A Real and Un-Automated Horse: On Brian Merchant’s “Blood in the Machine”
Brian Merchant | Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech | September 2023 | Little, Brown, and Company | 496 pages
And when the average well-read citizen considers this new technological innovation—does it even matter which “innovation” anymore?—the citizen has a readymade response: these tech people are so obviously trying to make money off of problems our society has already addressed. This response is not incorrect; it just also happens to be noticeably, troublingly common. If, as Twitter user @boring_as_heck tweeted in 2017, “Every 2 or 3 weeks, a tech guy accidentally invents the concept of a city bus,” then every other two or three weeks, someone recreates a version of that Tweet. “Congrats, #Uber,” Tweeted Brianna Wu on February 13th 2018, “You invented the bus.”
While it’s easy and at times fun to chide the ever-growing, ever-failing, ever-funded tech sector for churning out objects rife with ideological and computational illnesses and betraying a total disregard for history or even reality, it’s hard to ignore that we, the laypeople and critics, in our ever-dwindling number of publications and outlets, are diagnosing their shortcomings at a rate that suggests we’re getting paid by the diagnosis. For many years, I wrote, taught, and spoke about the worrisome follies of autonomous vehicle (AV) companies, integrating commentary and work by other writers and thinkers whose AV skepticism matched and often exceeded my own; this past summer, California regulators authorized vehicles from the General Motors-backed Cruise and Google-funded Waymo to roam San Francisco. I have begun to feel there’s nothing more to learn from critiquing tech: embarrassing as their indiscretions may be, these companies just keep scaling, both in the reach of their operations and in the number of producers angling for broader reach. It has felt more productive instead to start grappling with our responses to this relentless expansion.
As I reflected on my campaign’s shortcomings, one particular book appeared to me like a weathered knight on a real and un-automated horse: Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Merchant’s mission is both to reconsider the Luddites as members of a specific historical movement and to reclaim the twenty-first-century slang term that misunderstands them. Per Merchant, the Luddites were workers in nineteenth-century rural England who, rather than starve as automated machines wiped away their jobs, waged a class conflict against factory owners. Some of this conflict took the form of impassioned letters and pamphlets. More often, it manifested in the organized destruction of machines. Because on-the-record accounts of the Luddites are rare due to such consequent British policies as “anyone convicted of dismantling a machine [can] now be put to death,” Merchant—a noted fan and anthologizer of speculative fiction—brings alive the evolving politics of the Luddites by adapting contemporaneous oral histories into more readable, contemporary prose. Knowing that the Great Comet of 1811 passed over the town of young Luddite George Mellor, for instance, Merchant imagines Mellor’s interpretation: “he knew as well as anyone that the working people of England had plenty of reasons to see bad omens in the night sky.” This is not to say that Merchant adds unnecessary gloss. He takes care to show how grueling the era was, physically, mentally, and economically. (In 1811, “the weekly pay of a Lancashire weaver declined from 25 shillings in 1800 to 14 shillings”; at one harrowing moment in the book, an eight-year-old worker contemplates suicide).
But in fleshing out Mellor’s inner life, Merchant’s true aim becomes clear: to show contemporary audiences that, when it comes to responding to tech, more intellectually savvy and economically effective (and violent) responses are possible. Mellor is depicted as a worker who “understood that the problem lay not with the machines themselves, but with the men who owned them,” and Merchant slants his descriptions to resonate with the modern reader. Mellor was trapped in “the breakneck evolutions of his time, the relentlessly accelerating technologies, the harsh politics of inequality, the privatization, and the pandemic,” and contrary to our droll associations with the Luddites, they were not idle about these events. In November of 1811, “seventy men carrying hammers, axes, pistols, and swords” marched to the shop of master hosier Edward Hollingsworth, kicking off four major attacks across “forty-eight hours of machine-breaking fury.” Merchant strives to portray the Luddites’ policy-centric creativity, too. He celebrates the cloth workers as “some of the earliest policy futurists” who were always “on the lookout for ideas as to how machines might be more harmoniously introduced into workplaces to benefit them all,” such as “taxing technology.”
