BLOOD IN THE MACHINE

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.