Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Big Tech is Ruining Our Lives with Brian Merchant

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

Express skepticism about technology and you might be labeled a "Luddite." However, the true story of the historical Luddites offers a fascinating perspective on the relationship between workers and technology. In this episode, Adam chats with tech journalist Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, about the historical Luddites and their fight against wealthy elites replacing the working class with machines—a struggle made only more relevant by the state of the tech industry today. Find Brian's book at at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, I was born in the 80s, and for the first decades of my life, technology kept making my life better. It really felt like technological change was an unalloyed good because there were so many cool inventions coming out year after year. There was the birth of video games, the birth of the internet, the cell phone, MP3 players, all sorts of other things that I thought were cool and interesting and fun and actually made life for me and everyone I knew better. Well, guess what? I do not feel that way about technology today. Like millions of others, I have become a bit of a skeptic about the tech industry. You know, when Apple pushes their dumb new AR goggles, or AI

boosters promise they're making a godlike chatbot who's going to replace everyone's jobs, or some company promises a brand new app-enabled convenience that's going to hurt workers, my impulse is now to call bullshit. And that's because a lot of the tech industry's promises have turned out to be bullshit. And that is a really interesting shift in how all of us think about technology. You know, there's a word that we always use to describe someone who's skeptical or fearful of technology, a luddite. You know, if you have a friend who's avoided owning a smartphone or hasn't switched from cable to streaming yet, you might call them a Luddite. You know, someone weird and unnecessarily fearful of new technology, like an Amish person driving a horse and buggy or something, right?

Maybe if you really know your history, when you think of Luddites, you think of workers destroying the factory machines that were replacing them in some kind of sad, ineffectual tantrum against the inevitable force of progress or whatever. Well, all of that is a myth. The truth about the Luddites, who they were and what they actually wanted, is far more interesting with that, and it resonates with our present moment in profound ways. As we are reexamining our own relationship with technology, it's incredibly useful to go back into history and see who these people people who were the first ones to fight back against the technological change that was destroying their livelihoods actually were and what they were actually trying to

accomplish. Well, to talk about this today, we have an absolutely incredible guest. But before we get into it, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all the amazing conversations that we bring you week in and week out, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. You can join our online community. We would love to have you. And if you enjoy stand up comedy, come see me on the road.

I'm touring all the time. My tickets and tour dates are at Adam Conover dot net. And now let's introduce this week's guest. His name is Brian Merchant. He's one of the best tech writers working today. Recently, he worked for the LA Times and he's the author of the new book, Blood in the Machine,

The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Please welcome Brian Merchant. Brian, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. I've read you for many years in the LA Times. You did have really wonderful coverage of the strikes in Hollywood last year. You and I spoke and I, you were quoted me a couple of times in a piece or two.

It's really wonderful to meet you in person. You're one of our very best tech reporters, writers, thinkers. And you have a new book out about the Luddites, the original people to fight back against technology at a moment when a lot of people are trying to fight back against technology. So who were the Luddites and what do we get wrong about them? Yeah.

So the Luddites kind of had the misfortune of kind of being the trailblazers here against odds that are even, if you can imagine it, more stacked against sort of working people than they are today. I mean, we got big tech, which has an immense amount of consolidated power, but they had a hostile state. They had all sorts of wealth inequality that was just, you know, where we're headed today if we're not careful. But anyways, the Luddites were cloth workers, right? So they were weavers. They were stocking frame knitters. They were cloth finishers or croppers, people in the cloth trade in England, which was at the time.

What year? Early 1800s. But for the last two centuries, basically, they had comprised sort of like the biggest industrial workforce in England. They were besides agricultural workers. This was it. Like they were fueling England's economy and they would fuel the Industrial Revolution. However, a couple of things are happening in the in the second half, especially of the 18th century and the 1700s. The factory becomes an appealing idea for entrepreneurs and those with a little bit of money to throw around as a way to sort of divide labor and sort of take profit for yourself.

So for hundreds of years, the pre-Luddite cloth workers were, they were, they were working at home, the cottage industry, that is, that term was minted to describe these guys. Because they were literally working in their own cottages. Literally working in cottages. They'd maybe have a journeyman weaver come in. The family would help prepare cloth. They'd have maybe a small farm. It was a nice life. You're working maybe 30 hours a week. It's the original work from home, right? And here's the thing that's going to become important as we talk about this. There's a lot of dignity and agency that you have, right?

You have a job. You've got a merchant's going to bring you some raw materials. You're going to either weave it into cloth or you're going to knit it, whatever sort of section of the industrial trade you're based on. But how you do that is up to you. Yeah. You can sing songs in your house with your family. You can say, you know what? I've worked an hour.

I don't feel like working anymore. I'm going to go take a walk in the garden. I'm going to see how the neighbor's doing. Maybe, you know, hoe the field a little bit. And it's a nice sort of life and it's a dignified life. You can do the work your own way. You can say, I've got my own trick for doing it. I do it this way and I'm a little bit better than the guy next door. So I'm going to make some more money or whatever you can, you can take pride in your work as a craftsperson. That's right.

And you, and importantly, another thing that's going to become important, uh, is that they, they're also technologists. So they're good at using their machinery. If there's a way that they like to do it better, they, a lot of them mod it, fix it, maybe make it a little more efficient. What kind of machinery were they using? Like, so a hand loom and these, these, you know, were varying degrees of, uh, of size. Some of them were quite large. Usually, they're like on the second floor in the corner of the cottage, or sometimes there are small workshops. You got the hand loom. You have the shearing frame. So there's a lot of jobs that are in different parts and sort of like subsectors of this economy.

are in different parts and sort of like subsectors of this economy. So there's not just one machine, but there are all, you know, different sorts of machines that are, you know, used to produce or finish cloth. Yeah. And now the combination of this idea of the factory, that certain entrepreneurs start getting capital and enough influence and enough space to like build these things on, uh, on, on the land, um, you know, near streams where they can tap into that power or eventually, you know,

steam power, um, you know, they start to collide with people who are inventing more efficient, uh, machinery that can sort of automate the jobs of, of, of these, of these workers. machinery that can sort of automate the jobs of, of, of these, of these workers. So in, in cloth production and in, uh, cotton production, especially you have the power loom that starts to rear its head and, and this can automate, uh, what a weaver is doing basically. And weaver is the number one job in England besides agricultural worker. So in the entire country, pretty much in the entire country, again, besides farmer. So there's hundreds of thousands of, of weavers and this machine starts getting put into production. Um, there's another machine for knitting that's called the, the wide frame. Uh, and it's, it doubles essentially the rate that you can produce like a knitted garment that used to be a stocking frame.

