February 21, 2025 • 44 mins
It’s a crossover episode with our pals at TechStuff! Mango and Oz Woloshyn sit down with author Brian Merchant to discuss his incredible (and incredibly timely) book, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Did you know the Luddites were pro-worker, not anti-progress? Neither did we! Brian explains how industrial automation in the 19th century threatened workers’ livelihoods and dignity—and what happened when a decentralized movement rose up to fight back. Plus: What this means for us today, and an unexpected Lord Byron cameo.
Buy Brian’s book, Blood in the Machine.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:26):
Guess what oz?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
What's that?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Man? Gosh?
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Well, I am super excited to do this crossover episode
with you, but before we get started, maybe we should
tell everyone what's going on here. So we are both
podcast hosts. I do Part Time Genius, a ridiculous general
knowledge show that tackles some of the world's most important questions.
I'd have to say things like what's the story behind
(00:48):
dogs playing poker? Why does Lichtenstein export so many false teeth?
And you are the brand new co host of Tech Stuff.
It is a wildly popular show about the latest technology
and what it says about does is humans. But I
feel like we should let people in on a little secret.
We are also business partners. A few years ago we
(01:08):
founded the company behind both our shows, which is called Kaleidoscope.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
We spend an awful lot of time together, but never
recording a podcast together until now, which is kind of crazy.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
That is true.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
So today we're producing a little bit of a network
effect where we're doing a crossover between two Kaleidoscope shows,
Part Time Genius and Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
I'm so excited about this, And you know, we were
having I think it was burgers and drinks with our
palkate and she came up with a perfect topic for
us both, which is Luddites.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So what do you know about Luddites.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
I don't know a lot about Luddites. I know, I
hear that word all the time, and I associate it
with England in the past and today with people who
are kind of branded as technophobes.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
I mean, I feel like we refer to my mom
as a Luddite a lot and have for a while,
because you know when she told my dad like, oh,
I need to check my email, and what that meant
was he had to go into her email print out
a stack of email.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Print it.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
That's that's real classify story of Nomon. That's the ATCO vibes.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
She is kind of the CEO of our family.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
But you know, so I feel like most people probably
think ludite means anti tech or being against adopting new technologies.
But weirdly, that couldn't be further from the historical truth.
So the best description is that the Luddites were a
worker's rights movement, and these guys were your countrymen, specifically
(02:38):
as your countrymen, So they loosely formed in the early
eighteen hundreds in northern towns and villages in England. And
at the time the wool and textile trade was the
most important industry in Britain. It employed almost a million people,
which is remarkable, right, and textile weavers were the largest
single group of workers in the country for over a century.
(03:01):
People were really well employed, and some of them even
worked from home. And then something cropped up called the
gig mill. And this is where things get dicey, right.
The gig mill was a wooden machine that napped up
the wool or the cotton into a softened fabric. And
these mills started cropping up with remarkable pace. So basically,
(03:21):
entrepreneurs use these mills to build factories and put hundreds
of thousands of workers out of work. They brought in
unpaid child labor, and they pushed families to the brink
of starvation.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Well, I am having an association here which is a
William Blake poem and also Britain's most famous him Jerusalem,
which the choruses and did those feet in ancient times
walk upon England's mountains green? And did the countenance shine
forth upon these dark satanic mills?
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Dark satanic mills.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Dark satanic mills. Yeah, William Blake took up his pen,
but I think others took up more aggressive hitchforks.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah, so you're exactly right.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Like the workers organized and bands of dozens of them
would go out at night. They covered their faces with
coal or with mass and they were armed with blacksmith hammers,
and they'd actually break the machines right and and weirdly,
each group leader went by the same name, General Lud. Now,
the attacks were often prefaced with a note or a
(04:27):
letter pinned to the door of the mill with a warning,
if you do not pull down your frames, my company
will visit and destroy them, signed ned Lud.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
So this is the we are anonymous, we are legion
of the nineteenth century. Completely who was ned Lud?
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Though, so ned Lud was not a real person. He
was a fictional character based on a myth about an
apprentice who smashed his boss's device and then fled to
Sherwood Forest, which I'm sure most of our listeners know
from Robinhood. It's the wooded area where all those merry
men took refuge, and it's not a quinc evidence that
ned Lud was also set to reside there. Considering the
(05:03):
spirit of righteous rebelliousness. Anyway, the movement grew pretty quickly,
and before long there were about fifty machines a week
that were getting destroyed, and the raids definitely got bigger
and weirder as they went along. So many of these
Luddites would pull stockings over their faces during the night raids.
One account talked about a dude wearing a bloody mask
(05:24):
made from a calf skin to disguise himself. Some of
the Luddites wore costumes, and a few of the largest
bands were led by men in drag who called themselves
General Lud's Wife.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Isn't that incredible?
Speaker 4 (05:39):
So there are in fact famous illustrations from the time
of Ludite leader's in dress with factories burning in their background.
Supposedly it was an homage to the women who had
also lost their jobs of yarn spinning to automation, so
it was kind of in solidarity with them. Anyway, words
spread about the machine breakers and their cause became really,
(06:00):
really popular. As you can imagine, Basically everyone knew who
was involved, and sometimes these raids even began occurring in
full daylight, but no one talked like the villagers did
not snitch.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Wow, that's amazing. So it was like almost like an
open secret who was involved.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Yeah, but they were still pretty cautious. So the Luddites
had all these codes and handshakes to protect themselves. Like
if you were going to a meeting at a local pub,
there was a process, right, So first you'd make eye
contact with a Luddite guard who was posted across the room.
Then you'd make a coded hand gesture. The guard would
sort of keep a straight face, keep their cool, they
(06:37):
might even look bored, take a drink, but then they
would suddenly return the gesture. And then you'd actually head
into the back, maybe up a narrow staircase, to a
smaller room, and then you'd have to say a password,
and the password was win work, so you'd say that
to a guard and then finally you'd get into the
secret meeting.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
That's incredible. So it's almost like a Masonic vibe as well.
But what I mean, how they how they looked upon
by the broader British society and how much damage did
they do?
