The Daily Beast Podcast - The Rebels Who First Fought Big Tech Were on to Something

Episode Date: November 12, 2023

Tech columnist Brian Merchant tells The New Abnormal the Luddites got a bad rap following the Industrial Revolution but all they were trying to do was hold big tech to account. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedin, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal.

We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Brian Merchant, a technology columnist at the LA Times, who will tell us all about his new book, Blood in the Machine, the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Birthday week clips for Daniel. There we go.

That's what I'm saying. Are they going to be good clips? Nope. You know, I have to say, I'm starting us off very nicely. Okay. Let us brace ourselves then. Now, now, Danielle, let's give him a chance. Maybe this time he means it.

Hey, hey, you know, you know, I have done it all good clips in the past. We're Charlie Brown here. We're running at the football. Here we go. All right, I'll try to pick up the clip of this. Here we have Representative Steady Hoyer, who sounds like if Eeyore was 10 times more tired than usual. Yet still somehow, he really got the best of Representative Lauren Bowbert, or as MTG likes to call her, the Congresswoman from vaping and groping. Oh, shit.

Oh, shit. Anyway, let's listen to Mr. Hoyer in desperate need of a nap still really, really hand it to Warren Bobert. And I ask the gentlelady to yield for a question. I'm not recognized. It's not my time. I ask you to yield. I have reserved. You're free to speak. Yes. I'm asking if you'll yield for a question. Sure. Ask your question.

What funds in this bill are used for the purposes you are opposed to? Sorry, I couldn't hear the gentleman. I was getting clarification. This is precautionary. Precautionary for what? I'm asking. There are sanctuary city policies. Yes, I understand what you're. that are in place that are allowing the refuge of illegal aliens in these cities. And there is an influx in crime and drugs in these cities. And there's no way for these folks to even report what is taking place

because they are protected under this fake policy that has been created that is subduing the actual rule of law that we have in the Constitution of the United States. I understand that. But what you've said is none of the funds is, none of the funds is. in this bill can be spent for that objective. And that is precautionary. What funds are in this bill to be spent for that objective? I have seen this administration use all sorts of funds

to protect illegal aliens. And this is a precautionary to ensure that it will not be. Reclaiming my time. There are no funds in this bill to do that. So this is just an opportunity for you to stand and perhaps speak about an important subject. I understand that. But there are no funds in this bill to account.

that objective. You don't believe the chairman would put funds in to accomplish that objective, do you? I mean, sleepy but on time. I might get that crocheted above my bed. She just wanted the opportunity to say illegal aliens at least 75. You know, like how many times did she say that? Like if we were to take shots right now, we would have been drunk. She is breathtakingly stupid. Like, I mean, I don't even know how else to describe it. Like, she is, forget her ideology or anything like that. She's just a, she's just a stupid person. You know, I don't even want to, I was going to say, well, she's not smart. That's, that's underselling it. That, I can't do that. That's like, if someone lies, you got to call them a lie or you don't say they misspoke. I don't

want to say she's not smart. She's stupid. You know, one of those things of like when we talk about faking it to you make it and that everyone has impostors. syndrome and all these things. There are some people, though, who are just so not up for the job. And, like, I can, I know that energy she had in that segment, because I brought that to my math class homework almost every day of high school of, I'm going to bullshit my way through this like I did the work and I was prepared when I was absolutely fucking glutely not. Shame on her staff, boy.

Shame on her staff. That's the Dunning Kruger thing, right? Yes, that's the Dunning Kruger thing. Yeah. people who are the least competent in a certain subject area overestimate their skills the most. Yeah. She really does bring that to light all the time. Speaking of things that come to light all the time,

one of my favorite parts about the media bubble Fox has created is Republicans often forget how much their shit stings. Here we have Congressman Eric Swalwell in a committee on the Hill to remind them just how bad it smells. So what I'm concerned about is that we have anti-Sumet, posts coming from this committee. And last October, the chairman tweeted out on October 6th, Kanye Elon Trump. Those five statements that I just read to you were from Kanye West, who had made a number of anti-Semitic statements before this tweet was put up and then made the DeathCon statement about a day after the tweet was put up.