Um, and eventually up to six times as fast. Uh, and the, the caveat with all these things is it's doing a much worse job, right? So, and this is going to be some of the parallels that we're talking about, you know, a little bit with generative AI and so forth, but it's stitching the, so the wide frame in particular, you know, you would have a skilled cloth worker who would spend hours making sure you had a nice garment that's built from the ground up one piece. And you, you could be pretty certain if you were going to a skilled craftsman, you'd get a quality product that's going to last you years and years with the wide frame or these, some of these forms of automation, they're making cloth two by two stitching together,

and then they're going to fall apart faster. They're going to be a lot shoddier, but they can be sold on the market for a compete competitive price. All of a sudden the weaver or the, the, the knitters who are making their garment have to compete with that. This is the, this is the H and M clothes of the early 19th century,

right? You touch it and it falls apart. That's right. You put it through the wash one of the early 19th century, right? You touch it and it falls apart. That's right. You put it through the wash one time and then, oh, shit, it doesn't work. But they can sell more of them. The entrepreneurs and the industrialists who are taking advantage of both factorization and these new machines know that they can make more stuff, even if they have to sell it cheaper, they're still going to make more money. Now, the old mom and pop shops, the cottage industry folks, and the people who are going to become the Luddites see these trends intersecting, and they see this thing sort of starting to rise. They see industrialization taking shape,

rise. They see industrialization taking shape and they start protesting, you know, first, you know, in quite peaceful means they go to parliament and they say, look, look what's happening here. They're driving prices down. They're making what often amount to be like fraudulent goods. Like we're going to make a real thing and try to sell it on the marketplace. Now consumers don't know if it's going to fall apart or not. So they're going to be inclined to pay less. So we cannot make a living. Let's get some guarantees on the books. Let's do a few things. Let's try to get a minimum wage. Let's uphold the regulations that have governed this trade for years and years and years, decades, hundreds of years. But guess what? The entrepreneurs aren't following

them. And you can kind of imagine the kind of arguments that they're making, which is the same arguments that tech companies today make. So you like, think of like Uber when they rolled into a city and people were like, Hey, we have like taxi laws, right? And Uber's like, Oh no, no, this is software. This isn't a taxi service. These aren't taxis. These are just people sharing rides. It's a form of carpooling. It's a peer-to-peer network that we're facilitating. We have nothing to do with driving, even though a driver is going to show up at your door when you hire its service. And they would go in with their venture capital and with their sort of argument that they were a technology company and use it as an excuse to

roll over all these rules and regulations that cities have. And, you know, some cities fought it, others didn't, but that playbook is 200 years old because that's what these entrepreneurs were doing. Like, I don't know, we don't need apprentices. We don't need to guarantee the quality of cloth. We don't need to pay a minimum wage. We don't need to do all these, these, you know, adhere to these rules. Those are for the old times. That doesn't apply. This is new technology.

Now, the argument that you often also have those people make is that if you protest, you are simply denying the natural progress of technology. That the technology is inexorable, that the new world is destroying the old, and you must embrace it or you'll be left behind behind. And that's in fact, what we mean when we call someone a Luddite today. Oh, you're living in the past. You refuse to, uh, I don't know, like, um, what's your name? Um, Fran Lebowitz, who doesn't have a computer, right? She's like, I don't want, I don't want to use it. Right. That's that sort of stubbornness that stick. I don't want to join the future is what people think of a Luddite as being. Is is that what the Luddites at the time were doing? So. So, no. And there's, you know, think about who that argument benefits just for a second. Like, who does that benefit? If anybody who's saying, well, wait, wait a minute, like there should be some guardrails, there should be some protections.

We should be allowed to make a living when this stuff comes along. Who does it benefit to sort of sideline all those arguments? The people who own the technology. It's pretty, it's pretty simple. Then as now, it was a very concerted effort. So a couple of things happen after those sort of peaceful protests and the lobbying efforts fail. There's a bunch of, there's an economic crisis. England is at war with Napoleon. There are trade blockades. And at 1811, all of these things converge. And the Luddism, what became Luddism, the act that we remember, these guys taking hammers and smashing machines, was an absolute tactic of last resort after all like what we might say today, like doing it the right way failed. Like, you know, so, you know, unions were outlawed then. They could not unionize.

There was no democracy. You couldn't, you know, vote out a representative who wasn't paying attention. So in 1811, the, the, the, these cloth workers sort of organized this really sort of innovative rebellion under the banner of Ned Ludd. And Ned Ludd is this apocryphal figure who they kind of made this like Robin shape, Robin hood shaped myth around, right? Like was there a real Ned Ludd?

There was no real Ned Ludd. He was an apprentice worker who was working too slowly for his master's benefit. So he took him to the magistrate and the magistrate ordered that he be whipped for not working hard enough. Ned Ludd, the story goes, took up his master's own hammer, smashed his machine with it, and then fled to Sherwood Forest, where he sort of became a folk hero like Robin Hood before him. This was a story. This was their avatar. So what they would do is they would write letters to the industrialists and they'd say, we know that you have X hundred of the obnoxious machines, they'd call them.

