The Attenuated Politics of Popular Luddism

Merchant tells the story of Luddism with fidelity and panache. The Luddites were a loosely affiliated network of textile workers in the English north and Midlands, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, in the 1810s. Frame knitters, stockingers, and other craftspeople watched incredulously as manufacturers introduced machinery that enabled their own labor to be performed by unskilled workers—frequently children—at a fraction of the cost. Even more alarming, these devices were installed in a new architectural edifice, the factory, the inmates of which were subject to unprecedented labor intensity and discipline. Accompanying the Industrial Revolution, Merchant underscores, was an equally important cultural revolution: proudly independent artisans, many of whom had carried on their trade alongside their families at home, now had to report to what William Blake unforgettably called the “dark satanic mills,” where operatives were subordinated to the remorseless rhythm of automated production and the petty tyranny of overseers. Skilled craftworkers faced a Solomonic decision: starvation or proletarianization.

Refusing this baleful choice, many opted for resistance instead. Nevertheless, the Luddites were not crazed technophobes—indeed, many were themselves amateur inventors or mechanical enthusiasts. They did not turn to pulverizing machines (a bargaining tactic that had been utilized opportunistically for centuries) until they had exhausted all other avenues for redress. As Merchant documents, immiserated craftworkers pressed for the enforcement of regulations governing their trades that were already on the books, petitioned parliament to enact basic labor protection laws, and proposed alternatives that would enable manufacturers to make a profit without reducing their employees to penury. For these efforts, they were ignored and mocked by turns. Ironically, the machine wrecking for which Luddism became notorious was “the bargaining tool of last resort.”² Given the intransigence of the governing and employing classes, Merchant insists, the Luddites’ recourse to this tactic “was, if anything, a logical response.”³

Merchant, who has described himself as a Luddite and sledge-hammered devices at some of his publicity events, writes about his predecessors’ assaults with palpable relish.⁴ Rallying around the mythical figure of Edward “Ned” Ludd, an apprentice who destroyed his own knitting frame before retreating, Robin Hood-style, into Sherwood Forest, the Luddites waged an extremely deliberate campaign of industrial sabotage, targeting only, as one of their communiques memorably put it, “machinery hurtful to commonality.”⁵ As a rule, they conducted their raids with great discipline, precision, and even politeness. Far from a doomed undertaking, machine breaking was often an extremely successful tactic, leading to concessions from manufacturers fearful of losing their investment and the goodwill of their communities. It was neither the supposed inevitability of technological adoption nor the allegedly inexorable march of progress that put an end to the Luddite insurrection. Rather, as Merchant forcefully illustrates, the British state wielded its repressive power with unprecedented ferocity. The Midlands were subjected to a veritable military occupation; machine breaking and oath taking, the warp and woof of Luddism, were designated capital offenses; and show trials held at York Castle in 1813 made a macabre example of some of the movement’s leaders. While episodes of machine wrecking continued sporadically for another half-dozen years, the Luddite rebellion was effectively over.

The essential truths of the Luddite phenomenon that Merchant enumerates have been told many times before in canonical works by historians such as E. P. Thompson, John and Barbara Hammond, and Malcolm Thomis. Writing in a more accessible style, authors such as Devin Thomas O’Shea, Kirkpatrick Sale, and even Thomas Pynchon have made their own efforts to explain and vindicate the Luddite cause. But the idea that the Luddites were irrational opponents of progress—”rebels against the future,” in Sale’s memorable phrase—is one of those myths that stubbornly refuses to be debunked.⁶ Its resilience derives from its ideological utility; Merchant tartly observes that it is convenient for the entrepreneurial class to be able to dismiss anyone who has reservations about a new venture or innovation by tarring them as a Luddite. While this is undoubtedly correct, I suspect that the myth of the Luddite endures for an additional, less pernicious reason. We have never fully come to terms with industrial modernity, and its chilly metallic embrace enfolds us more completely with each new Apple device and chatbot upgrade. The Luddite has become an emblem for the visceral rejection of the machine age: unreasonable, yes, but also fundamentally understandable, and, at times, attractive. (Who has not wanted to smash an uncooperative gadget or defenestrate a mulish PC?) As technology penetrates ever-deeper into our routines, our environment, and our bodies, expect the myth of the machine-hating Luddites to grow stronger, despite the repeated efforts of sympathetic commentators to dispel it.