It’s through accounts of these lives, blatantly parallel to our own, that the book becomes a necessary rejoinder to our weary responses to tech in the present moment. Do not, Merchant seems to say, criticize the techies for lacking historical grounding if you yourself do not understand the history of your critiques. There are countless historical uprisings, Merchant instructs us, and even a few modern ones that depict how “alongside every labor-saving innovation, a spasm of protest burst out from the workers whose lives it disrupted.” The workers in the past, though, did not “view technology as inherently progressive; they had not been taught to lionize disruption.”
While Merchant doesn’t explicitly cover how the tech sector came to bill itself successfully as a progressive cadre of disruptors, he does argue that there’s an inciting incident when it comes to our shifting cultural perception of the Luddites. That none of the historical Luddites’ ingenuity and protest is associated with our contemporary use of the word is owed in Merchant’s rendering to chicanery that began immediately after the hanging of George Mellor. Newspaper descriptions of Mellor’s protest and death “completed the elite reframing of the Luddite narrative from that of an insurgent, strategic, and folk-heroic labor movement to some delusional idiots breaking machines because they did not understand them.” The Luddites of the era were organized and impassioned, yet contemporaneous media accounts recast them as something far less threatening. They were not to be remembered as a legitimate political force. Instead, the Luddites were herded together, reduced to an “epithet for a delusional malcontent who is anti-technology and anti-progress.”
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It is telling that, in contemporary usage, “Luddite” almost always appears in the singular. Even for those who do not intend the word to mean “reactionary” or “unenlightened,” the Luddite is nonetheless a loner, an oddball, one whose sense of reality fails to conform to some perceived norm. Even when used in a positive sense, “Luddite” signals something like stubbornness: the Luddite is one who stands inertly as history marches at and past them.
This diminution of “Luddites” from a collective to a singular entity works to trick opponents of our world’s tech saturation into believing that their values are really an individual pathology. Understanding this helped me realize that it’s not the repetition of tech jokes on Twitter per se that I find sad: it’s their isolation from one another, their inability to make any kind of collective movement out of the personal discontent they express. Merchant notes the emerging trend of social media users adding “Luddite” to their profiles, and though I confess I found this example ironic at the back-end of a book in which workers destroyed machines, it nonetheless marks a crucial shift from isolation toward cooperation, one informed by history. Merchant clearly approves. By historicizing responses to technology, he demonstrates that to act as a Luddite is to be anything but out-of-touch: to act as a Luddite means to mobilize a plentiful if obscured common sentiment that marches toward us from the past, and to stride as part of a collective toward a more equitable future.
And what a year to witness this march. Late this summer in San Francisco, protestors known as the Safe Street Rebels began to place traffic cones on the hoods of recently permitted Waymo and Cruise vehicles, tricking their sensors and freezing the cars in place. This mode of protest struck me as a brilliant re-interpretation of the Luddites’ pistols-and-swords approach, and what ensued across the rest of 2023 was a race between the driverless sector and its critics to scale their operations and responses. Cruise, much like Uber’s ride-sharing operations before it, quickly expanded their driverless operations to Phoenix, Houston, Austin, and Miami. (Regarding why, David Zipper said the quiet part loud in an October 24th Slate article: “A source who previously worked at Cruise shared with me the company’s internal 2023 objectives, including 2,300 robotaxis deployed and $120 million in revenue, mostly from the Bay Area.”) When Waymo announced plans to launch their driverless program in Los Angeles County, it was Teamsters and community groups who scaled their critique into a mid-October protest in the name of safety and job protections. Chris Griswold, President of Teamsters Joint Council 42, declared simply that “we cannot allow the unchecked deployment of untested technology on our roads.” Griswold, in his reluctance to get lost in the hypothetical benefits of this technology in the future, sounded like a descendant of Merchant’s Luddites, who “viewed technology not as an ambiguous force shrouded in futurity, but as a mechanism that is deployed in ‘the present tense,’ and that can be accepted or rejected accordingly.”
When I bring up Griswold’s comments or Zipper’s article to the many workers I’ve met in Pittsburgh’s AV sector and the American AV sector at-large, I hear a familiar kind of exhaustion and frustration. The vehicles have been tested, they say—for years. They are safer—the trust we continue to put in the failed machines known as humans is unfathomable. I am repeatedly reminded of the radical, mind-boggling differences in each AV company’s approach to safety, and how the more principled actors must constantly answer for the technological sins of the “move fast and break things” crowd (prior to Cruise’s deception, Tesla and its supposed Full Self-Driving capabilities were the go-to example of the latter). Many of the rejoinders are specific to me: you are a novelist, they say, who has no real idea how any of these machines or systems work.
