It doesn’t look like much: a collection of wooden boards attached to each other horizontally and vertically; it resembles a bunk bed without a mattress. But the power loom, which was invented in 1785 and refined over the following decades, automated the job of weaving. This deceptively simple technology catalyzed Britain’s Industrial Revolution and helped inspire a furious, sometimes violent, clandestine, and exceptionally methodical movement—the Luddites—that opposed the changes that the machinery and its owners were imposing on workers.
The Luddites took matters into their own hands by declaring war against the machines. It was a state of affairs that Brian Merchant’s new book, Blood in the Machine: the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, argues was a precursor to workers who are terrified of losing their jobs to cutting edge technology in the United States today.
The beginning of the nineteenth century in England, Merchant writes, “was the first time that technology was used to replace jobs en masse.” Those jobs were often in the textile industry. The technology undermined the livelihoods—and lives—of highly skilled and well-remunerated textile craftsmen who worked with wool (“the most important industry in Britain”) and cotton, turning those fabrics into viable artifacts that would be spun into clothes.
By concentrating “wealth, power, and technological advantage in a relatively small number of hands,” by 1812 swathes of England were driven “to the brink of civil war.”
Even members of the ruling class who weren’t industrial magnates were, at best, indifferent to the beleaguered textile laborers. (Not all of them though. The poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were sympathetic to the Luddites). The Prince Regent (the future king George IV), essentially the ruling monarch, was an asinine hedonist who was insensitive to the problems of his poorer subjects.
Parliament, for the most part, shared George IV’s rancor toward the workers. To cite just two examples: unions were outlawed; and when the Luddites started demolishing the machines that were destroying their jobs, legislation was passed that made such destruction a capital offense. And there were other ordeals bedeviling society. Between 1750 and 1820 the population doubled, from five million to ten million, putting pressure on the food supply. War with France was bleeding the economy.
The American economy today, pervaded by dread of new technological breakthroughs, pulsates with anxiety, despair, and rage.
Factories, one of the offshoots of the new technology, were described in a poem by William Blake as “dark Satanic mills.” Merchant makes a plausible case that Blake was on target. He quotes inspectors in 1810 describing a “typical” weaving factory: “overcrowded,” “a great want of ventilation,” “diet was inadequate,” “the privies were too offensive to be approached by us,” “apprentices complained of being overworked,” corporal “abuse and exploitation” were commonplace. Wages were piddling and child labor was brutal, little better than slavery.
Desperate circumstances can prompt a desperate backlash. The Luddites struck back. They were named for one Ned Ludd—whom many believed was a real person, but was, in fact, a “fictional figurehead, based on the myth of an apprentice who smashed his master’s device.” Nevertheless, the movement would become an almost legendary crusade to regain the economic security and dignity of textile workers.
One of the most interesting parts of Blood in the Machine concerns the etymology of Luddite, its misuse, and misapplication to the present day. “Starting almost immediately upon the Luddites’ emergence,” Merchant writes, “philosophical critiques of, and even outright opposition to, technology in general. . .were conflated with Luddism.” But, the author maintains, “Such conflation remains a deeply incorrect parsing of what the original movement was about.”
He explains: “True Luddism was about locating exactly where elites were using technology to the disadvantage of the human being, and organizing to fight back. This is an important point: Luddism can and certainly did coexist with technology, and even a love of technology. The handloom, for example, made the Luddites’ way of life possible, long before they became Luddites—and they cherished that lifestyle enough to take up arms to defend it. It is a matter, of course, of how technology is deployed.”
From about 1811 to 1813—the peak of Luddite activity—the movement was scrupulous about destroying only the machinery that its adherents abhorred. Attacking at night and wearing masks, the Luddites displayed military-like precision in carrying out raids on the hated factories. I wish that Merchant had delved deeper into where the Luddites acquired military cohesion and learned martial maneuvers. My theory: their formidable discipline was rooted in the finesse and patience that they assimilated while practicing their former textile work.