Speaker 4 (07:04):
I mean they did a lot of damage. One account
from the time, this is from the Leeds Mercury. It
reported that since the commencement of the Ludite system in Nottingham,
forty two lace frames and five hundred and forty four
plain silk and cotton stocking frames have been destroyed, and
that amounts to about thirteen four hundred pounds in eighteen
(07:25):
eleven prices or about sixteen million dollars today.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Well, no wonder they were catching people's attention.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Yeah, So the Luodites in the early nineteenth century weren't
so much anti technology as really they wanted a humane
adaptation of technology. And that's I think where some of
this distinction comes in.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Well, I'm definitely fascinated by everything you're saying, mangsh But
I guess if we really want to dig into the
understanding of the Luddite movement, there's someone we should talk to,
Brian Merchant, who wrote an incredible four hundred page book
about it. It's called Blood in the Machine, The Origins
of the Rebellion. Again big tech, and lucky for us,
we managed to get him on the line to talk
about it. Let's dive in. I know, Mange, shouldn't I
(08:09):
were excited to talk about the book Blood in the Machine,
But maybe a good place to thought would be why
did you decide to spend too much time writing a
four hundred page book about the Luddites.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (08:19):
There's a couple different answers to that, And the first
is that I had sort of spent a long time
as a tech journalist. So you hear it, the term ludite,
it's this derogatory term, and I had just kind of
integrated this term lutite. Oh, someone who hates technology, someone
who gets angry when they have to use a new technology,
makes them want to smash their phone, or you know,
(08:40):
just against progress.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
And so the minute that it became clear to me.
Speaker 5 (08:46):
That that was in no way the truth, sort of
like all of my you know, journalistic instincts kicked in
and there's nothing that a journalist likes to do more
than to overturn an assumption. Right, So like I spent
I spent like the nerdiest labor day weekend of my life,
just like reading academic journal articles about the Ledites. And
(09:08):
I was a reporter for Vice at the time. So
I wrote this piece called You've got the Lutites all
wrong because it was clear to me that they're not backwards,
they're not anti progress, they're anti bosses using technology to
sort of exploit them, to grind their livelihoods away, and
so like that sort of key insight stuck with me
(09:30):
because that was over ten years ago. So it was
really at the same time that we started seeing more
of the fallout from the labor forces at Amazon, the
warehouse workers who were working and often really degrading and
inhuman conditions. When it started to be clear that Uber,
after initially seeming to be this great thing, was starting
to squeeze its drivers, and we had stories about drivers
(09:53):
who couldn't afford rent were sleeping in their cars. So
this was all before the AI boom and the fear
that AI was going to replace our jobs. There's all
these examples of ways that tech was really being used
to hurt people or it was having a deleterious effect
on their lives. And then that kind of collided with
this thinking about the Luddites, and I said, maybe this
(10:14):
is a good lens to sort of look at these
emergent resistances to technology. Maybe we should understand more about
why people have real issues, real complaints about some of
the forces that technology is unleashing on their lives.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
I also love that though you figured this out over
labor day. There's something so funny about that. But take
us into this. Can you situate us in the history
event year. I think it's the eighteen hundreds, Yorkshire, Northern
Nish England. Can you paint a picture of the times
that we're talking about.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
So this is the very beginning days of the industrial revolution.
It's not yet quite at the point where if you
just kind of close your eyes and you say, like
peak industrial Revolution and you're imagining the billowing smoke and
like the coughing children working in factories.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
We're not quite there yet. That is beginning to take shape.
Speaker 5 (11:07):
So there have been a number of mechanical innovations. So
you had like the steam engine that's allowing for new
sources of power. You have water power coming onto the scene,
and then you have basically all of these inventions that
allows the work of weaving a garment to be done
(11:28):
by one person instead of say six, So it can
automate this task to a great degree.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
You still need a worker to run.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
The machine to make sure it's not screwing up, but
it is speeding up the process by which you can
produce goods. And industrialists and factory owners realize that they
can start buying these machines, machines like the gig mill,
the shearing frame that automate different parts of the clothing trade,
and that they can organize them into an early sort
(11:59):
of version of the factory. This is like the late
seventeen nineties early eighteen hundreds that I'm talking about here,
and it's in the midlands of England around Nottingham and Yorkshire,
and so you have workers who are used to working
at home with their families running the machine. They're not
(12:20):
anti technology, they're really good technicians technologists in their homes,
but they start to see the emergence of the factory.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Who are the innovators behind these kind of proto factories.
Speaker 5 (12:31):
The most famous is there's a man named Richard Arkwright
and he's generally considered to be the father of the factory.
You can go in these buildings today and kind of
see for yourself really awful working conditions. There's no ventilation,
there are multiple stories up to six stories, so it's noisy,
(12:53):
and it's just sort of churning out the yarn right
that used to be spun by hand. And so Arkwright
really kind of helped automate away the first sort of
rung of cloth workers. Arkwright figured out a way to
sort of make an astonishing volume of yarn.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Right.
Speaker 5 (13:12):
I opened the book, in fact, with one of the
inventors who will later invent the power loom touring like
this factory, and they're all ruminating all and his sort
of contemporaries are saying, well, it's one thing to make yarn.
That was just that's just women's work. It's another altogether
to automate like weaving a finished garment like that skilled
labor that'll never happen. And then he sets about trying
(13:34):
to do it.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
I think you called Arkwright the first startup founder to
launch a unicorn company, which I love. But how did
the laudite start to fight back? What kind of early
industrial action did they take?
Speaker 5 (13:47):
So basically arc Right's blueprint spreads around the country. People
recognize that you can sort of concentrate labor, and before
long this method of industrialization starts to lower prices and
the artisan workers, the skilled workers, who are still the
(14:07):
largest industrial base of worker in England.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
At the time, England was a cloth producing country.
Speaker 5 (14:12):
It exports it all over the world, so you have
more workers doing this than ever and they start to
see this work basically being transferred from that domestic system
where they're working at home into the factory system where
they're either going to have to compete on price they
have to start working for less, or they have to
go work in the factory where it's just a very
dehumanizing and often dangerous place to work. So they start
(14:37):
to form different modes of resistance, and first they go
to Parliament and say, hey, these industrialists are using machinery
that violate these number of rules on the books, like
we have laws that say how long you have to
be an apprentice for we have laws that say how
many threads have to go into a certain garment for
it to be sold on the market. And they're just
(14:57):
laughed out of Parliament time and time again, saying all
we want is a minimum wage, or maybe we could
figure out a way to get attacks on the output
that they're making that can sort of pay for social benefits,
because they're just sort of tearing up the social contract.