I, the chairman at the time, Chairman Nadler, many people in the Jewish community, asked the chairman, Chairman Jordan, to take this down. And it wasn't just members of Congress. It was nonpartisan Jewish organizations who said, Kanye West is anti-Semitic. I don't know what you're doing, but please do not give him a platform by leaving this tweet up. It stayed up for months.

Defiantly, the chairman kept this tweet up. So, Mr. Chairman, I want to be just today your accountability partner, your online accountability partner, and just go through your social. media because if we're going to have a hearing about anti-Semitism, we can't allow a tweet like this to be posted on our side or your side. In 2019, Chairman Jordan also tweeted at Tom Steyer and used the dollar sign for Steyer to spell his name. Again, known Jewish philanthropist playing into what Ms. Burdett mentioned earlier, tropes about Jewish people and money. So this committee

should have a conversation and a hearing about anti-Semitism. But I would first insist that the chairman, I don't know why he put this tweet up, either he believes it, which I hope is not the case, or he just wanted to own the lips. And if that's what you're doing, you're hurting a lot of people

by keeping that tweet up for so long, especially knowing what it represents. And if we're talking about being your online accountability partner, chairman, you still have a subpoena in your inbox. That's about 500 days old. And with that, I'll yield back. Oh, God. Swall well for the win.

I just love when he is, has the microphone on the committee because, my God, first of all, the accountability partner, I like just pure shade at the new speaker, Mike Johnson and his porn accountability partner, who is his son, who's 17. And check your inbox because you still got a subpoena in there. And he got, oh, God, it's just so good. That's what it looks like when you actually know what the fuck you're talking about and have the receipts to show it. Bravo.

Yeah. That tweet was so weird. And the fact that it just was there for so long, just everything about that was bizarre. I mean, I will say that, like, out of the three people in that tweet, Kanye Elon Trump, I care the least about Kanye. Yeah, because he's not elected. Yeah. Kanye's a super talented guy who has a lot of mental issues, and I'm not excusing.

He's said a lot of really bad things. But in terms of power, I think, you know, Trump, a lot more serious than Kanye here. I think particularly my favorite thing about this, though, is that Jim Jordan, just every time he sets up one of these hearings, he thinks he's going to run the most competent thing, and you can see such a stark contrast of how bad he has run that. and just every time his objective goes to hell and yet again, we see it go there again because he thought his shit didn't stink. Yep. He's like the real life pinky and the brain. Today we're going to take over the world.

It's like, turd-d-d-d-d-d-d-d. Yeah. I like that a lot. Jesse, this is two good clips in a row. Well, we're coming to the end. Can we go for three? Come on. Give us three.

Absolutely not. Okay, here we have Vivek the fake Rabaswami doing what so many Republican politicians do, which is throw a shitty idea at the wall and see how much it stains the wall. Noting his audience are seals who will lap it up, most likely. He really did that a lot at that debate that I could barely get through. And this from Wednesday's debate is probably one of the dumbest examples I've seen of throwing a shitty policy idea at the wall. A good relationship with that next president of Mexico. We'll use our own military to seal our own southern border.

What we need to do is stop using our military to protect somebody else's border halfway around the world when we're short right here at home. Get serious about protecting this border. And then the other thing that hasn't been discussed is the northern border. I'm the only candidate on the stage, as far as I'm aware, who has actually visited the northern border. There was enough fentanyl that was captured just on the northern border last year to kill three million Americans. So we got to just skate to where the puck is going, not just where the puck is. Don't just build the wall, build both walls. can't just complete the wall, use the military to seal the Swiss cheese for the tunnels that they're actually building underneath that wall.

Thank you, Mr. Ramaswana. And actually get this job done. Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm. Was he using a hockey analogy because he was talking about the border with Canada? That seems to be a thing that was happening, yeah. Okay. Because as a hockey fan, I found that very offensive. And as somebody that likes Swiss cheese, I also found that offensive.