And they've taken 600 jobs from our brothers who can no longer afford bread. If you don't take down the machines, you'll get a visit from Ned Ludd's army. And they'd pin it to the door or deliver it otherwise. And if they complied, fine. Like they would leave them alone. If he didn't, if they kept running the machines and a funny thing about it, they could hear the machine.

A lot of the industrialists didn't want to admit they were using the machines because they knew they were hated, but they made a certain sound, a lot of the machines. So they could hear them they were using the machines because they knew they were hated but they made a certain sound a lot of the machines so they could hear them through the and they would sneak in through the window smash the machines or hold up the overseer by gunpoint smash just those machines not the machinery that had coexisted with society for decades not their implements of the trade that they need just the obnoxious machines and they repeated this tactic over and over

and it was replicable, right? So there was no real Ned Ludd. So if you're a hundred miles away in an industrial district and you have your own grievances, Ned Ludd can show up there and lead his army into battle. Wow.

Ned Ludd can show up, you know, a hundred miles away from there and lead his army into battle. So all across the industrial districts of England, you start to see these uprisings. This is sick as hell. It is. They were,

so you're not the only one that thought that they were bad asses. Like they were, people would come out and cheer them in the streets. Yeah. They would clap. They would applaud. Like, you know,

they were supposed to inform, you know, to working up to the point we were talking about earlier, like the prop, the propaganda became necessary because the state would go like there have been depredations in our district and there have been of the most unseemly kind. Please, you know, give give information on as to the participants to your local magistrate. No one would come forward. They would offer like 10 years worth of salary for some of these workers to just to give information that would let them, you know, finger the Luddites and no one came forward. So despite the fact there were unions were outlawed, these folks were like organized this solidarity.

This is where we're not turning anyone in where we are all Ned Ludd and none of us are Ned Ludd. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's a unit, a historian, Eric Hobsbawm, calls it collective bargaining by riot. So it was both fearsome. Like, you know, the factory owners and industrialists were legitimately afraid because they didn't

know. Like, they weren't on a joke. They didn't know if Ned Ludd was fake or if there was like really a powerful organizing. This was, you know, post-revolutionary France. So they're all worried the same thing's going to happen in England, bring democracy, bring, you know, all these things that might threaten their power on top of these sort of industrial disputes. So they're, you know, they are scared and they are sort of, you know, trying to figure out how to deal with it. Meanwhile, the public is cheering and they're writing folk songs about it.

It was Robin Hood of the day. Yeah. Until, you know, the state gets a hold of it and sees it as this threat. Right. And the state does really three things. First, it just marshals troops and sends them in by the thousands. Largest domestic occupation in English history. It's huge.

There's at the height of it, I think there are like 30,000 troops just stationed ready to fight the Luddites. And it's more than they had fighting Napoleon in one of the biggest wars that England had going on. So then they make it a capital offense. So if you break a machine, you can be hung, right? You can be killed for smashing a machine, for doing sabotage or vandalism. And it's actually a little side note here is that Byron, Lord Byron, makes his debut. He's a lord, so he's supposed to take part in politics and stuff. He makes his very first virgin speech to the,

to, to, to parliament defending the Luddites. He's from Nottingham. He's from where all this stuff is happening. He's seen it in the streets and he recognizes that the Luddites have a point. So while the state is moving to try to crush these guys,

he's making this huge thundering and famous defense of the Luddites saying, what are you? You're going to, you're just going to answer this with more barbarism? They're starving. So you're just going to make it an outlaw? You're going to outlaw their means of sort of addressing these grievances? You're going to kill them?

And he basically chastises the state. I mean, it doesn't work. They passed the law anyways. So yeah, so troops stationed by the thousands. It's now a crime punishable by death to smash a machine and then third they have this propaganda campaign going where you know oh they don't they know not what they do they're probably led they've been their minds have been warped by some deluded leader they you know they're they're dummies they're they're against progress and that

they're minting this idea that has been sustained for a long time that to smash these machines, to protest any segment of technology, to challenge this in open court is to be a dummy, to be backwards looking, to be a Luddite. to be backwards looking, to be a Luddite. But when you look at what kind of progress this was, right? Yes, a new machine has been built, but it produces work of inferior quality. That means that people who previously did the work cannot make a living, right? It's worse for everybody, except for one segment of society, the people who own the machines.

So, you know, even if we were to accept the idea of technological progress as being linear advancement in a certain direction, the same way we think of, I don't know, science. It's actually not even true of science, but like, you know, there's a fiction that technology always goes in one direction and that it's like always up and up and up. And tomorrow is always advanced, more advanced in some way than today or better. There's a line graph going up into the right. Even if that were true in this case, it's only happening for one group of people. So

there's myth upon myth upon myth here about how technology works. That's right. Absolutely. And, you know, that's, again, where we come to this mischaracterization of the Luddites. The biggest misconception is that they were against the technology. No, they were against that graph only being beneficial to 1% of society. If somebody had came in and said, hey, I've invented this way to sort of dramatically improve your productivity. And I'm going to sort of build this machine in your small shops or in your homes, or maybe we can figure out a way to do it together. We can all win from this together. It would have been such a different story. Instead, it's a proto-capitalist. Capitalism was sort of in its

infancy at this stage. You can kind of see the Luddites as, you know, kind of, you know, fighting against the, you know, the shock troops of industrial capitalism, really. But so these guys are setting up factories outside of town and setting them up in opposition to the workers interest in the opposition to everybody. And a lot of times they're not even trying to recruit the cloth workers to work with them. They're piping in orphans from orphanages, literally to because and it's another important truism that holds to still today. There's when you hear automation, when you hear about AI, when you hear about, oh, the promises that we're going to automate these jobs, it's never it's never a clean automation, as you might say. There is always, always an invisible sort of supply chain of usually exploited labor hiding behind it.