And this isn't the twenty first century. We don't have
a globalized economy. I can't go get a job at
Starbucks pretty much. Weaving is the only thing I know
(15:19):
how to do. So you throw us a bone. Parliament
does not, so they box them out for like ten
years of fighting, and we get to eighteen o nine,
they tear up all the rules altogether. Now it's the
working class pitted against these new industrialists. It's illegal toform unions.
(15:39):
There's no recourse at all, there's no democracy. So you
have a really volatile situation. And finally there's the crop
failure and then some intense tariffs placed on exports during
the Napoleonic War, and people.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Are quite literally going without food.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
That Luttites would often say, you know, the factory owners
have stolen our bread, because again, to them, it didn't
look like the complex machinations of a globalized economy. It
looked like they had a job, they got a fair wage.
And then one day somebody built a giant factory started
selling crappier stuff, taking away their market share, and now
(16:21):
that guy had money. It didn't look complicated to them.
It looked like theft, and it felt like theft. So
it just all goes up in flames. The Luddites emerged.
They say, you've left us no choice. They organized this
gorilla rebellion to fight back.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
Coming up, we meet some of the main characters in
this Ludite movement. Stick with us and welcome back to
the crossover between part time genius and tech stuff where
(16:58):
we're talking to the wonderful author Brian Merchant. So could
you tell us a little bit about George Meller and
his role in.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
All of this.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, So, George Meller is the Ledite that I.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
Focus on the most in the book, and we sort
of follow his reluctance to take up the hammer, so
to speak. But he's watching the first sort of uprising happen,
which happens in Nottingham. What they do is they first
send letters to the owners of the obnoxious machines and
they say, your factory has three hundred power looms and
(17:33):
it's putting twelve hundred of our brothers out of work.
Take down those machines or you'll get a visit from
ned Lud's army. Ned Lud is this apocryphal figure who
was supposed to have sort of rebelled against his master,
but they use him as this avatar.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
They sign these letters ned Lud.
Speaker 5 (17:50):
You know you're going to get a visit from ned
Lud's army, And then sure enough, a lot of factory
owners do ned Lud's army shows up with hammers in hand.
They hold up an overseer at gunpoint, and they sneak
into the factory and they smashed the machines.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
But only the machines that are that are taking.
Speaker 5 (18:05):
Jobs and tearing up the social contract, just those that
are sort of transferring wealth into the hands of the
factory owner away from them. So it was a very
pointed tactic and people loved them at the time. People
cheered the Ludites in the street. Magistrates would come out
and just kind of watch it happen.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
The factory owners would be going.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
What are you gonna do something about this, buddy, and
they and they're like, well, they kind of have a point.
So at first the Luddites were super popular. They were winning,
they won concessions. A bunch of factory owners said, I
don't want any part of this. Just you know, we'll
raise the prices again, We'll stop using these machines.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
You guys win.
Speaker 5 (18:44):
So for at least six months or so, it worked
to some extent. And so George Meller is up in
the West Riding, which is these days a few hours
north of Nottingham, and he's reading about this in the newspaper,
and he's saying, these guys have it right. This is
(19:05):
what we should be doing locally, because prices are falling
here right in our town, in Huddersfield, which is the
broader area that George Meller and his cohort worked, and
they had been watching their wages go down, their coworkers
literally starving, sometimes quite desperately, so conditions were extremely dire.
(19:29):
And in the book, I'd chart George Miller's sort of
ambivalence to full throated embrace of this idea of Luddism,
of becoming a Luddite, and then he becomes the local
sort of ned lud or general lud, leading other workers
into battle against the men that are quite literally causing
(19:51):
them to starve.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
One of these is William Horstfel Right.
Speaker 5 (19:55):
Yes, William's Horsefall is one of the two most hated
factory owners in town, and in part because he was
just like he was so unabashed to the point where,
you know, like as he would ride between his factories
into town.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Little children would would run.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
Up and taunt him and say, you know, the Luddites
are gonna get you, and he'll.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Try to whip them with a horsewhip.
Speaker 5 (20:21):
He was just like a classic like sort of mustache
twirling villain, like you really like these things that. His
quote was like I look forward to the day when
I like ride up to my saddle girths in Luddite blood.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
So he's gone, wow, yeah, So he's taunting them.
Speaker 5 (20:36):
He's sort of also turning his factory into a fortress,
so he's hiring mercenaries. So should the Luddites attack him,
they you know, he would gun them down before they
got there, or pour boiling oil on their heads. Things
like we would you know, associate with an assault on
a castle in medieval times or something. But it's an
extreme case because you got to remember that, like this
(20:59):
is on the front line of just industrial capitalism. This
is just taking shape right now, and no one really
knows what to make of it. A lot of factory
owners were like, ah, like I'm really torn. But if
I don't buy automating machinery, then my neighbor will and
he'll buy more of it and I won't be able
to compete then, And some factory owners say, I'm out
of the game. I don't want to contribute to the
(21:19):
ruination of working men's lives. I give up, I'm out. Others,
you know, continue to try to do it the old
way and buy from the weavers who work at home,
but it really sort of ultimately everybody has to compete
with men like Horsefall.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
So one of the.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
Things we were interested in was like how the Loveites
aren't just this group of people with the mallets to
break up these machines, but that they were actually kind
of savvy with pr as well. Yeah, is that something
you could talk about.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
Yeah, of course they were savvy in a way that
we might recognize today. The entire sort of construction of
their movement and the that they sort of chose to
go about building Luddism is really interesting, and it's decentralized.
It's almost meme based, right, So you have this figure
(22:10):
ned lud who is made up almost certainly, and you
have a set of tactics that can be replicated or emulated.
Where you write a threatening letter, you make sure it's
like posted out on the door, so it's like written
up in the newspapers or people see it and talk
about it and it causes a stir and you build
up this sense that your movement could be anywhere, right,
(22:33):
that's not your real names aren't attached to it.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
These letters are showing up anywhere.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
And it's it's replicable because if you're in a completely
different part of the country and you have the similar
grievances or ones that you want to address through, this
means you can just become a Lottite, right. You don't
have to have this central planning committee. You can just
gather your men in a pub as they did at
the time, and you can write your own letters. So
(23:00):
that's exactly what happens. It happens around Manchester and in
different parts of Nottinghamshire and all these different parts of
the Midlands of England, so they a lot of them
just kind of explodes.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
I remember when I first moved to New York, it
was a time of occupy Woolve Street and there was
this like very exciting feeling in the street downtown that
like people are taken the streets and that like the
authorities didn't know what to do. And then like a
few days past and the authorities decided to basically make
their tactics much more harsh, and then Occupy Wolf Street
was over right, So and it makes me think a
(23:34):
little bit about the Battle of Wolfitz mill in your
in your book.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Yeah, that's an analogy.