Thank you, DeFed Danielle, for speaking for us. Yeah, that was not right. As someone who is lactose intolerant, I find you, this is ableist. Oh, shit. In 2023, this is not okay. I understand it. One of my favorite things is when we discuss budgeting things and conservatives talk about how we don't have money the whole entire debate and then build a wall across the entire northern border for a statistic I made up about how much fentanyl comes over. it. Right. And then also, don't do anything about the people who are creating those drugs that people

are overdosing on because you want to protect the wealthy because you also get donor dollars from them. So like don't have a real conversation about how we let off the entire families that were making the opioid crisis and making billions doing it. When we bring it up for legislation, for folks to be able to vote, Republicans are the first people that are like, no, no, no. Don't hurt the companies. Don't hurt the shareholders. That'll hurt our bottom line. I hate these people.

And also, by the way, deploy the military domestically. Yeah, yeah, cute stuff. Which seems like a bit of an issue. Also, is Mexico around the world? Like, he also just doesn't know geography. Like, like the wall around the world. It's below Texas. Like, what?

Like, it's right there. Okay. He is not our best. He is not our best. I'm going to shock you guys. We're going to end on a fun or note. We've done a lot of interviews about creeping fascism on the show, and we know one of the features and weaknesses of these monsters

is they fight like little cats against each other all day long for power. And Kevin McCarthy, this one happened right before we went to air, and clearly he has a lot of interest in vengeance, and I'm just going to let him go off. Matt Gates, you've been mentioning a lot. on how much would the Republican Party benefit if you were no longer a member of the House, in your opinion? Oh, tremendously.

I mean, people have to earn the right to be here. And I just think from, I mean, he'll admit to you personally, he doesn't have a conservative bent in his philosophy and just the nature of what he focuses on. Do you think the House, JOP, you should consider expelling him? Look, that's up to the conference. But, I mean, I don't believe the conference would ever heal if they, there's no consequences for the action. What about them surprised you, Burchett and Mace?

It just didn't, it seemed out of nature, but they seemed to have changed during the time. They care a lot about press, not about policy, and so they seem to just want the press and the personality. Do you think Mace will have a difficult time winning re-election now? Yeah, well, not because of this. I mean, if you've watched her, just her philosophy and the flip-flopping, I don't believe she wins re-election.

I don't think she'll probably have earned the right to get reelected. I think that you look at the district herself, yeah. I mean, this is the this is the onion piece, right? The heartbreaking, the worst person you know, just a great point. Like everything he said was true, I think. And I don't think I've ever said that about him before in my life. A broken clock is right twice a day, you know? So there you go, Kevin McCarthy.

Well done, I guess. I'll point out the one thing. I don't think he said it was just right. You have to earn your place here because this is the guy who protected George Santos's seat there. Well, that's a fair point. That's a fair point. Also, he became speaker somehow, so. Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, technically he did earn that through all 17,000 votes that he pushed through. That's true. Like, persistence should be rewarded in my opinion. That's what my father taught me. Also, he never met a camera he didn't fucking like, right? Like, give me a break. Oh, it's all about, you know, the cameras and, you know, being popular and not about policy. I'm like, hello, pot, kettle.

You know, Danielle, I'm going to defend my Kevin here. When you're a golden retriever of a man, we all know what a golden retriever is there for us to look pretty. He's doing his job there. Come on. A golden retriever of a man. Wow. If you're a golden retriever owner and you are offended by what Jesse just said, please tweet it at him. and not at me.

And I would assume Danielle also does not want those tweets. No. tweet them at Jesse Cannon. Appreciate this. Just for the record. I've owned and loved golden retrievers. Hashtack I love all dogs. Yes, yes, agreed.

I have one of my lap now. Hashtag not all golden retrievers. These days when we use the word Luddite, it's as a pejorative against someone who opposes any new forms of technology. But as Los Angeles Times tech columnist Brian Merchant tells us in his new book, couldn't be more wrong. And in fact, the Luddites have a lot to teach us about our current culture and economy. The book is Blood in the Machine, the Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech. You can buy it right now. And he joins us now to tell us about it. Brian, thanks so much for being here.