Previously, I had responded to these counterarguments on their grounds, learning way too much about sensors and lidar. I read and ranted about countless transit studies. Merchant’s book has equipped me with a simpler argument, one that I had previously made only under the guise of fiction: honestly? I just don’t trust many of you. At all. Whereas I previously rolled my eyes at the tech commentariot’s partiality toward palace intrigue reporting, I now see the flaw in my thinking. The people matter as much as the tech. The people are the tech. The cars, after all, are not driving themselves—not really. As law professor Bryant Walker Smith recently observed in a news story about Cruise, driverless cars are just “cars driven by their companies.” I can hear Mellor in this critique: “the problem lay not with the machines themselves, but with the men who owned them.”
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Cruise’s permit was suspended in San Francisco on October 23rd. The decision forced the company to pause all driverless operations, and to be clear, the problem for Cruise did, most immediately, lie in “the machines themselves”: a vehicle had dragged a pedestrian—who had first been hit by a human-driven vehicle—an additional twenty feet. Still, during the investigation, “the man who owned” these machines—Kyle Vogt, then the Cruise CEO—initially showed regulators and journalists an abbreviated video in which the vehicle braked hard, cutting out before the pedestrian was dragged away. Cruise attempted to take control of the narrative and failed, this after Vogt had spent the summer explaining how critiques against the company were “sensationalized.” Our present landscape may be absent of pistols and beatings, but the tone and content of Vogt’s “elite reframing,” to use Merchant’s phrase, is similar to what happened in the wake of George Mellor’s hanging two hundred years prior. Opposition to tech, Vogt suggested, is surely not part of some “insurgent, strategic, and folk-heroic labor movement” but is rather the pointless hobby of “some delusional idiots breaking machines because they did not understand them.”
Cruise, as a company, may recover. They may not (the end of 2023 saw Vogt resign, followed by Cruise shedding 24% of its staff). Placing bets in the AV horse race has always been counterproductive: it’s a parlor game that privileges launch dates and stock value over the safe, democratic integration of technology. What I feel confident in saying is that it will be more and more difficult to frame AV critics as delusional and isolated if the failures are this obvious and the number of protesting voices keeps increasing. If Cruise devotees doubt that dissent is growing, they need to look no further than their parent company, General Motors, who, days after Cruise’s suspension, reached a deal with the United Auto Workers, ending the now infamous months-long stand-up strike. Like the cloth workers of Blood in the Machine, the UAW did not just demand better wages: they demanded that technologies be more “harmoniously” integrated into society. In describing the agreement that would place electric battery manufacturing under the national master agreement, Shawn Fein, the UAW president, sounded an awful lot like a cloth worker refusing to believe that an emerging industry couldn’t benefit workers: “We have been told for months this is impossible. We have been told the EV future must be a race to the bottom. We called their bluff.” The UAW achieved a similar harmonious integration on October 28th, when automaker Stellantis agreed to reopen its Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois and invest in a new electric vehicle battery plant at the recently shuttered location.
In this year’s many union victories, workers—not shareholders, not executives—are making winning arguments about company investment, ones rooted in the idea that a thriving technological future cannot exist without an equitable integration of technology in the present. As political chair in my own teacher’s union, I cringe at the thought of beginning a Zoom meeting with, “Hey, so I think we should be more vocal about our tacit Luddism,” but the potential applications of their historical example are many and worthwhile. Perhaps hidden Luddites in various organizations and companies will begin demanding more say in how their technologies affect the environment. Perhaps autoworkers will demand that the machines they construct operate on more safely designed streets, as advocated for by Jessie Singer in There are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price.
The forces opposing these transformations are formidable and then some. It’s no accident the Luddites’ history is under-discussed. Technology integrates into society and then scales at a rapid pace precisely so that it can move faster than any restrictions put upon it. This is a race in which the public is perpetually behind, and the lag is what generates conflict, according to Merchant:
The biggest reason that the last two hundred years have seen a series of conflicts between the employers who deploy technology and workers forced to navigate that technology is that we are still subject to what is, ultimately, a profoundly undemocratic means of developing, introducing, and integrating technology into society.
Profoundly undemocratic integrations are a given at this point. The variable becomes: how quick, unified, and visionary can the response be?