Speaker 5 (23:39):
I was thinking about a lot too, and black lives matter,
where you can basically take the core ideas and the
core grievances and then they mobilize them because you didn't
need sort of, you know, an approval structure where you
have like a hierarchy and leadership that has to be
consulted before you move on. But yeah, as you said,
(24:00):
the Ludites run into real trouble when a few things happen,
and that's when the state makes it a crime punishable
by death to break a machine. So now if you
break a machine, you can be strung up and you
can be hung. And they've sent tens of thousands of
troops to occupy the districts where Luddism is going on.
(24:23):
The state has it is the largest domestic occupation military
occupation of England in history, with just at one point
north of thirty thousand troops stationed just to fight the Ludites.
And then you finally have sort of this license given
by the state for industrialists to.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Fight fire with fire.
Speaker 5 (24:48):
Basically until this point, the Luddites are not violent except
against machines. They are breaking the machines, as this labor tactic,
as this strategy, but with the law passed, with the
army there and with like the mercenaries there, factory owners
are basically given license to shoot back. And so that's
what really happens at this famous Battle of Raffold's Mill,
(25:10):
when it's supposed to be sort of the crowning achievement
of the Luedtite movement. At that point, George Meller is
helping to lead this effort. He's gathered over one hundred
Ledtites and they're just going to go and attack Raffold's Mill,
and little do they know that this factory too has
been turned into a military fortress. So they get there
(25:31):
and guards open fire. A bunch of Ledites are gunned down,
they can't get inside. They basically have to call a retreat,
and somewhere between three and four Lutedites are believed to
have died, possibly even many more. But it's a big disaster.
And one of George Meller's sort of close friends, somebody
who he had sort of talked into joining the Ledite movement,
(25:54):
is one of the men who was gunned down, a
young apprentice and kind of sens sends George Meller off
the deep end, and he sort of you know, breaks
bad as it were, and he goes and assassinates the
other factory owner, William Horsefall in cold Blood.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
He assassinates, and it was that Hostel basically thought that
he'd won and ventured out of the factory fortress and
and Mellow was lying in wait or how did this happen?
Speaker 5 (26:25):
Yeah, I mean basically Horsefall was he was never afraid,
He was never cowed really, so it really does speak
again this sort of this tech titan mindset where like
you have to say, you know, people be damned, I
don't care if they hate me. I don't care if
it's even dangerous for me to be in the public.
(26:45):
I'm going to sort of run rough shot over these
norms and standards and just show that, you know, I
believe what I'm doing is right, is justified. Just kind
of like arc right back in the day. He had
also had to accept being despised by a lot of people.
So Horsefall was just he he had gone out and
wash was had a drink and was was riding home,
(27:08):
and they knew the route that he took from the
cloth market where he would sell his goods back to
his his factory.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
And his home.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
So they Yeah, they lay in wait and they ambushed
him on the way and they gunned him down.
Speaker 4 (27:21):
Tell us about this trial with with about Horsefall.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (27:25):
So again another indicator of how sort of widely liked
the Luddites were is that for a long time, well
both liked and feared, you should say, they would nobody
would inform on them like they would. There would be
entire towns where most people, with most working people would
know exactly who was involved right in a in a
(27:46):
factory raid, who smashed the factory owners automating machinery last night?
Who was behind this? No one would say a word. No,
The authorities could not get anybody to come forward. And
so it was the same with uh with the case
of Horsefall. When the authorities started making the rounds and
sort of pulling everybody in and interrogating them, nobody said
(28:08):
anything for months and months and months. So it finally
took the authorities basically putting a huge sort of bounty
or promising a big payment for anybody who brought in information.
And then one of the mothers of one of the
men sort of George, enlisted to go kind of assassinate
Horsefall said you got to take this, and then sort
(28:30):
of went and told the magistrate that it was George
and they and it finally flipped him. So it took
a long time before they could even get him, you know,
you get him behind bars. But you know, once they did,
I think it was understood that this would make a
good sort of show trial. Right, so it was going
(28:52):
to be George and a few of his compadres who
were believed to be there when they when they assassinated Horsefall.
But then it was going to be another round of
like over a dozen just Luddites who it had have
been involved in sort of the factory strikes and breaking
machines more broadly. So, I think the state understood that
(29:14):
this was their best chance at making this very unsympathetic.
The trial is is packed, it's it's like a big
sort of media event, and you know, the state uses
it to make this case not just about George and
the assassination, but of Luddism more broadly.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
So this is where for the one of the first
times you have this.
Speaker 5 (29:39):
Equation of Luddism to sort of backwards looking, to being dumb,
to being oh these these deluded men. Of course, it's
left out of the equation that they're that they're starving,
that their families can't eat, that that many of them
were involved in reform protest movements for decades, or try
(30:00):
to get things done the right way before it got
to this point. All of that, of course, is out
the window. It's just like, look at this, Look at
these Luedites who are willing to do.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Violence because they hate machines so much.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
So the state is not just wanting to convict George
in his compadres, is really looking to sort of use
this trials and opportunity to win the battle of ideas
and to smear the Luddite movement in a way that
I guess with quite effective ultimately.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 5 (30:28):
And at the time a lot of newspapers are still
financed by the monarchy, by its prince. Regent is running
the country at the time, and he does his office
does issue a lot of propaganda about the Leddites, you know,
from the beginning, off and on, and then really seizes
this moment to again, yeah, equate the Leddites as dummies,
(30:50):
as malcontents, as backwards looking destroying that which they do
not understand a lot of the key ingredients that would
sort of be stamped on history as as the Ludites
as we understand them today.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Well happened to the actual Luddites, to Georgi and co.
Speaker 5 (31:05):
They're hung, right, They're hung publicly, Yeah, outside of the
walls of York Castle. And it's a spectacle, you know,
it's an event like this is what happens when you
turn against progress. And then even more notable shortly after that,
they have the trial of the Lueddites just strictly for
(31:25):
machine breaking and they're all hung too, you know, over
a dozen people. You know, once again just sort of
underlining the fact that this is what will happen to
you if you oppose the machinery of the state, of
this approach that we have taken to industrialization.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Because the rich, the elite.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
In England at the time really liked industrialization obviously, like
they when factories are built on their lands, that's more taxes,
more income. They benefit from that, it contributes to the
war effort. In their eyes, they can produce a great
deal more so they have an interest in sort of
defending this centralized industrial approach that the Luddites threatened so
(32:08):
this sort of version of Luddism as backwards looking is
therefore sort of entered into the history books, and it
has remained as such ever since for two hundred years.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
It is it is crazy to think that like in
the beginning, there were offering ideas, trying to propose reforms.