What distinguishes Merchant’s book from previous apologia for Luddism? There are two qualities in particular. First, it is a narrative history. Blood in the Machine recounts the saga of Luddism by braiding together numerous individuals’ stories, drawing upon first-person accounts, oral histories, and papers from the UK Home Office. The dramatis personae include Robert Blincoe, a London orphan duped, like many of his playmates, into years of indentured servitude in factories; George Mellor, a charismatic Huddersfield cropper who completed his seven-year apprenticeship just in time to see the introduction of the machines that would render his skills obsolete, and who subsequently became a regional Luddite commander; and William Cartwright, a West Riding manufacturer whose bloody repulsion of a machine-breaking assault on his mill in 1812 broke the momentum of the Luddite revolt. Merchant further enriches his tale by interweaving vignettes about the literary titans who expressed solidarity with the Luddites’ cause. The arch-Romantic Lord Byron utilized his first speech in the House of Lords to defend the machine wreckers and taunt government; Percy Bysshe Shelley incorporated passages in his visionary poem, Queen Mab, that bewail the dehumanization of factory work—and raised funds for the surviving families of executed Luddites. Most indelibly, Mary Shelley’s mythopoetic novel of an artificial man that rebels against his creator took shape in the afterglow of the Luddite insurgency.

Merchant portions out his story in short, vivid chapters, which lends Blood in the Machine the headlong pace of an airport thriller. While this rapid shuttling between narrative threads keeps the pages turning, I did find myself wondering if this technique was not itself a concession to readers’ atrophied attention spans, for which we have (what else?) our devices to thank. Moreover, small factual mistakes slip through here and there. For example, Mary Shelley was inspired by a discussion of the ideas of Erasmus Darwin, not Erasmus’s grandson Charles (who was 9 years old at the time); and the narrator of Frankenstein is named Walton, not Marlow (unless the latter wandered in from a neighboring Joseph Conrad novel). But such minor errors notwithstanding, Merchant is a congenial guide who braids together the many strands of his story with a deftness that the weavers he memorializes might well appreciate.

This brings us to the second quality that distinguishes Blood in the Machine from previous accounts of Luddism, and which lends it its contemporary salience: its systematic paralleling of the industrial-revolutionary conditions that spawned Luddism and those of our own digital revolution. Merchant leans hard into these comparisons. Accordingly, factory owners are the “first tech titans”; the legend of Ludd is a “nineteenth-century meme”; Jeff Bezos is “the modern [Richard] Arkwright,” the contemporary analog of the creator of the factory system.⁷ These insistent comparisons produce moments of inadvertent comedy; one scene has Luddites discussing factory conditions in “watercooler talk,” as if they were themselves cubicle-dwelling extras in Office Space.⁸

Merchant’s heavy-handedness notwithstanding, the affinities between the Industrial Revolution and its digital counterpart that he highlights are compelling and important. Like their factory lord antecedents, Silicon Valley’s tech titans simply ignore the laws that constrain their ambitions. They too claim credit for the innovations of others. (Merchant quotes Steve Jobs’s revealing boast that “we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”⁹) They too cloak self-enriching decisions in the bland rhetoric of progress and technological inevitability. As for the contemporary working classes’ resemblance to their textile-worker forerunners, we need look no further than the taxi drivers immiserated by Uber and Google Maps, haggard Amazon warehouse pickers lashed by tracking software, and apprehensive graphic designers who are at risk of being replaced by AI systems that were trained on their designs.

The broad conclusions that Merchant draws from his comparative history are so lucid that they deserve to enjoy that contemporary form of canonization: virality. Among the most significant is that the automation of work does not result in less labor. Rather, it culminates in more unskilled, casualized, and lower-paid labor. The mechanization of a particular labor process is always a choice, typically one made by an entrepreneur or CEO eager to increase profit margins or disrupt an industry. The full automation of production that will bring society unprecedented prosperity and leisure is “always just around the bend,” its putative imminence justifying present-day exploitation.¹⁰ Finally, most radically—and reasonably—it is always an option to refrain from adopting a novel technology, whether that decision is effectuated “by policy or by force.”¹¹

A technology columnist by trade, Merchant is no enemy of innovation. But, like the Luddites before him, he refuses to swallow the lazy and ideologically fraught assumption that newly developed technology “can only be introduced to society through reckless disruption.”¹² He insists that we need more democratic, inclusive, and judicious procedures for bringing inventions online. Such procedures would ensure that workers and owners alike benefit from technological advances, and communal well-being is not sacrificed on the altar of industrial progress.

