They would smash the

gig mills and the shearing frames, not those that had been used for hundreds of years. And then they would file out under the darkness of night. They were famous for brandishing the great blacksmiths hammer, and they would call it ENOC. The hammers themselves were made by James and ENOC tailor, who were blacksmiths that were also building automating machinery, so they had a saying, and that saying would go ENOC, made them, ENOC shall break them, and it was this great giant hammer. made them, you know, I shall break them. And it was this great giant hammer. So this first let it raid happens in Nottingham in 1811.

How does the movement spread from there? Yeah, I think one of the most interesting things about the let it movement is that it is a truly decentralized movement. It's an early sort of innovation really in this mode of sort of cell-based organizing. There was a well organized sortized sort of network of lightites in and around Nottingham. That came first.

And they met with fairly astonishing success. So they would sneak into the factories, break the machines, and people cheered. Once they saw that public reaction was so good, they would do it again, and they got increasingly brazen. Soon there were raids in broad daylight as the crowds of the city would come out and cheer. So it's clear pretty early on that there's a lot of popular sentiment in favor of letism. And so you see

let it cells start to crop up in various places, even where it's not clear that they were in touch. crop up in various places, even where it's not clear that they were in touch. In the beginning, it really was truly a decentralized movement, something like Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter. It might be an analogous to that today. So who are some of the most important Luddite leaders who emerged during this time, but what drove them to the movement? So the interesting thing about Luddites is that they left very little trace. What we know about Luddites is largely through the letters they sent,

the complaints and descriptions passed down through the magistrates that fought them, the newspaper writers of the day, and you know through what was passed down through oral tradition. We do know a handful of the Leidite leadership, And the most famous is George Meller. George Meller had recently finished his apprenticeship as a cloth finisher or a cropper at the time that the entrepreneurs were starting to use automated machinery. So you can kind of imagine a young man going, ah, I finished my apprenticeship.

Now I can sort of embark on the world and then seeing a factory spring up outside town and say, actually, we're gonna do that work for you and you're not gonna get paid anything anymore. So he is particularly incensed by all of this. So he agitates for this organized rebellion after Nottingham. So Nottingham comes first.

It's an inspiration to cloth workers everywhere. And George Meller is reading these accounts in the newspaper and saying we need to do this here. And so what was the government's reaction to the one I said they're gaining this popularity. They're becoming heroes and people are cheering them on even in broad daylight. What happens in terms of parliament? So the government is not pleased. Their response is swift and it is increasingly punitive, increasingly brutal. First, they just send troops. After there's an outbreak in Nottingham, the first Luddite uprising, they just send troops to occupy any of the villages or towns where these disturbances are going on. And the funny thing is, is that it doesn't matter.

The Luddites continue their campaigns and they slip right past. These troops, nobody is informing on the Luddites. The state puts huge rewards out there if anyone will come forward and inform on them, and nobody does. And when that doesn't work, they take the final step. And that is making it a crime punishable by death

to break a machine. So it gets the point or breaking a loom could have you put to death. So things are really escalating between the Luddites and the government. When does it all come to a hat? So the Luddites had been rising up for months and they had become very good at striking small to medium-sized operations

and factories. There was a period where there were machine raids almost every day and hundreds and then thousands of machines were smashed, just a huge sums in that day of damage being done to the industrial state. But they felt, and specifically George Meller felt that it was time to strike a bigger blow. So this is probably the most famous battle in Luddite lore, but he gathers scores of men, there's over a hundred, and they attack what is then one of the biggest factories in the West Riding. A stone giant monolithic building and kind of unbeknownst to them, it has been built up like a fortress inside.

It turns into this huge melee where the luttites are taking turns smashing this hammer and trying to shoot through the windows to try to gain entry so they can break the machines. But there are soldiers and mercenaries inside all shooting back at them. In the end, it's believed for, but two for sure, luddites are shot and killed and they have to retreat. The attack at Ruffold's Mill was really the luddites' first major defeat,

and it was a huge turning point. It showed the factory owners that the Luddites could be turned back by force, that they could be crushed in this way, and that maybe the answer wasn't, you know, bounties or trying to ratchet up the penal code, but to simply encourage factory owners to defend their businesses with guns if necessary. So could you tell us how the Luddite movement eventually ended? Like, what led to their defeat?

So after the defeat at Raffles, George Meller kind of goes up the deep end, one of his close friends, who he had personally convinced to become a Luddite John Booth, was among the dead, and he becomes pretty deeply unwell and he quickly resolves. He needs to take more direct action. So he enlists a few of his colleagues and they set out to attack the other major factory owner in town, a man named Horsefall, and they ambush him on his ride home and assassinate him in cold blood. So it becomes clear both by the body count and sort of by the way the winds are blowing that the luttites are losing. And after George and the other croppers assassinate horsefall, they also begin to lose public sentiment.

So all of this leads this most sort of explosive outburst of lethism to Peter out. Really the core let it uprising that we think about when we think about let it happen from 1811 to 1813 and it dies out by the end of the decade. And ultimately George Miller, the let it leader and his friends, were put to death for their role in the assassination, right? Yeah, yeah, it was a big dramatic trial. courtroom was packed. It was written about in the papers and You know, they never admitted to the assassination, but they were convicted pretty quickly and they were hung outside York Castle and then

just Days later there was a trial for all of those who had been participating in the movement otherwise, just for machine breaking, not for assassinating. First fall, and they were all put to death as well. It was a public affair. It was meant to send a signal to workers everywhere, because again, Luddites had become quite popular. Their movement was joined, not just by cloth workers, but by shoemakers, by coal workers, by people of every stripe.