They were like, you know, targeting just these specific machines
and then you know, they become the enemy of the state.
But where does the Luttite movement go, Like does it
peter out? Like do they have any wins in this
whole process?
Speaker 5 (32:39):
Yeah, I want it just for one second to what
you just said there. I think it's really interesting that
they did, like they proposed even something that would sort
of like that sounds today like something that like Andrew
Yang or Bill Gates has said, you know, tax like
the productivity of the machines a little bit like.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
The robot tax, the robot tax.
Speaker 5 (32:59):
It would work this same way. They had the same idea.
These are not radical, you know, Bill Gates is hardly
a radical. Were they really did try in good faith
to sort of suggest ways to build a better runway
to the future rather than one where just a handful
of rich guys to get to hoard all the gains
from it at everyone else's expense, and they just well,
(33:23):
leudism is what it came to. So the trials are
in eighteen thirteen. There are sort of more sporadic sort
of ebbs and flows of Leutism until about eighteen nineteen,
but by far the most explosive years of Lettism are
eighteen eleven eighteen twelve, and then sort of when it's
(33:44):
crushed in eighteen thirteen. But importantly, there are some Lutedites who,
for instance, were all sort of Lutedites by night and
then reform politicians or reformers by day, and so that
sort of thread continues, and it feeds into the broader
workers movement, people who are fighting for the right to
(34:07):
collectively bargain to repeal these acts that prevented them from
forming unions that were on the books, and so Luddites
sort of take on more of a political character. But
the broader tale or legacy of Leutism is this transference
into the reform movement where people actually do finally win concessions,
(34:28):
the right to unionize, the right to fight for better conditions.
It sort of segues in even to the right to vote,
so Lueddites are really vital in activating sort of a
political consciousness. There's a famous book called The Making of
the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson, and his
whole sort of meaty middle of the book is all
about the Luttites, because it's this explosive, catalyzing event that
(34:52):
gets workers from all over the country to sort of
go like, hey, this is kind of happening in my
industry too. It has the same broad shape, like I
have like the same grievances against my boss and over
the way he's using machinery and they're fighting back in
this way, and I can kind of imagine myself doing that.
So he argues that it really just sort of forms
(35:14):
class consciousness in England.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
For one of the first times.
Speaker 4 (35:18):
Coming up, lessons we can learn from the Luddites. Stick
with us, Welcome back to Part Time Genius and Tech Stuff,
our first crossover episode where we're talking to the wonderful
(35:41):
writer Brian Merchant, all about Luddites. Let's get back into it.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
On the very first page of the book, you write, quote,
this could be today, and you ask the reader to quote,
imagine millions of ordinary people plagued by a fear that
technology is accelerating out of control. They worry that machines
are coming to take away that job, upend the order
of their lives. Inequality is rempant, and power is wielded
by those commanding wealth and new technologies. You don't need
(36:07):
a great imagination to picture the scene. How do you
understand what's happening right now today through the lens of
your work on the LA lights.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 5 (36:19):
The corollaries are so stark that you barely do need
any imagination at all to see them. I mean, it's
just right there, especially with generative AI and the way
that it's being used in a lot of creative industries
right now. But more broadly, there's a ton of anxieties
(36:41):
around AI and what it's going to mean for the
broader economy and for working people.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
It's almost to a t.
Speaker 5 (36:50):
You can kind of go down the list of things
that are happening and it's like, well, they had these
machines and they could create stuff that was cheaper but.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Not really better.
Speaker 5 (37:01):
You had to have people to like sort of go
oversee the output to make sure you could still use it.
But you could still make enough of a case that
you can de skill or sort of move work away
from this column of skilled workers and put it over
here in this column. So when you're looking at you know,
artists or illustrators or copywriters or a lot of creative
(37:23):
workers who are seeing the impacts already of generative AI
on their livelihoods, like this is the form it's taking, right.
It's not that it's being automated away completely, but the
fear is just that it's kind of a wrecking ball
to the norms and standards of their livelihoods, and that
(37:43):
suddenly somebody who has access to mid journey and no
training as an artist at all can kind of, you know,
if a company wants to, you know, take the risk
running a foul right now of copyright law or whatever
things that are still undecided, they can do that. Instead,
they can produce output if they need images for their
you know, PowerPoint slides or for their their magazines or
(38:06):
whatever whatever it may be.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
Who are who are the Laddites of today? I mean,
is it my engage's mother who who requires their emails
to be printed out? Is Itoni? Is it Christian Small's
the Amazon factory worker who led that industrial action? I mean,
who in this sort of spectrum. Do you identify the
new Lottites.
Speaker 5 (38:26):
Yeah, I think of those three options, Christian Smalls is
the closest, although he is also I think, just a
very traditional and effective union organizer. But a lot of
the grievances that Amazon workers have do come from the
company's insistence on, you know, using technological tools to sort
(38:47):
of surveil them or sort of like gamify their workplace.
They have to be so productive, you know all the
stories about how long they have to complete a task.
You know drivers that are peeing in bottles because they
don't want to get docked for stopping when they're delivering
a package. So those are all sort of technologically motivated.
But I would say the Ledites of today are largely,
(39:10):
but not entirely, people who see AI or technologies creeping
into their workplaces and are willing to sort of refuse
the way that it's being deployed against them. So the
most powerful example, I think are the writers and actors
in Hollywood who really took a stand in twenty twenty
three against the way that the studios were hinting that
(39:33):
they wanted to use AI, which is to write scripts
or to generate scripts and then have writers rewrite them
for less money, less fees, less intellectual property, thus again
not necessarily eliminating the role of the writer, but degrading
it significantly. You have nurses who are fighting hospitals that
sort of want to deploy AI in the similarly top
(39:55):
down way, with executives saying, well, a I should be
used for this and this and this, instead of saying, nurses,
how would you find AI useful? In which context might
you want to use this now? Instead, it's like, you
must use AI to make this diagnosis. If you do
it incorrectly, then we can penalize you. And the nurses
are looking at this and saying this is going to.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Be a nightmare.