Hey, Andy, thanks for having me. Absolutely. So as I noted in the intro, you draw a lot of comparisons in the book between the 19th century world of the Luddites and ours. But before we get to that, let me ask you what may be the broadest question in the history of interviewing. Tell us who the Luddites were, what they were protesting, because it feels like, you know, as I also said in the intro, a lot of that seems to have gotten lost in the way that we refer to them today. Yeah. This is one of those questions where you could, you know, answer in the form of an entire chapter length dissertation or we could do the closed version here. So, but the Luddites, to keep it short, were largely skilled cloth workers at sort of the turn of the century. in England at the beginning of the 1800s, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, who were protesting

the ways that the sort of the early entrepreneurs and factory bosses were using technology to automate work, to degrade working conditions, and to sort of undercut their wages. And so Luddites did not hate technology at all. They were technicians and technologists themselves, we might call them today. They were very familiar with technology, and that's why they were very aware of the way that it was being used against them. And cloth workers had protested these changes and fought parliament to get them protections for a long time, things like minimum wage. And when that didn't work, they finally became the Luddites. And they embarked on a campaign against the industrialists who they saw as, quote,

stealing their bread with these new machines and targeted them in basically a campaign of industrial sabotage. And it was a campaign that was specifically designed to try to get them to restore wages, to protect the standard of life, and to sort of highlight the fact that there were all these technologies that were only serving a tiny portion of people at the expense of a bunch of others. It really did strike me that they sound a lot like the way, a union would sound today. That's exactly right. And history misremembers them. And a lot of that was intentional because those in power had a real interest in sort of casting aspersions against them and painting them as anti-technology, diluted, backwards-looking, anti-progress, that kind of thing.

But no, they were really on a campaign to, you know, improve working conditions. They were only against what they called the machinery hurtful to commonality. That is technologies that were being used to sort of tear up longstanding social contracts, to, you know, again, as I said, undercut wages, and to sort of speed the rise of the factory system, which they saw as exploitative and sort of opening the door to things like child labor and sort of long working days under the command of overseers, which was a new thing. So they were protesting that.

as much as they were protesting any specific technology. They were more anti-poverty than they were anti-technology. Right. Somewhere along the way I had picked up on the fact that everything I thought I knew about the Luddites was wrong in the sense that they had gotten a really bad rap. But one thing I either didn't know or had long since forgotten is that their name comes from a fictional character. I just assumed that there was like the sort of leader of the group was named Ludd. And it turns out that's not so much the case. Yeah, it's also a really interesting element of their uprising is that they use this figure who's almost certainly apocryphal, this mythical figure named Ned Lud.

And the story goes that Ned Lud was once an apprentice stocking weaver. His master thought he wasn't working hard enough. So he had him whipped. And he was just a boy at the time. And he, in a fit of rage, he responded by grabbing a hammer and smashing the machine. that he had, as he saw it, been oppressed by, owned by this master. And then he fled into the Sherwood Forest, where he started recruiting more aggrieved workers like that. And that's notable because, you know, the Luddites' resistance stemmed from the same exact region that was

famous for Robin Hood. And in fact, you know, there's a phonetic similarity there. Robin Hood, Ned Ludd. So they're drawing from this same sort of legacy, the same culture of dissent that sort of fueled Robin Hood, and they tapped into that. And the Luddites were, they were heroes. They were folk heroes for a long time for standing up against these sort of industrialists who were making big changes to the way people were working and bringing on a lot of poverty and profiting immensely at the expense of working people. So yeah, people cheered the Luddites in the street in the early days. Well, that's something, a thing you wrote in the book that really struck me was, I'm going to quote here, in the 18th century, merchants, business owners, and industrialists started investing in

automated machinery in creating the first factories. In the process, they began to displace the workers whose livelihoods had existed for centuries, and by the 19th century had concentrated wealth, power, and technological advantage in a relatively small number of hands. And that part at the end seems like the crux of it to me. We're always told that technology will be freeing, but it does seem like whether it's the 19th century or the 21st century, often what it leads to instead is just bigger societal gaps. Exactly right. And that's one of those parallels that led me to sort of dig deeper into this story because, as I argue in the book, that really starts here, sort of this mode of technological development where you have a few people who have access to resources and the technologies who can