Working people understood the structures that were taking shape, and that this mode of factory work, especially, and having to tend to the machines owned by somebody else was so onerous that it was worth fighting to preserve their way of life, to preserve their freedom, basically. So how did the defeat of the Luddites represent like a new template for labor relations and also just, you know, the way we make and build things going for it? and also just, you know, the way we make and build things going forward. The defeat of the Luddites meant that the factory owners won, and that this mode of production gets replicated everywhere. We get the industrial revolution, and it's largely a factory revolution. So when the Luddites lost, on the one hand,

this particular mode of work became ascendant. And on the other hand, it became taboo to question how technology was used and how it was used in your workplace, how it was used against you, if it was going to be used against you. Technology became synonymous with progress, and to say otherwise, could get you labeled backwards thinking or just sort of ignorant. And this was also very intentional. And we see that when in the prosecutor is prosecuting George Meller and the Luddites, he's using these terms.

He's decrying that men like George Meller have led other men under this delusion that machinery is not progress. So we see this equation early on begin to be formulated by those who it stands to benefit. Coming up after the break, we'll talk more with Brian Merchant about the ways that the Luddite movement still echoes today and whether we might see another lead-eye uprising. So I'm back with Brian Merchant, and Brian, I have to say, I'm kind of flambragasted by how thoroughly the lead-ites were defeated.

Like not only was the movement defeated in its time, but the word itself lead-eye was taken over by, you know, capillus and industrialists to mean anti-progress and anti-technology and kind of a blind, ignorant way. Like that level of defeat, like even at the level of a language is kind of hard to fathom. Yeah, it really is.

There's a scholar, theater, Rosac, who once said about the Luddites, and I love this, he said, if the Luddites didn't exist, then the tech industry would have to invent them. I think it's been very intentional on some level by the people who stand to benefit most from a lot of these technologies

that we would do very well to question to have us not question them. It serves that bottom line. We're not asking questions about how Amazon gets us our products so cheaply and so quickly, and that to say, maybe it's not worth the cost if we understand what's going on behind the scenes, if that is backwards looking, then Amazon wins.

If we say maybe there should be safeguards or rules about how AI is used or situations where it should not be used at all in the workplace, if saying things like that makes us look sort of foolish, that serves companies like OpenAI that stand to make enormous profits from selling these tools to other enterprises. So it does make a certain level of sense that the Luddite term has been captured so thoroughly by, I guess you could say, its opponents. Do you think we might see a new kind of Luddite uprising in reaction to developments and automation today?

I do think we'll see some new threads of letism being woven, so to speak. I think we already are. So again, the Luddites did not have the tools that we have available to us. We do have the ability to organize our workplaces and to confront AI or automation if it's being used in ways that can cause us harms. And we are finally seeing that. And I think that is ledism. And that is something that we haven't seen for decades now.

And I'm talking about the actors and the screenwriters strike, which is predicated in large part over grievances about AI and sort of the giggification of their work. It's very much explicit. Both the screenwriters and the writers are drawing a red line in the way that we might imagine the Luddites drawing that line and saying, no, you cannot use chat GPT or an AI service to create an original script because we know that what you want to do is have the AI turn out an original script and then to pay us less money to edit it.

And that's exactly what was happening 200 years ago. You know, they couldn't get rid of the person altogether, but they could make sort of a shoddy substitute. And it's that saying no that just resonates so deeply with what Buddhism is all about. A lot of what the Luddites were fighting against is so timeless because the way that we develop technology and the way it's imposed on our economy is so much the same. To the extent that if you look back 200 years and you look at some of the solutions Luddites were proposing, they were proposing things that today look an awful lot like a robot tax

that would be proposed by someone like Andrew Yang or Michael Bloomberg, where if you're using automated machinery, then some portion of that cloth that you would not otherwise be able to produce, you should tax that and then use that to fund worker programs. This is something that they suggested 200 years ago. And they saw the way that tech titans and entrepreneurs were using the idea of technology to get around regulations in much the same way that 200 years later, Uber and Lyft and the gig economy companies would be using to say, oh, we're a technology company.

We don't have to play by the municipal tax decode rules or anything like that. So this playbook has remained the same for for for so long and it's going to be the same Unless we really sort of take major strides to to address it Would you like to see people like use the word luddite today in the proper way? Like is this like a mission? It is a mission. I have become a very pro-luddite I will fight this battle any day of the week. I think the time is right to reclaim the term, and I think we all benefit greatly if we succeed.

99% of the visible was produced this week by Delaney Hall, sound mix by Dara Hirsch, original music by Swanrielle. Kathy too is our executive producer Kurt Colestad is the digital director. Press the team includes Martin Gonzales, Chris Barube, Jason Dillion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lashemadon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. Brian Merchand's book will be available for purchase on September 26th. It's called Blood in the Machine, the origins of the rebellion against Big Tech. There is so much detail we couldn't get into, bloody detail, incredible characters, so much going on. If you want to learn more about

the Lennites, you definitely have to check it out. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are a part of the Stitcher and Serious XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI work or on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too.

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