Here, too, Merchant’s reasoning is not merely persuasive: it has the profundity of long repressed common sense. However, a glaring obstacle stands in the way of his preferred approach to managing innovation. While appropriately skeptical of the rhetoric of technological inevitability, Merchant concedes that our economic system has its own peremptory imperatives: “The logic of unfettered capitalism ensures that any labor-saving, cost-reducing, or control-enabling device will eventually be put to use, regardless of the composition of the societies these technologies will disrupt.” Not unreasonably, he declares this “the iron law of profit-seeking automation.”¹³ However, this raises a rather obvious question: How are we to achieve more deliberative and community-minded protocols for introducing new technology under capitalist conditions of production?

Merchant, who is largely content to let readers infer his preferred solutions from the negative example of the nineteenth century, vests his hopes in organized labor, government regulation, and, if necessary, renewed Luddite vigilantism. While these are laudable remedies, they have also proven inadequate to countervail capitalism’s iron laws.

This returns us to the historical parallel that Merchant leaves undrawn. The Welsh cotton manufacturer Robert Owen makes several cameo appearances in Blood in the Machine. Merchant depicts Owen as an enlightened captain of industry who champions labor protection legislation and seeks a “technical fix” to Britain’s breakneck industrialization.¹⁴ These descriptions are accurate, so far as they go. (Although rather bizarrely, Merchant likens him to a nineteenth-century Andrew Yang.)

But Owen was no mere tinkerer. Soon after the Luddite rebellion was crushed by the state, he began to advocate on behalf of a qualitatively new “social system”—what acolytes and fellow travelers would soon be calling “socialism.” In the existing political and economic order, Owen argued, machinery would inevitably act as an engine of inequality and abjection. But under different social arrangements, only those labor processes that were unsafe or degrading need be automized. If judiciously managed, he suggested in an 1817 parliamentary subcommittee report, the mechanization of production could proceed indefinitely, “but only in aid of, and not in competition with, human labor.”¹⁵ While this formulation is obviously too neat, it is no less clear that Owen grasped that technological improvement and skilled labor should exist in a symbiotic relationship. This was a conviction that had animated many Luddites. But Owen and his followers (including the young Frederick Engels, an enthusiastic participant in Manchester’s Owenite subculture) added another dimension to this vision: advances in productivity, they argued, were rapidly creating the conditions for universal material well-being and, ultimately, the abolition of the class system. Although Karl Marx and Engels grouped Owen among the utopian socialists in The Communist Manifesto, they assimilated many of his insights into their own, more vigorous ideal of an egalitarian social order collectively managed by the associated producers.

Blood in the Machine is simultaneously a highly enjoyable book and a galvanizing protest against technological fatalism that deserves the wide audience it has found. Merchant’s insistence that new technology be implemented through inclusive and democratic processes is as perspicacious as it is ethical. However, its realization lies beyond the horizon of capitalism.

Notes

1. ↩ Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2023), 143.
2. ↩ Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 60.
3. ↩ Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 164.
4. ↩ Brian Merchant, “I’ve Always Loved Tech. Now, I’m a Luddite. You Should Be One, Too,” Washington Post, September 18, 2023; Sheelah Kohlhatkar, “Smithereens,” New Yorker, October 23, 2023.
5. ↩ Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 67.
6. ↩ Kirpatrick Sale, Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley, 1995).
7. ↩ Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 1, 68, 373.
8. ↩ Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 96.
9. ↩ Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 425n101.
10. ↩ Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 50.
11. ↩ Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 212.
12. ↩ Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 308.
13. ↩ Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 260.
14. ↩ Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 375.
15. ↩ Robert Owen, “Report to the Committee for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor,” The Life of Robert Owen, vol. 1A, (London: Effingham Wilson, 1858), 63.