buy the technologies who can organize them into factories and then use them sort of against the common will of the people. And that point about how we're always told that technology is liberating, it can be if everybody is given an equal or somewhat equal say in how it's used. But that is not the case now. And it wasn't the case then. There's a handful of people who are making the decisions about how technology is going to be used to organize labor, who's going to accrue the most benefits from it, and sort of, you know, what kind of products and things it's going to produce.

So we've sort of been at the whims of this sort of top-down model of technology. technological development ever since. And I think, you know, we're seeing another period where we're really starting to feel the ramifications of that. And people are looking around and saying, hey, we were promised all of these things. Technology was supposed to really improve our lives in all of these material ways. And to be sure, in some ways, it has. But in others, it's just locked in these same old modes of exploitation and oppression. A lot of the book is sort of drawing the parallels between then and now. And you talk about companies like Amazon and Uber a lot and what they've done in terms of

workers and how a lot of this, you know, on the Uber side or on that type of things, we end up with this gig economy that maybe is better for consumers or at least it is at first as these companies under charge until they gain a market share. But it's absolutely horrible for workers. And this seems to get overlooked a lot, much as the industrialists of the Luddites terms didn't really seemed to care what their technological advancements were doing to the workers and how it was affecting so many lives negatively. That's exactly right.

I mean, those are two great examples, Uber and Amazon, where these companies kind of present themselves as as tech companies, you know, Amazon with, with e-commerce and Uber with its app that's supposed to seamlessly call a driver to you. The truth is both of those companies' success has been underwritten not on any particularly great breakthrough technology. It's been more about those companies' willingness to sort of use technology as a lever against labor or in some cases as an excuse to get around old norms, standards, or regulations. One of the biggest aha moments in the book for me was looking at sort of the history of the recent history of the rise of Uber and comparing that to sort of the

rise of the entrepreneurs and industrialists in the early 1800s. And you see a lot of these same beats. Well, they say, you know, in the 1800s, they were saying, well, we don't have to follow all these laws that are on the books governing the cloth trade that say, oh, you need, you know, an apprentice to work this many years and be paid this amount after they come out, that cloth count has to be of a certain quality. Because all that's torn up, because now we're using technology. And the old book doesn't apply anymore. And that looks an awful lot, like, what, happened with Uber when they said, oh, you know, we're not a taxi company. We are a software platform. We are just connecting people, peer to peer. We're connecting independent contractors

to drivers using our sophisticated new technology. Well, at the end of the day, you're still just calling a cab. You know, you're still using the phone to, you know, summon a cab driver. It's really not all that revolutionary. But just this positioning and context, let them tear up all these rules and standards that had, you know, governed the taxi trade for a long time. And it seems over and over. And in Amazon's case, they were basically sort of using technology as this excuse to just kind of make their workers work harder. You know, the big complaint that many Amazon warehouse workers have these days is just that they are treated like robots. You know, they are expected to be working as fast as a robot and following all of these like intense sort of productivity goals. And

that they're surveilled in the workplace. And it's really just about squeezing as much human labor using these kind of new technologies on the side. But that was the story also in the Industrial Revolution, too, of just these big factories using new technologies as a means of getting workers to work longer hours, work harder, be more productive. Yeah. It's basically the history of these guys saying, we're going to use machines for everything

we can and for anything we can. we're just going to treat the humans as if they were machines. Yep. And that started with, you know, Richard Arkwright, who in the book, I argue, is one of the first sort of quote tech titans. You know, they obviously didn't have that term at the time. And I just kind of use it to situate things a little bit. But his biggest innovation was kind of being the Jeff Bezos of his day, was just organizing