Speaker 5 (40:15):
It is a nightmare because it's taking more time to
get medicine to patients who need it, and I can't
override it because it's built in. It's again, it's the
issue always comes when it's top down, when the technology
is rammed through by management or thrust upon working a
population who has no real democratics say in how it's
(40:36):
then used. So I've talked to nurses educators who are
seeing AI handed down by administrators to put into the classrooms,
and again usually The issue isn't just that the AI exists,
it's the way that bosses are forcing people to use
it that they don't like.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
So I think as some of the objectives.
Speaker 5 (40:58):
Of AI companies because come a little more pointed as
they try to infiltrate further into workplaces and people feel
the heat more, I do think with it will start
to see even more resistance there.
Speaker 4 (41:10):
I think I think that's what was so eye opening
about all this was that Luedtites really weren't against progress
or technology, but but really the social costs that we're
you know, coming from this. But ever since writing this book,
and I'm sure talking with friends and stuff, has anyone
taken up the term LA as a badge of.
Speaker 5 (41:30):
Honor besides me, h, yeah, there are It's like the
rested development.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
There are dozens of us, dozens.
Speaker 5 (41:41):
But no, I think it's you are seeing it pop
up more and more.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
There are a number.
Speaker 5 (41:47):
Of of podcasts and cultural figures and people who identify
more directly with the Luttites. It's hard. It's hard to
overcome that to you know. It's and I think a
lot of people are kind of wondering whether do we
just reclaim the term outright do we say what we're
doing is something different? But like no, I, since I've
written this book, I think not a day goes by
where somebody tags me in some thread or sends me
(42:09):
some message that today I found out the Ludites kick ass,
or today I found out the Ludites were awesome.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
And it's happening all the time.
Speaker 5 (42:18):
Artists, writers, librarians, archivists, journalists, people are you know, sort
of at least recognizing, you know, that the Luddites were
right at least to have a wide range of grievances.
You know, there can be disagreement about their tactics, but
their critique what they were angry about.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
I think seeing what we're seeing and.
Speaker 5 (42:41):
Right now it looks a lot like AI is going
to be unleashed by a handful of extremely large companies
that are more than likely to pocket most of the games,
then it's not hard to see, you know, where where
the grievances is. I think again, most Ludites even today
are not just like no, AI smash it.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
I hate it all, But.
Speaker 5 (43:03):
It's like, we absolutely have to make sure that this
technology is not just primarily exploiting people for the benefit
of a few execs in Silicon Valley, right, And I
think that that is something that just kind of intuitively
is seen by more people now, and so when they
hear the Luddite story, it's like, oh, yeah, well that's
not all that different than us today, So maybe I
(43:24):
am a Loedite.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Thank you so much, Brian, Yeah, my pleasure. If you
want to hear more from Brian, I'm sure have him
back on tech stuff really soon. And he also has
his own brand new podcast. Check it out. It's called
System Crash.
Speaker 4 (43:38):
I actually love System Crash and I've been binging it
this week. But that's it for today's Part Time Genius.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
And today's tech stuff for this week.
Speaker 4 (43:44):
If you like what you hear, hit us up on
Twitter or Instagram, or drop us a line in the
Apple Reviews. Also, you can check out Kaleidoscope's other shows.
And if you have a great Luddite fact we missed
or have a topic you want us to cover, be
short or write us about those two.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
And thank you so much for listening to both Part
Time Genius and Text
Guess what oz?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
What's that?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Man? Gosh?
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Well, I am super excited to do this crossover episode
with you, but before we get started, maybe we should
tell everyone what's going on here. So we are both
podcast hosts. I do Part Time Genius, a ridiculous general
knowledge show that tackles some of the world's most important questions.
I'd have to say things like what's the story behind
(00:48):
dogs playing poker? Why does Lichtenstein export so many false teeth?
And you are the brand new co host of Tech Stuff.
It is a wildly popular show about the latest technology
and what it says about does is humans. But I
feel like we should let people in on a little secret.
We are also business partners. A few years ago we
(01:08):
founded the company behind both our shows, which is called Kaleidoscope.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
We spend an awful lot of time together, but never
recording a podcast together until now, which is kind of crazy.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
That is true.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
So today we're producing a little bit of a network
effect where we're doing a crossover between two Kaleidoscope shows,
Part Time Genius and Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
I'm so excited about this, And you know, we were
having I think it was burgers and drinks with our
palkate and she came up with a perfect topic for
us both, which is Luddites.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So what do you know about Luddites.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
I don't know a lot about Luddites. I know, I
hear that word all the time, and I associate it
with England in the past and today with people who
are kind of branded as technophobes.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
I mean, I feel like we refer to my mom
as a Luddite a lot and have for a while,
because you know when she told my dad like, oh,
I need to check my email, and what that meant
was he had to go into her email print out
a stack of email.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Print it.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
That's that's real classify story of Nomon. That's the ATCO vibes.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
She is kind of the CEO of our family.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
But you know, so I feel like most people probably
think ludite means anti tech or being against adopting new technologies.
But weirdly, that couldn't be further from the historical truth.
So the best description is that the Luddites were a
worker's rights movement, and these guys were your countrymen, specifically
(02:38):
as your countrymen, So they loosely formed in the early
eighteen hundreds in northern towns and villages in England. And
at the time the wool and textile trade was the
most important industry in Britain. It employed almost a million people,
which is remarkable, right, and textile weavers were the largest
single group of workers in the country for over a century.
(03:01):
People were really well employed, and some of them even
worked from home. And then something cropped up called the
gig mill. And this is where things get dicey, right.
The gig mill was a wooden machine that napped up
the wool or the cotton into a softened fabric. And
these mills started cropping up with remarkable pace. So basically,
(03:21):
entrepreneurs use these mills to build factories and put hundreds
of thousands of workers out of work. They brought in
unpaid child labor, and they pushed families to the brink
of starvation.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Well, I am having an association here which is a
William Blake poem and also Britain's most famous him Jerusalem,
which the choruses and did those feet in ancient times
walk upon England's mountains green? And did the countenance shine
forth upon these dark satanic mills?
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Dark satanic mills.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Dark satanic mills. Yeah, William Blake took up his pen,
but I think others took up more aggressive hitchforks.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah, so you're exactly right.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Like the workers organized and bands of dozens of them
would go out at night. They covered their faces with
coal or with mass and they were armed with blacksmith hammers,
and they'd actually break the machines right and and weirdly,
each group leader went by the same name, General Lud. Now,
the attacks were often prefaced with a note or a
(04:27):
letter pinned to the door of the mill with a warning,
if you do not pull down your frames, my company
will visit and destroy them, signed ned Lud.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
So this is the we are anonymous, we are legion
of the nineteenth century. Completely who was ned Lud?
