The term “Luddite” is often used today in a pejorative way for people standing in the way of progress and averse to technology. But for the Luddites of the 19th century, pushing back against technological advancements was a matter of life and death.
Tech journalist Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, unveils the history behind the first time machines came for human jobs and the lessons we can glean for today’s fight against big tech. He’s also the author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.
Brian and Greg discuss the ties between Luddite displacement in the 19th century to today’s gig work, and AI-driven job cuts. Brian also describes sneaking into Shenzhen’s Foxconn City and emphasizes that technologies like the iPhone result from collective organizational effort, while “great man” narratives obscure workers’ contributions and shape how society views “tech titans.”
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
When technology takeaways worker autonomy
5:12: They [Luddite] saw a future that was confined to factories, where they were made to work in factories. They hated more than anything to, "stand at their command," as some of these workers put it. These were people who worked at home, who worked with machinery as they saw fit, took breaks when they saw fit. They had autonomy, and they saw the dawning not just of a technological age, but of an age where technology was being used to reorder society in a very specific way, and that's what they were rebelling against. That and the fact that at the moment they couldn't feed their families anymore.
What people get wrong about Luddites
06:29: What people get wrong is that the Luddites were anti-technology, right? They were really just anti-exploitation and anti the factory system. Really, they were anti-poverty. Their struggle was against, in some cases, a technology or a set of technologies that had existed for some time.
The myth of the lone innovator
54:09: We have bound up progress or our notions of progress, our ideas of progress in a single person being the motor, being the hander-down of innovations, the sort of disruptor. And until we can change that, and part of my project trying to untangle some of those assumptions, and the whole, as you mentioned, the whole iPhone book is chapter by chapter trying to tell the story and give credit to all the other people who sort of were behind the innovations that wound up in the iPhone and wound up changing the way that we live through this one device. And similarly with the Luddites, I wanted to explain their point of view, why they felt crushed by these titans, why they felt like their lives were being made worse by the technologies that they were using, and give voice to that collective body.
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