workers so relentlessly. And sort of the early sort of business and management sort of writers and advocates, guys who might today be considered sort of futurists or business futurists or, you know, writing for Harvard Business Review or things like that. They really cheered this. They said the great achievement of Richard Arkwright wasn't that he, you know, invented some new technology. It was that he was able to sort of break the spirit of workers and to teach them to work in this, you know, machine-like environment at a machine-like pace. One of the things you sort of talk about in the book is that the Luddite, as you said earlier in interview,

we're kind of like folk heroes. They really captured the imaginations of a lot of people, including Mary Shelley and people like that. Talk about that. Talk about how they became sort of this touchstone for a lot of people. So there's a couple different things to say about that. And that is that one thing that I found pretty quickly upon looking into the Luddite story is that it is a wild story.

They really rise up and take up arms. They're like rebels. They're using this Ned Ludd sort of meme like, figure to sort of organize their protest. They're going against the state. They're cheered by the public and by the working classes. And then so that really does inspire the cultural commentary at at the time. You know, most notably, as I say in the book, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. So Lord Byron was probably the biggest and most famous defender of Luddites in the time. He uses his very first speech as a lord in the house of lords to give this thundering defense of the Luddites and really trying to humanize them

and to get people to sort of identify with their plight. He thought it was just common sense that they're sort of taking up arms and doing what they're doing at a time when the rest of the parliament was trying to find ways to further punish them. And his speech was in response to this effort by the state to make machine breaking of any kind a capital offense so they could be Hong. So there was this element where they're really inspiring to a lot of people because they're fighting back. And that's kind of resonating with the romantic poets and the writers of the time. And they're also drawing to the fore all these issues we've been talking about in this interview already about just how unequal the gains from these machines seem to be, how miserable

the working regimen seems to be in the new factories. They're kind of putting a face on what industrialization in its current form is doing. And Mary Shelley responds to a lot of that when she's writing Frankenstein. And a lot of scholars have argued that some of the chief inspirations for Frankenstein and Frankenstein's monster specifically are the Luddites and that she's sort of imbueing Frankenstein's monster, who in the book is, you know, we might forget because modern day, you know, depictions or he's like this, you know, dottering like childlike dummy. But, you know, in the actual text, Frankenstein is really thoughtful and really miserable and he's really articulate. And the inventor who created him, Victor Frankenstein, is callous and is not meeting any of his

demands or trying to keep him happy. He's created this volatile, sympathetic being with a lot of power. And then he sort of cast him off and doesn't want to. So a lot of people have thought that that really sort of embodies what was happening with the Luddites, who were this great mass of working people who were created by a set of conditions by entrepreneurs and then the state completely turned their back on them. Yeah, and it's kind of interesting in that context to note that the same way we've sort of debased what Frankenstein's monster was in the original text is what we've done to the Luddites.

There's an unbelievable parallel there, it seems to me. That really struck me too because it had been forever since I had read Frankenstein, maybe in, you know, eighth grade English or something. I hadn't been paying super close attention to it. But then, you know, we're sort of inculcated. We sort of get this picture of Frankenstein as this, you know, dumb monster who knows not what he does. And that's exactly sort of what's happened to the Luddites too.

So I think that parallel is really striking. Yeah. Yeah. When I first heard about this book, I thought, oh, a tech columnist writing about a group of people who rebelled against tech. That seems weird. And then the more I learned, I thought, actually, this seems like something. more tech columnists should be looking at. Is that sort of how it went for you? Yeah, it is. I wrote a

little piece for the Washington Post, actually, that kind of chronicles my journey to becoming a leadite. I do consider myself a ludite for these reasons. And I am both a tech columnist and a leadite. And I don't think that those things are incompatible at all. Just like the Luddites used tech were technologists themselves. Their core mission was to question who technology served. And in my eyes, That is something that in 2023, we absolutely need to be doing now more than ever. And I think as a tech columnist, I've been a pretty good position to do it. No, that's absolutely true. And I think you are spot on there.

The book is Blood in the Machine, the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. It is out right now. Please go out and buy it. Brian Merchant, thank you so much for being here. This was incredibly interesting. Yeah, it was great. Thanks so much for having me. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal.

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