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Though, so ned Lud was not a real person. He
was a fictional character based on a myth about an
apprentice who smashed his boss's device and then fled to
Sherwood Forest, which I'm sure most of our listeners know
from Robinhood. It's the wooded area where all those merry
men took refuge, and it's not a quinc evidence that
ned Lud was also set to reside there. Considering the
(05:03):
spirit of righteous rebelliousness. Anyway, the movement grew pretty quickly,
and before long there were about fifty machines a week
that were getting destroyed, and the raids definitely got bigger
and weirder as they went along. So many of these
Luddites would pull stockings over their faces during the night raids.
One account talked about a dude wearing a bloody mask
(05:24):
made from a calf skin to disguise himself. Some of
the Luddites wore costumes, and a few of the largest
bands were led by men in drag who called themselves
General Lud's Wife.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Isn't that incredible?
Speaker 4 (05:39):
So there are in fact famous illustrations from the time
of Ludite leader's in dress with factories burning in their background.
Supposedly it was an homage to the women who had
also lost their jobs of yarn spinning to automation, so
it was kind of in solidarity with them. Anyway, words
spread about the machine breakers and their cause became really,
(06:00):
really popular. As you can imagine, Basically everyone knew who
was involved, and sometimes these raids even began occurring in
full daylight, but no one talked like the villagers did
not snitch.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Wow, that's amazing. So it was like almost like an
open secret who was involved.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Yeah, but they were still pretty cautious. So the Luddites
had all these codes and handshakes to protect themselves. Like
if you were going to a meeting at a local pub,
there was a process, right, So first you'd make eye
contact with a Luddite guard who was posted across the room.
Then you'd make a coded hand gesture. The guard would
sort of keep a straight face, keep their cool, they
(06:37):
might even look bored, take a drink, but then they
would suddenly return the gesture. And then you'd actually head
into the back, maybe up a narrow staircase, to a
smaller room, and then you'd have to say a password,
and the password was win work, so you'd say that
to a guard and then finally you'd get into the
secret meeting.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
That's incredible. So it's almost like a Masonic vibe as well.
But what I mean, how they how they looked upon
by the broader British society and how much damage did
they do?
Speaker 4 (07:04):
I mean they did a lot of damage. One account
from the time, this is from the Leeds Mercury. It
reported that since the commencement of the Ludite system in Nottingham,
forty two lace frames and five hundred and forty four
plain silk and cotton stocking frames have been destroyed, and
that amounts to about thirteen four hundred pounds in eighteen
(07:25):
eleven prices or about sixteen million dollars today.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Well, no wonder they were catching people's attention.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Yeah, So the Luodites in the early nineteenth century weren't
so much anti technology as really they wanted a humane
adaptation of technology. And that's I think where some of
this distinction comes in.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Well, I'm definitely fascinated by everything you're saying, mangsh But
I guess if we really want to dig into the
understanding of the Luddite movement, there's someone we should talk to,
Brian Merchant, who wrote an incredible four hundred page book
about it. It's called Blood in the Machine, The Origins
of the Rebellion. Again big tech, and lucky for us,
we managed to get him on the line to talk
about it. Let's dive in. I know, Mange, shouldn't I
(08:09):
were excited to talk about the book Blood in the Machine,
But maybe a good place to thought would be why
did you decide to spend too much time writing a
four hundred page book about the Luddites.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (08:19):
There's a couple different answers to that, And the first
is that I had sort of spent a long time
as a tech journalist. So you hear it, the term ludite,
it's this derogatory term, and I had just kind of
integrated this term lutite. Oh, someone who hates technology, someone
who gets angry when they have to use a new technology,
makes them want to smash their phone, or you know,
(08:40):
just against progress.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
And so the minute that it became clear to me.
Speaker 5 (08:46):
That that was in no way the truth, sort of
like all of my you know, journalistic instincts kicked in
and there's nothing that a journalist likes to do more
than to overturn an assumption. Right, So like I spent
I spent like the nerdiest labor day weekend of my life,
just like reading academic journal articles about the Ledites. And
(09:08):
I was a reporter for Vice at the time. So
I wrote this piece called You've got the Lutites all
wrong because it was clear to me that they're not backwards,
they're not anti progress, they're anti bosses using technology to
sort of exploit them, to grind their livelihoods away, and
so like that sort of key insight stuck with me
(09:30):
because that was over ten years ago. So it was
really at the same time that we started seeing more
of the fallout from the labor forces at Amazon, the
warehouse workers who were working and often really degrading and
inhuman conditions. When it started to be clear that Uber,
after initially seeming to be this great thing, was starting
to squeeze its drivers, and we had stories about drivers
(09:53):
who couldn't afford rent were sleeping in their cars. So
this was all before the AI boom and the fear
that AI was going to replace our jobs. There's all
these examples of ways that tech was really being used
to hurt people or it was having a deleterious effect
on their lives. And then that kind of collided with
this thinking about the Luddites, and I said, maybe this
(10:14):
is a good lens to sort of look at these
emergent resistances to technology. Maybe we should understand more about
why people have real issues, real complaints about some of
the forces that technology is unleashing on their lives.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
I also love that though you figured this out over
labor day. There's something so funny about that. But take
us into this. Can you situate us in the history
event year. I think it's the eighteen hundreds, Yorkshire, Northern
Nish England. Can you paint a picture of the times
that we're talking about.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
So this is the very beginning days of the industrial revolution.
It's not yet quite at the point where if you
just kind of close your eyes and you say, like
peak industrial Revolution and you're imagining the billowing smoke and
like the coughing children working in factories.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
We're not quite there yet. That is beginning to take shape.
Speaker 5 (11:07):
So there have been a number of mechanical innovations. So
you had like the steam engine that's allowing for new
sources of power. You have water power coming onto the scene,
and then you have basically all of these inventions that
allows the work of weaving a garment to be done
(11:28):
by one person instead of say six, So it can
automate this task to a great degree.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
You still need a worker to run.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
The machine to make sure it's not screwing up, but
it is speeding up the process by which you can
produce goods. And industrialists and factory owners realize that they
can start buying these machines, machines like the gig mill,
the shearing frame that automate different parts of the clothing trade,
and that they can organize them into an early sort
(11:59):
of version of the factory. This is like the late
seventeen nineties early eighteen hundreds that I'm talking about here,
and it's in the midlands of England around Nottingham and Yorkshire,
and so you have workers who are used to working
at home with their families running the machine. They're not
(12:20):
anti technology, they're really good technicians technologists in their homes,
but they start to see the emergence of the factory.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Who are the innovators behind these kind of proto factories.