So in that day, you know, they're like, oh, these machines are more efficient. It's the future. But by the way, you got to keep shipping us children from the orphanage because that's who's really going to run the machines. We don't need it. It's sort of de-skilling, and that's the economist term for it, but they, you know, they still need a lot of labor and it's more precarious, more vulnerable. And that's who's making automation possible. Today, you look at these AI systems, you have precarious labor that's, you know, doing quality assurance to make sure generative AI.

Yeah, there's people being paid pennies in Kenya to review all of the output and to go through the training data and take out the swears and whatnot. Exactly. And so this is not jobs being automated. It's good jobs being replaced by bad jobs. And again, why should we accept this as progress, right? Like, you know, my, my phone, my iPhone is very advanced in, it can do more things today than it could three years ago. You know, I can use it to pay for shit and I couldn't before I can look at it and say,

those are, how do we measure advancement in terms of the capability of the device and its utility to me seems to be pretty good. But if next year Apple were to make a phone that did everything less well, they took away some features, but it's better for Apple. Apple makes more money. And by the way, we could talk about cases in which Apple has arguably done this in the past. But if they were to say, hey, the phone works less well, but it's better for us and it's more advanced. I'd be like, well, who is it more advanced for? Why are you saying it's more?

It's different. It's different in a way that from my perspective is bad, right? Because what is, what is technology? It's tech. What is the point of technology? It is to make human work more efficient, quicker, more capable, right. To, to increase human ability. But in this case, for the people doing the work and the people wearing the clothes, it did not increase anyone's ability, capability, efficiency. It made everything worse, right? That's right. And, you know, eventually, you know, some of the technology did improve, but these two things are disconnected. It's really a question and remains to this day, a question of who benefits from the improvement of technology. Who's getting it right? Back then, that industrial entrepreneurial class was capturing all of the gains.

So the Luddites were starving even as productivity was shooting through the roof. Productivity. You know, we could drill into the issues with calling it that. More crappy clothes are being made. More money is being made. The working people aren't seeing any of it. So Luddism is one of the early efforts to try to get those, those trajectories to align so that if you have technology that's making productivity skyrocket,

it's trying to get people a seat at the table so that they can benefit too. Presumably in there, there, it would have been possible to come up with some new loom technology that actually benefited everybody or at least benefited the workers more than what they did. It's not necessarily the new invention. It is how it was put to use and to what ends. That's right. It's a social context. And, you know, just like I wrote about in my column at the Times when you all were on strike and fighting the studio system who wanted to use AI to generate scripts, basically, again, like the factory owners of old, not as a tool that would contribute to your flourishing and creativity, but to in opposition to your interests as something that was going to degrade the amount of your working conditions, your standards, and was going to they were going to try to claw more value out of it and cut out things like residuals cut out.

You know, I mean, I repeated this over and over again in every interview that I did, because the the the AI boosters have infected people's brains so much with a promise. They say it's going to be able to do things better than a human and therefore is going to replace jobs. And what I had to repeat over and over again is actually the technology that they have invented and the technology that they intend to invent over the next couple of years cannot replace a human writer. All it can do is make the product worse. But what we are worried about is not the job of a writer being replaced. We're worried about this like pretty rudimentary, crappy technology, the technology that can predict the next word coming in a sentence that can output text from a simple prompt. Cool shit, right? Not that useful for

writing a screenplay that you actually want to be good. But what we're worried about is the companies using that technology in order to reduce our wages and working conditions by having it barf out a draft. You heard me say this in our interview, but we were not worried about a AI that could write an entire script and go to set and work with the director and go to post and do all the things that like an actual television writer has to do. We were worried about these companies using it to barf out a script and then assigning it to somebody and say, now you have to rewrite it, talk to the director, go to post, do all the work of a writer. You're not a writer though.

You're just a fucking associate producer because the AI was the writer. And that would have been, that was something that was, was allowable in our contract. And we, we got luckily protections put in place against, um, not luckily through great effort and mass solidarity. But, um, the point was not, we're worried about the technology. The point is we're worried about what the motherfuckers are going to do with it. That's, that's why. And that's why last year, 2023, the year that AI kind of exploded and was hyped and endlessly. And you look at what, you know, what the conversation is and it's Sam Altman going out there going like, oh man, this is so powerful. It could, it just might destroy humanity, but we got to push on.

And, you know, are you interested in purchasing like enterprise tier open AI technology? I guess you better give me money so I can stop the apocalypse that I'm creating. I mean, oh, you just got to give me money. I guess I got to go speak before Congress and tell them why they should do what I say. Honestly, I've never, 15 years as a tech reporter, I've never seen anything quite like it. This sort of blunt force, apocalyptic hyping of how powerful it is. And that's because they haven't really figured out a good way to make money with it.

They just want to convince everybody that it's necessary and that they can sell it to people. And then maybe it'll, but you're exactly right. And this is, you know, your fight was in, in,

in Hollywood and in the entertainment industry, but it's going to happen to copywriters, to illustrators, to coders, graphic designers down the line where they're going to institutions are making this pitch to them basically., to illustrators, to coders, graphic designers down the line where they're going to institutions are making this pitch to them basically. And it's not really in reality, 95% of the time going to be the case that the AI can do even a credible job at it. You know, if you're making like a presentation for some corporation and you have to like make

a PowerPoint deck and you used to maybe hire a graphic designer, maybe mid journey can just like slap something on there and that'll work for you. And you're, you know, you're cutting workout, you're cutting job out of the economy, but maybe that's a functional use there. But the example I always use is Photoshop having generative AI tools in it, right? Obviously that is something that would be useful and that people will use. Photoshop has had high tech image manipulation algorithms in it for decades. And yet another one, you know, generative fill or whatever. Sure. That could be used by a fucking Photoshop artist, you know, to then do that could actually be useful and time saving for a particular. Sure. Yeah. Editing tools, things like that there.