But for all the Luddites’ dedication to their cause, for all the ingenuity and efficacy of their tactics (which included “exploiting the media technologies of the day. . .”), their struggle, fairly early on, steadily petered out. The tools of an antagonistic government were ultimately overwhelming. Magistrates, empowered by anti-Luddite legislation, ruthlessly pursued suspected Luddites and mercilessly punished those arrested, after going through the motions of staging kangaroo courts (dozens were executed; others were exiled to Australia. By contrast, the Luddites are known to have killed only one person, an industrialist and mortal enemy named William Horsfall). Government spies infiltrated Luddite meetings and teams.
However, Merchant writes, Luddite aspirations would influence future labor reforms. Around 1823, a bill introduced in Parliament by the “radical reformer” Francis Place was passed; it “finally allow[ed] workers to legally organize to bargain for improved conditions together. There were plenty of caveats, of course, and the road to truly free unions was a long one.”
Then in 1832, “the journalist and labor reform advocate” John Brown (not to be confused with the American abolitionist) wrote a muckraking book, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, that “helped finally drive reforms through Parliament that did have at least some teeth—enforceable limits on the length of the workday, an end to the parish-to-factory pipeline practice, an end to indentured servitude.” It was a start, even though child labor was still permitted.
Merchant summarizes his interpretation of the Luddites’ achievements: “It’s easy to conclude that the Luddites were losers, that their struggle was futile, pointless, and in vain. This is not the case. We owe the Luddites a great deal, in fact, for resisting the onslaught of automated technology, the onset of the factory system, and the earliest iterations of unrestrained tech titanism and corporate exploitation.”
Blood in the Machine is really two books. The first, which I’ve been writing about, explores Luddite history, and is quite informative; the second is an attempt to draw analogies between Luddism and our contemporary world. The latter half, passionate and polemical, outlines an incipient neo-Luddite movement whose goal is to protect modern civilization from the alleged sinister encroachments of the new age of technology. “Increasingly,” Merchant tells us, “the spirit of Luddism does seem to be alive in emergent attitudes toward new technologies, especially among the younger generations.”
“There’s also a newly insurgent contingent that is unafraid to. . . argue not that these technologies should be built carefully,” he adds, “but that they should not be built at all. Or should be dismantled, with a hammer.” Merchant also adamantly believes that “[i]f the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are.”
It seems clear, to me anyway, Merchant wouldn’t be averse to seeing contemporary techies lash out and raze—meticulously and ethically, of course—the technology that is supposedly remaking our culture into a dystopia. And I have to acknowledge that the American economy today, pervaded by dread of new technological breakthroughs, pulsates with anxiety, despair, and rage.
For instance, as I write, the ongoing strikes by Hollywood’s writers and actors are partly stoked by fears of how artificial intelligence will subvert, perhaps even eliminate, those professions. As a gig worker, I’m sympathetic to what terrifies the writers and actors.
“If any current group’s situation most closely resembles that of the Luddites,” Merchant writes, “it is the large and ever-growing cohort of gig workers whose backs are against the wall, their options diminishing daily.” That pronouncement didn’t delight me when I read it.
The past, however, isn’t so easy to understand. And if that’s true of the past, how much more so is it true of the future? Yes, today’s technology can seem ominous, even nightmarish. But since no one can predict what’s going to happen, I would suggest to those who are convinced that we are doomed to a technohell, that surprise is the one constant in human history. You may, one day way down the road, be pleasantly startled. One of the things that AI might contribute to eventually is a cure for cancer. That’s a splendid reason not to consign AI to oblivion.
Merchant brings up the novelist Thomas Pynchon as one of “a contingent of the [contemporary] intelligentsia that has fought to uphold [the Luddites’] spirit and broadcast their values.” Curious, I checked Merchant’s endnote citation for Pynchon’s piece, and tracked down and read his 1984 essay, “Is It OK to be a Luddite?”
Well, well: The essay doesn’t share Merchant’s technofunk about the future. “If our world survives,” Pynchon writes, “the next great challenge to watch out for will come—you heard it here first—when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to.”
Yes, I’m aware that I just warned against speculating about the future; but your hypocritical reviewer—who is not even a great admirer of Pynchon’s fiction—still steadfastly maintains that in this passage the novelist was spot on. And reader, please note that nowhere in this quote is there any suggestion that the exhilarating agenda that Pynchon perceives will be achieved by violence, against machines or people.