To make the book’s political stakes even plainer, Merchant renders the early 19th century in current-day language. Factory owners are “entrepreneurs,” “the one percent,” even “tech titans” who are “disrupting” the textile industry — moving fast and breaking things, to borrow Facebook’s old slogan. Factory technologies spread “virally” and represent a form of “automation” (a term, as Merchant notes, that was not coined until the 1940s). The Luddites themselves are likened to decentralized movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. In the book’s final section, Merchant shifts back into a journalistic register, interviewing labor lawyers, analysts and workers struggling against the worst abuses of the gig economy. Chris Smalls, the magnetic warehouse employee who led the first successful unionization drive at Amazon last year, emerges as our era’s nearest analogue to Mellor.
Luddite histories are not just political, but almost always corrective. Today the term “Luddite” is divorced from the context of labor struggle, and instead signifies an irrational technophobia or a stubborn adherence to older ways. You might be a Luddite if you prefer to pay in cash, or if you think smartphones have ushered in the downfall of society. As Merchant argues, this is a holdover from how the elites of the day depicted the weavers’ struggles, as tantrums against technology. In fact, machine breaking was not a raison d’être for the Luddites, but a last resort when appeals to law, custom and morality fell on the deaf ears of authorities. If smashing a stocking frame became the signature Luddite action, it was because it got the goods, so to speak: Many millowners submitted to Luddite demands on pay and working conditions rather than risk their machines — or their lives.
Merchant is keen to reframe the Luddites as proto-unionist reformers rather than violent revolutionaries. Mellor’s story ends with a letter from his prison cell, where he awaits his execution, requesting that his name be added to a petition calling for restrictions on machines. In Merchant’s account, gig economy workers and their advocates focus on regulation and fair treatment, never sabotage. It is not an unfair conclusion to draw: No American worker movements approach the militancy of the Luddites during their raids, and President Biden’s ear bends more readily than that of the Prince Regent. But if we truly want to break from the future that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have planned for us, with our blood in their machines, it could take more than legislation to do so. It might require a few hammers.
Gavin Mueller is an assistant professor of new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam, and the author of “Breaking Things at Work.”
BLOOD IN THE MACHINE: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech | By Brian Merchant | Illustrated | 465 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $30