I mean, this is not to say that there are not, you know, interesting or, you know, use cases for this stuff. But again, it's if you see where it's going, where it's being deployed by management, by the C-suite, by tech companies hoping to sort of make profit off of this, then you're going to find a lot of trouble and it's going to be put in opposition to workers just as it was put against you guys. And there's yet another parallel. And you see these interests aligned in a lot of cases where in this case, it was, you know, tech companies, big tech is making the pitch that AI is coming down the pike, you know, studio executives have either bought it, bought the hype, or have just seen the opportunity. Big tech's hype has allowed them to make the case that they can use when even if they know exactly what they're doing, as you talked about, it's giving them a little bit of cover to do this.

Well, back in the Luddites' day, a lot of these factories were going to aristocratic lands on lords that would profit from all the new taxes that are coming in. So they don't ultimately care about the quality of the cloth. I mean, again, it varies. There's some people who are more compassionate and lords worrying about the welfare of their workers. But the greedier ones were just like, I don't care if it's good. We have this new technology in a new plant. I'm getting more taxes. It gives cover for the sort of these new tech entrepreneurs of the day to make the case for automating more machinery.

And it gives cover to the whole enterprise where at the time being, it was good for nobody just as it is today. So you just have to look at where power is aligning the sort of arguments that are being made about the technology and Luddism. I think I just wrote a piece for the Atlantic, uh, sort of detailing the new Luddites, uh, sort of making these arguments. I mean, this is such a, uh, you know, you're describing this sort of guerrilla rebellion of workers rising up together, creating a folk hero whose mask they put on to go destroy, you know, the machinery of,

of early capitalism that is like hurting them. I'm like, man, these are, this is an aspirational story. You know, this is goals. So who are there folks doing this today? Yeah. Yeah. There, there are. So again, like, as I mentioned back then you couldn't unionize, there were combination acts that, that literally made it illegal to form a union. So part of this was, you know, out of necessity that they operate in these sort of decentralized collectives. But we don't have to, you know, go that far today. And there's all of these sort of like green shoots of Luddism. And, you know, I would argue that what you all were doing in the strikes and this sort of direct opposition, which as I wrote in that column, we haven't seen that.

In the last 10, 15 years, Silicon Valley kind of came out with this halo and Google is doing no evil and Apple's making products everybody likes. And they get the benefit of the doubt for so long, even when, you know, Amazon and Uber are doing things that's sort of patently and obviously bad for workers. So people are afraid of being called the incorrect characterization of Luddites. The game is changing now and people are emboldened and able to make space for this kind of resistance. So we're not going to see machine smashing yet. I mean, I mean, it's not. Some people seem ready.

Yeah. Some people seem ready to grab a hammer and head to Palo Alto. I'm just saying. Yeah. And, you know, but so the fuck thing that we have to watch out for is that it is a different playing field than it was 200 years ago. Obviously, the Luddites could look up on the hill and say, there's the factory. There's where that asshole William Horsfall has dumped all his money into automating us out of work and undercutting our wages and making all of our lives worse.

Let's get our hammers. Let's go. And they could destroy those machines and make a fairly immediate impact. Both symbolically, people would cheer them and feel a little bit better, and they would destroy the machinery that was allowing this automation and allowing the bosses to undercut their wages. Today, we have these winding supply chains and globalization and all these invisible workers that we're. And it's a little bit, if you're actually looking to destroy machinery, it's harder. If you're looking to target machinery, I don't, you know, again,

nobody's talking industrial sabotage yet. Although, you know, there's the whole climate, you know, the how to blow up a pipeline thing. But the shitty thing that can happen is that when Uber moved into France, for example, and they were going to offer a new service that was going to compete directly with France's cab drivers, the cab drivers, which were very well organized and have a higher, you know, sort of density of sort of solidarity among one another. They're better organized and more powerful. They revolted. And what did they're, they're better organized and more powerful. They re they revolted. And what did they smash?

They didn't smash Uber servers. They smashed the, the new Uber drivers cars. And that's the other working people who have to buy their cars. And so there's a lot of cases like that too, where the new sort of sort of logic of Silicon Valley's new labor regimes is that you buy your own capital equipment. They offload so much on the worker. If you're an Amazon flex driver, a lot of times you're doing it in your own car and you're doing it with stuff that you've invested in.

So people are on the line with their own stuff, their own. And it is, has been harder to sort of say, okay, well, where do I oppose all this stuff? It feels hopeless and Congress, it feels like tech giants are so powerful. But the one thing we are seeing is real animosity towards like, you know, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. Yeah. I mean, I literally do a joke about Jeff Bezos in my standup act right now that when I do it, people don't laugh. They just cheer at the idea of bad things happening to them. Like it's, but all across the country, I go to any state and this happens. People are, I mean, the sentiment has really turned against the tech industry. And even though, yes, there's nothing physically to

smash. We're all dependent on these things. I can't smash my iPhone. I'm dependent on it for so many things now. But, you know, people are making, I think a similar demand of the Luddites, not that we eliminate the technology, but that the technology serve us and not, you know, our masters or not the people who already have everything in society. That's right. Yeah, exactly. It's reclamation. It's reclaiming the power over these technologies that have in many cases sort of just been foisted on us, you know? And it's that same sort of development model that has also lasted 200 years, right? Like a handful of mostly white guys deciding which technologies are going to sort of proliferate in, in society at a given time. And today, you know, look at, let's talk about some, let's get into some specific examples. Yeah. Let's talk about the Apple vision pro which like, look, I, there's a

part of me that loves a lot of what Apple does, right? As a design house, as a way of, you know, making things with a good fit and finish, you know, the quality of, you know, so vertically integrated, they can do stuff with technology that literally nobody else can do. So I'm like curious what this device is, right? I have not tried one myself. I'm excited to try it for the spectacle of it, right? To see what it's like. However, I'm sitting there going the pitch of having all of my Macintosh windows around me. Right now, my Macintosh windows are on my laptop. But instead, what if you were surrounded by your email and your text messages and Instagram? I'm like, that sounds like fucking hell.

