Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

by Brian Merchant Narrated by Eric Jason Martin

Overview

Longlisted*for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year

The "rich and gripping" true story of the first time machines came for human jobs-and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today*(Naomi Klein)

The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods.

The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines-on punishment of death-and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees.

Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it?

The answers lie in Blood in the Machine. Brian Merchant intertwines a lucid examination of our current age with the story of the Luddites, showing how automation changed our world-and is shaping our future.

Editorial Reviews

author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Rem Margaret O'Mara

An immersive, propulsive tale...an eye-opening history delivering powerful lessons for our high-tech present.

New York Times Bestselling author of This Changes Naomi Klein

A rich and gripping account of a chronically misunderstood historical chapter, one with urgent relevance to our own time, as we once again pit humans against machines.

New York Times Opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo

I’ve thrown around the word ‘Luddite’ often in my work, mainly as a cheap insult, so Brian Merchant’s rich and absorbing history of the movement was, for me, both a revelation and an embarrassment. The embarrassment is at how little I’d known about them, and how the lessons I’d taken from their effort were based on a silly caricature. The revelation, in Brian’s deft telling, is that technology never has to be inevitable, that we humans have agency over how we live with the machines, and that perhaps the best way to figure out what to do about the future is to look to the past.

bestselling author of Palo Alto Malcolm Harris

Forget everything you know about the Luddites. After Blood in the Machine you’ll never look at your computer screen – or a hammer – the same way again.

From the Publisher

A riveting look into the past, and a cautionary tale for our rapidly approaching future…. Fast paced, engagingly written, and exhaustively researched, this work of history could not feel more relevant to the current moment. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.”
 —Kim Kelly, author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor

Kirkus

A well-argued linkage of early industrial and postindustrial struggles for workers' rights.

The Culture Journalist

Engrossing and exhaustively researched

New York Times bestselling author of Little Brothe Cory Doctorow

A thrilling history and a stirring manifesto for seizing the means of production, or smashing it, when necessary. Automation has always been about turning people into machines: brainless and disposable. To be a Luddite is to demand a say in the future. It's not enough to ask what a machine does - we have to ask who it does it for and who it does it to.

New York Times bestselling author Christopher Leonard

An absolutely indispensable, shocking, and fascinating tale by one of today’s most important technology writers. This riveting book is as much a work of history as it is an urgent examination of our ability to resist the overwhelming changes technology is wreaking on our lives.”

nationally bestselling author Malcolm Harris

After Blood in the Machine, you’ll never look at your computer screen— or a hammer—the same way again.”

New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow

A thrilling history and a stirring manifesto for seizing the means of production, or smashing it, when necessary.”

author of Sandworm and Tracers in the Dark Andy Greenberg

Brian Merchant has pulled off a kind of temporal magic trick: He's told a two-century-old story with such resonant themes about technology, labor and human exploitation—and done it with such gripping, visceral detail and empathy—that it feels like it's about our future.

New York Times bestselling author of Kochland and Christopher Leonard

This is an absolutely indispensable, shocking, and fascinating tale by one of today’s most important technology writers. This riveting book is as much a work of history as it is an urgent examination of our ability to resist the overwhelming changes technology is wreaking on our lives. The Luddites knew that automation, job loss and the consolidation of wealth aren’t inevitable. We can shape these forces if we’re willing to break a loom or two.

author of Sandworm and Tracers in the Dark Any Greenberg

Brian Merchant has pulled off a kind of temporal magic trick: He's told a two-century-old story with such resonant themes about technology, labor and human exploitation—and done it with such gripping, visceral detail and empathy—that it feels like it's about our future.

Kirkus Reviews

2023-08-11
A history of the 19th-century revolutionaries who fought against the machine.

In 1812, writes Merchant, the author of The One Device, British workers watched as power looms began to displace them, then rose up in a movement named after a young rebel named Ned Ludd, leading the UK to “the brink of civil war.” Two centuries later, advanced digital technology in the hands of capitalists threatens human livelihoods in many fields, occasion for a new Luddite revolt. Merchant chronicles how the British militants didn’t necessarily object to labor-saving devices, but instead to how they were used—namely, to enrich a small handful of industrialists at the expense of a great mass of skilled workers. Indeed, Merchant adds, when textile workers asked that a machine be put in place to measure thread count, an index of quality, the owners refused, “preferring to retain the unilateral power to determine the quality of a garment themselves, and to offer workers the prices they approved of.” Under such conditions, weavers’ wages fell by nearly half between 1800 and 1811, good reason for protest. At times, those demonstrations turned violent, with factories burned and one particularly hated capitalist murdered. Some reforms ensued, but the supremacy of the bosses endured. Just so, Merchant writes compellingly, while today’s gig workers may object to the whims of employers who offer few benefits and jobs that “are subject to sudden changes in workload and pay rates,” it seems unlikely that those bosses will change their ways short of a mass uprising. After all, Merchant charges, Jeff Bezos determined that it was cheaper to keep emergency technicians on hand to treat heatstroke rather than air-condition some of his warehouses. “And since Amazon does it,” writes the author, “everyone else must make their employees machinelike as well, if they hope to keep pace.”

A well-argued linkage of early industrial and postindustrial struggles for workers’ rights.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178728871
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	09/26/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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