What the Luddites can teach us about the next tech rebellion

In an exclusive excerpt from “Blood in the Machine,” a forthcoming history of the movement: what the Luddites show us about how tech uprisings begin In “Blood in the Machine,” Brian Merchant explores the history and legacy of the Luddites. [Photos: Rawpixel (fist, circuit board, gears, robotic arm); Joe Piette/Flickr; ucfw770/Flickr] BY BRIAN MERCHANT LONG READ It was 1811, and a young cloth dresser in Huddersfield, England, was worried. There were the breakneck evolutions of relentlessly accelerating technologies, the harsh politics of inequality, the privatization of industries, and the tail end of a smallpox pandemic. But as mill and factory owners installed new textile machines—the water frame, the power loom, the gig mill—George Mellor was now seeing his working identity stripped from him: seven years of training pronounced worthless. “There’s a conspiracy on foot to improve and improve,” he is imagined by historians to have said, “till the working man that has nothing but his han

In an exclusive excerpt from “Blood in the Machine,” a forthcoming history of the movement: what the Luddites show us about how tech uprisings begin In “Blood in the Machine,” Brian Merchant explores the history and legacy of the Luddites. [Photos: Rawpixel (fist, circuit board, gears, robotic arm); Joe Piette/Flickr; ucfw770/Flickr] BY BRIAN MERCHANT LONG READ It was 1811, and a young cloth dresser in Huddersfield, England, was worried. There were the breakneck evolutions of relentlessly accelerating technologies, the harsh politics of inequality, the privatization of industries, and the tail