Who would want to be in the middle of all of that? The only person I can think of is Tim Cook and or an Apple CEO whose life is literally sitting there looking at their emails. And like, what if it was a lot cooler to do my emails? But most people, if you ask them that, would it be nice to be surrounded by your fucking Safari windows? Why would anybody want this? They've designed something just for themselves. I know there was that tweet that went viral where he was like, this is sports on the,

on the vision pro. And it was just like, just like, it's like, oh my God. Like, it's like the clockwork orange guy, just like your eyes peeled open. And so much.

It's like, no, it's confusing because like you could have screens all over your house they already are i can already walk from one room to another and see screens everywhere my room is my house is fucking full of them and i bought them all from you why am i trying to put them around now you know the vision pro is like it doesn't seem that nefarious to me. It just seems like kind of a dumb idea. We'll see how it develops. But there's other examples

of this where people are designing things that benefit them, not the public, but telling all of us that, you know, their, their shit smells like roses. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I kind of feel the same way about the vision pro. I do think that, you know, eventually the movie is going to be to try to get you to spend more and more time in this sort of intensely mediated space that, uh, that Apple will, will ultimately profit from because you're going to be spending more time and it's already walled garden using its services. And, you know, it'll probably, it's already been pushing subscription services for stuff so if it gets enough people in there and you're all working in there it does there's like there is like a grimness at the corners of it and you could you could see certain

uh tells like when facebook came out with this you know it's like the oculus like it's our meta quest is going to be the future and here's like the amazing things you can do with it. They had that big like dueling demo. And then what's the first product they actually launch? Work. You're in workspaces. You're like around a table. And yeah, you're like dressed as a character from Star Wars or something.

But you're still just sitting around a conference room doing work. And it's like that's ultimately what I fear like the pitch is going to be. It's like that's ultimately what I fear like the pitch is going to be. We just want you to have a space where you can be more productive, surveilled more, you're trapped more, purchasing more stuff. Again, it's like I'd call it like soft nefarious. It's not just like immediately necessarily exploitative, especially since it doesn't seem like it's going to be all that popular. Yeah. But yeah, but the point stands. I did try one.

And you know what? There's some amazing technology. You tried Division Pro. I did. Yeah. I went down there in kind of a weird sign. Like I was able to sign up for a demo. I didn't even use my tech press credit.

Oh, you just went to an Apple store and said, let me try it out. Same day. Wow. You could just book one. It was the same day. And I was like, huh. Like if there's really a lot of demand, you know, you'd'd maybe have to wait a couple weeks because back when you could get those i mean people lining up for iphones was like a major news story every year for 10 years in a row

yeah so i guess they're and i was kind of soft grilling the the apple folks about it and they're like you know we've actually seen a lot of interest it's mostly from like rich people who just have money and are just like yeah i, I'll try it. Who cares? Like I bought everything else. Apple made, which seems like the reason Apple made it because they're rich and they're like, yeah,

I mean, I guess we'll make this. I mean, we got nothing else to make. They've been like working on a car for 10 years. That's probably never going to come out. Yeah. Like they just,

they're making so much money and they just clearly don't need all of it. Like we could, maybe here's an idea. We could like take some of the money and like spend it on roads and shit, you know? Cause they're making something that nobody needs. And they're like, we're not even expecting this to be successful yet.

They're transparently just blowing cash on it in the hopes that one day it pays off. Exactly, yeah. Well, and they're also notorious tax dodges. They've got their all their money stocked in ireland somewhere so yeah no that's classic classic mega core you know shit just like not you know not not much interest in uh you know the physical or the public good um but you know it did do cool things like it was there are some things that genuinely surprised me as

being cool like it was cool to look through photos and it felt it felt kind of new you know like you just like they they offered you like family photos and you can kind of it's like oh you're in this 3d space yeah a 3d photo that that or video that you're like you can kind of relive that moment and that was and like they you had little demos where you could see sports kind of like real up close and personal it's like okay that's kind of cool. But the thing that, again, Apple, that's not enough. It's not like, here's this cool thing where you can sit in your living room and have a few cool experiences. And just like with Facebook, it has to be like, here's the next thing that we're going to pitch as the thing that you need for everything.

Otherwise, it's not worth making. So Facebook had the whole pitch about the metaverse, which is so. Otherwise it's not worth making. So Facebook, you know, it had the whole pitch about the metaverse, which is so funny because no one even remembers that. That was like for two years straight. I mean, it was incredible, the metaverse. Two years of them pumping this

as the next biggest thing. And nobody ever once said, wow, looks cool, I like it. Not even, not the tech press, not the people watching like Mark's YouTube videos and everything. Like everyone was like, this looks like dog shit from front to back. And yet it was like on, you know, metaverse gains, like Facebook stock goes up until I get it fizzled out because it was fucking fake. Cause they make their money

selling us ads against right-wing conspiracy theories and anti-vax bullshit. That's where they make the money and they're trying to distract from it. Yeah. That's what it was. That's what it was. Years and years of scandal after scandal of Facebook has done this. Facebook has abetted genocide. Facebook makes teen girls feel like they are. Yeah. All these things just, you know, he's, oh, he just like had a big button that said like metaverse or like a bullshit button on his desk and he hits and it's just the next year he's oh he just like had a big button that said like metaverse or like a bullshit button on his desk and he hits and it's just the next year he's why he bought oculus right it's like oh i need i've never invented anything but i need to give the impression that i'm a tech company

that's creating the future yes oh here's a company that people seem to think that this is a futurist futuristic company let me buy it and then integrate it. And like, what if VR is the thing? And let's just pretend it is for five years. And that'll hopefully take some of the heat off of my endless rounds of congressional testimony that I'm being forced to give. That's exactly it. It's like, oh, Elon and Elon and Jeff Bezos have space. Like they're going to be the spacemen building rockets. What can I do? Like, what's my shiny thing that I can distract the public with? I actually think that there's a lot of truth to that but that's exactly that's it was a very calculated thing and yeah yeah i mean it didn't even matter if they because it

kind of worked it kind of worked we laughed at them people made fun of the metaverse and we're like where are the legs it took them like two years that's where the development ended they're like actually we got we got legs and by then no one cared anymore. It was on to AI. But also, guess what? We're not talking about so much. And that's how just dramatically shitty Facebook is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've had a Facebook account for years. I'm trapped on Instagram. But Facebook itself is like gotten so bad that no one I know uses it. It's not even required for me to be there anymore because I'm not over 60 and I leave my house sometimes. But it's the gap between what the tech industry is making and what the public actually wants has gotten bigger and bigger to the point where this argument that you're making is starting to really track that. Like people are ready to to fight back in a semi-organized way.

And I think that's part of why the writer's strike caught on with the public is because, and the, and the SAG after strike is because we were seen as doing that. We were seen as being the first people who are fighting back against tech, even though honestly, the AI stuff was like not the biggest issue, even at the beginning.

No, I mean, it grew in importance and it was an important issue that we got and taken care of, but there was like other shit happening that, you know, didn't capture the public imagination in quite the same way. Well,

it really, I think a lot of people feel anxious about it and justifiably. So I think a lot of people, you know, are worried along across the spectrum. You know, I would go to the picket lines and I'd talk to people and some people, you know, think like thought a lot like you did, where it's just going to be this bullshit tool. That's an excuse for a more corporate exploitation. Others, you

know, were legitimately worried that it was going to be an existential threat to their identity and, and the job. Um, and that I think spectrum exists for people in just about every line of work that's not manual labor right now. It's pervasive. And so by standing up and by fighting back, I think it did rally a lot of support. And importantly, it sort of provided something of a blueprint. union density and are really good at organizing and are strong, you know, leaders in that space. Not everybody's so lucky, you know, illustrators and freelance writers and folks like that are much more atomized. But nonetheless, I do think that it is a real case study that people can learn from. And, you know, I think it did set the tone in a really productive way. And that's another, all this stuff we're talking about can be, can sound very doomy and sound pretty grim, but I do think there's a lot of reason to hope because I think there's a real opportunity for people to kind of do basic, basically modern day Luddism where they sort of claw back some of the control and some of the democratic inputs into the

development of technology in a way we haven't seen for years and years. We've relegated all that stuff to a few rich guys in Silicon Valley for too long. And now people are saying, I want to say and how this affects me. I don't want it to wipe away my job. I like my job. I like making a living. I don't like being thrown to the wolves and these precarious structures. Maybe this is a way that we can fight back and make things better

for everybody. And you're seeing people do it collectively. You know, if you look at the, the UAW strike, it was about a lot of it, making sure that the transition to electric cars and green jobs is going to benefit those workers. It was that union saying, Hey, we see the future and we see the use of technology. We're going to make sure that this technology benefits us. Same thing with the, with the entertainment unions. I'm curious about your industry journalism. You were, we was taking a little while to say this. One of the many people laid off at the LA times, the paper,

my hometown paper, not my hometown paper, but the paper of the place I currently live. I have a subscription to this thing and I'm kind of reconsidering it now because they just laid off a bunch of my favorite journalists, including the people who write the food section, the entire DC Bureau, you. How does technology interact

with what we've seen in journalism? Because certainly that's the story that you're told is that, you know, the internet and Craigslist killed newspapers, but it certainly doesn't seem like they had to do this. Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of different factors playing into this one. I mean, there's this new trend where, you know, billionaires have bought newspapers and media organizations, Washington Post, LA Times, Time Magazine, all owned by sort of enterprising billionaires and who maybe set out wanting to do a good thing and then either get tired of it or take a hit in their

stock portfolio and suddenly, oh, maybe I don't want it. And when the billionaire that bought the LA Times bought it, it was genuinely like, oh, thank God, because the paper was about to be sold to, I forget what, a private equity firm or something like that, that was about to gut it and sell it for parts. So it bought at least, you know, five years of it being a good paper for a little bit. Yep. No, absolutely. But you still have this condition where you have this vast gulf between, you know, an

owner who can kind of make whatever decision he sees fit. And that can be quite, you know, there's a lot of distance between the people actually making the paper and, you know, doing the news. So that's one issue. And, you know, the role of big tech cannot be discounted. You know, Craigslist took out classified ads. That was a long time ago. But Google and Facebook have taken out the rest of the ads in a big way. So they're, you know, they, they sell ads on their newsfeed or on, you know,

on, on Google news or Google search. And that has sucked away a lot of the advertising revenue from the papers. And that's just been a downward slope. Sometimes you click a link, you like search uh search for a piece of news and then you click a link and it sort of says on there somewhere oh it's from a newspaper but you're looking at it on like msn.com and it's like surrounded by other like all these other ads you're like how do i get to the paper i don't did they just like steal this i'm sure there's some business relationship but half the time you're you at these companies have – they require the work of journalists. Journalists cannot actually be replaced by AI, but they are – the way that they are comporting their businesses is destroying journalism.

Yeah. No, absolutely. And in some of these cases, it's not – usually AI – on some of the fringe cases, you do have AI play playing a role. You know, I made a case in one of my columns back when I was still employed that that BuzzFeed sort of use of AI adoption of it. It's big deal or is going to use AI to help make listicles. And and then a couple of weeks later, they fired all the buzzfeed news staff so yeah news is gone ai is in and i had a long sort of argument with jonah peretti that uh the ceo of uh of buzzfeed and founder of buzzfeed about whether or not what he was doing was you know automating away jobs or replacing it and he's he was like no this just wasn't working but then we saw this other thing and i was like well that's exactly how it works you know it's not he was like, no, this just wasn't working. But then we saw this other thing. And I was like, well, that's exactly how it works. You know, it's not always just like

you're out the robots in. It's like, oh, well, maybe this can kind of work and maybe we can use this to sort of, you know, impress investors long enough to sort of get them to forget that we inspired all these humans. Sure. You don't need to be a bad guy to have this happen to do this. You can just have the pressure of the stockholders, capitalism pressing down on you. Yeah. And you're just compliant enough with it. They're like, I was just trying to run my business. I don't know, I'll do the best I can.

And you end up being subject to these forces. Right. And in your mind, it might not even be like, I'm replacing workers with AI or automation. It's just like these two things just kind of made sense at the same time to fire these people and to start using AI. Well, like again, it's such a misunderstanding of how the work is done. Like you see, uh, at the, uh, former Gizmodo blogs, uh, you know, the GMG blogs, Kotaku and all these things, they're constantly, the management is constantly playing with AI and trying to, you know, cut head count and replace those people with AI. But it's like the, to have to believe that you could replace journalists with AI is to

misunderstand what they do. They don't just chew up other words and spit them out. They call people on the phone and, or reach out to people or read things and observe things. They go to a place and see a thing happen that no one else has written down before. And then they write down, guess what I saw happen? Guess what the person who I talked to on the phone told me. And if nobody does that, then there's nothing for the fucking large language model to make an article out of because no one will know it happened. You can't just, if you have no journalists, what is the AI going to make shit out of?

That's it. That's it. You can't. And to the fucking stupid, I'm sorry. No, it is. It is. And you know, anybody that actually thinks about it, if you're running a, a, a credible journalistic organization right now, it's not even really in the conversation to use AI to generate articles or news. It's I, you know, I've heard of a few fringe, fringe cases, but it's in these, it's in these arenas where, you know, you've really already seen decline, like the most sort of, you know, market example is Sports Illustrated, which has gone downhill for like 20 years straight, and then has various mismanagement issues, lost advertising, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then in its last sort of pathetic gasp, whoever owned it, the arena group or some weird content group, turned to using AI. At that point, they're not thinking that they're actually going to get journalism out of it.

They're thinking that they can juice the numbers just enough to, you know, hang on and to sell it. And, you know, so by the time that AI is a real threat to replacing journalists, that organization already has huge problems. You mentioned Gizmodo or whatever's left of that. I mean, that place has been sort of ransacked by a private equity firm for years now, and there's already it's already in dire straits. by a private equity firm for years now. And there's already, it's already in dire straits. So that's where you'll start to see sort of the use of AI as these sad little like content mills hoping to sort of get a few eyeballs.

But the thing that all this ignores, and maybe this is a good note to sort of bring us to an ending, is that like technology at the end of the day is for people, right? It's operated, it's created by people. It's operated by people. And the things that it does are used by people.

People are wearing the clothes that the looms made, that they were, the auto looms made that the Luddites were smashing. People are watching the movies that, when TV shows that we are making and people are reading the websites, right? People are the ones going to sports illustrated.com.

It's not for AI to read. So why would you think that people would, would want worse clothes, shitty articles like it's. That's you. That's exactly right. And I think serving the ends of people, it should be serving people.

And again, I think that's, you could do a lot worse than having a solid working definition of Luddism as the effort to bring those things into alignment, to be, to make sure that technology is serving people, not, but not a small, tiny section of, uh, of the upper, upper, upper class, not sort of just as an engine for profit, not for, you know, just sort of just kind of sputtering around in the dark recesses of the web so that, you know, one automated system is registering the eyeballs of another automated system. And, you know, we're so far away from anything that actually helps a human. Luddism is about asking who that technology serves and

fighting to ensure that it does serve people and most people. It's against the machinery hurtful to commonality, as they put it. That is such a beautiful explanation. I feel that I am now a Luddite and I feel that many people are watching and now Luddites based on that definition. How does one join Luddism or put it into practice? And where can people get the book? Yeah. Nice, nice tie-in. I appreciate it. I'll tell them where they can get the book. You tell them how they can put it into practice. So if you're, you know, I would, if you're already part of an organized workplace, then I would just make sure that your workplace is aware that these threats from automation

and AI are going to come down. Again, the fear should not be 90% of the time that it's going to replace your job and you need to find a way to save it. It's going to be how management is going to use it to try as leverage against you

in one way or another. So put this on your radar. Even if your workplace is not organized, I think the best thing you can do is to start talking about getting organized. There are non-organized resources out there. The Freelance Solidarity Project, if you're a writer or an artist or an illustrator or someone like that is starting to sort of build bonds. They're great. I know them. They're great. Yeah. They're doing some great stuff. There are a lot of, you know,

hookup with, if you don't have an official, you know, the, the guilds and the trade groups in some cases are doing some good stuff. The author's guild. So it's all about sort of building these networks, plugging in,

feeling okay, saying no, it's, it is okay to say no to an exploitative use of technology for too long. We've been afraid to say like, this sucks. Like, no, I do not want this technology or this use of technology in my life, in my workplace. And guess what? Everybody I know, everybody in this room feels the same way.

So what do we do about it? That's doing Luddism is rejecting those exploitative uses and asking questions about how you can turn it around and make it so technology benefits everybody. Hell yeah. Incredible, Brian. Thank you so much for being here. The book is called Blood in the Machine. You can pick up a copy of our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people find you online? I am for the time being BC Merchant on X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it. I do have a Blood in the Machine newsletter that I'm ramping up. It's bloodinthemachine.com.

So yeah. Thanks so much for being here. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's a blast. Well, my God, thank you once again to Brian Merchant for coming on the show. If you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did, once again, you can pick up a copy of his book at factuallypod.com slash books.

Any purchase you make there will support not just your local bookstore, but this show as well. If you want to support this show directly, please do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you into our online community and gets you every episode of this show ad free. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your name on this very podcast and put it in the credits of every one of my YouTube monologues. This week, I want to thank Stuart Pym and Jasmine Andrade. Thank you so much for supporting the show. I want to thank our producers, Sam Rodman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for helping make this show possible. You can find me online at adamconover.net. Thank you so much for listening

or watching, and we'll see you next time on Factually. I don't know anything.