Speaker 5 (12:31):
The most famous is there's a man named Richard Arkwright
and he's generally considered to be the father of the factory.
You can go in these buildings today and kind of
see for yourself really awful working conditions. There's no ventilation,
there are multiple stories up to six stories, so it's noisy,
(12:53):
and it's just sort of churning out the yarn right
that used to be spun by hand. And so Arkwright
really kind of helped automate away the first sort of
rung of cloth workers. Arkwright figured out a way to
sort of make an astonishing volume of yarn.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Right.
Speaker 5 (13:12):
I opened the book, in fact, with one of the
inventors who will later invent the power loom touring like
this factory, and they're all ruminating all and his sort
of contemporaries are saying, well, it's one thing to make yarn.
That was just that's just women's work. It's another altogether
to automate like weaving a finished garment like that skilled
labor that'll never happen. And then he sets about trying
(13:34):
to do it.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
I think you called Arkwright the first startup founder to
launch a unicorn company, which I love. But how did
the laudite start to fight back? What kind of early
industrial action did they take?
Speaker 5 (13:47):
So basically arc Right's blueprint spreads around the country. People
recognize that you can sort of concentrate labor, and before
long this method of industrialization starts to lower prices and
the artisan workers, the skilled workers, who are still the
(14:07):
largest industrial base of worker in England.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
At the time, England was a cloth producing country.
Speaker 5 (14:12):
It exports it all over the world, so you have
more workers doing this than ever and they start to
see this work basically being transferred from that domestic system
where they're working at home into the factory system where
they're either going to have to compete on price they
have to start working for less, or they have to
go work in the factory where it's just a very
dehumanizing and often dangerous place to work. So they start
(14:37):
to form different modes of resistance, and first they go
to Parliament and say, hey, these industrialists are using machinery
that violate these number of rules on the books, like
we have laws that say how long you have to
be an apprentice for we have laws that say how
many threads have to go into a certain garment for
it to be sold on the market. And they're just
(14:57):
laughed out of Parliament time and time again, saying all
we want is a minimum wage, or maybe we could
figure out a way to get attacks on the output
that they're making that can sort of pay for social benefits,
because they're just sort of tearing up the social contract.
And this isn't the twenty first century. We don't have
a globalized economy. I can't go get a job at
Starbucks pretty much. Weaving is the only thing I know
(15:19):
how to do. So you throw us a bone. Parliament
does not, so they box them out for like ten
years of fighting, and we get to eighteen o nine,
they tear up all the rules altogether. Now it's the
working class pitted against these new industrialists. It's illegal toform unions.
(15:39):
There's no recourse at all, there's no democracy. So you
have a really volatile situation. And finally there's the crop
failure and then some intense tariffs placed on exports during
the Napoleonic War, and people.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Are quite literally going without food.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
That Luttites would often say, you know, the factory owners
have stolen our bread, because again, to them, it didn't
look like the complex machinations of a globalized economy. It
looked like they had a job, they got a fair wage.
And then one day somebody built a giant factory started
selling crappier stuff, taking away their market share, and now
(16:21):
that guy had money. It didn't look complicated to them.
It looked like theft, and it felt like theft. So
it just all goes up in flames. The Luddites emerged.
They say, you've left us no choice. They organized this
gorilla rebellion to fight back.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
Coming up, we meet some of the main characters in
this Ludite movement. Stick with us and welcome back to
the crossover between part time genius and tech stuff where
(16:58):
we're talking to the wonderful author Brian Merchant. So could
you tell us a little bit about George Meller and
his role in.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
All of this.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, So, George Meller is the Ledite that I.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
Focus on the most in the book, and we sort
of follow his reluctance to take up the hammer, so
to speak. But he's watching the first sort of uprising happen,
which happens in Nottingham. What they do is they first
send letters to the owners of the obnoxious machines and
they say, your factory has three hundred power looms and
(17:33):
it's putting twelve hundred of our brothers out of work.
Take down those machines or you'll get a visit from
ned Lud's army. Ned Lud is this apocryphal figure who
was supposed to have sort of rebelled against his master,
but they use him as this avatar.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
They sign these letters ned Lud.
Speaker 5 (17:50):
You know you're going to get a visit from ned
Lud's army, And then sure enough, a lot of factory
owners do ned Lud's army shows up with hammers in hand.
They hold up an overseer at gunpoint, and they sneak
into the factory and they smashed the machines.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
But only the machines that are that are taking.
Speaker 5 (18:05):
Jobs and tearing up the social contract, just those that
are sort of transferring wealth into the hands of the
factory owner away from them. So it was a very
pointed tactic and people loved them at the time. People
cheered the Ludites in the street. Magistrates would come out
and just kind of watch it happen.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
The factory owners would be going.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
What are you gonna do something about this, buddy, and
they and they're like, well, they kind of have a point.
So at first the Luddites were super popular. They were winning,
they won concessions. A bunch of factory owners said, I
don't want any part of this. Just you know, we'll
raise the prices again, We'll stop using these machines.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
You guys win.
Speaker 5 (18:44):
So for at least six months or so, it worked
to some extent. And so George Meller is up in
the West Riding, which is these days a few hours
north of Nottingham, and he's reading about this in the newspaper,
and he's saying, these guys have it right. This is
(19:05):
what we should be doing locally, because prices are falling
here right in our town, in Huddersfield, which is the
broader area that George Meller and his cohort worked, and
they had been watching their wages go down, their coworkers
literally starving, sometimes quite desperately, so conditions were extremely dire.
(19:29):
And in the book, I'd chart George Miller's sort of
ambivalence to full throated embrace of this idea of Luddism,
of becoming a Luddite, and then he becomes the local
sort of ned lud or general lud, leading other workers
into battle against the men that are quite literally causing
(19:51):
them to starve.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
One of these is William Horstfel Right.
Speaker 5 (19:55):
Yes, William's Horsefall is one of the two most hated
factory owners in town, and in part because he was
just like he was so unabashed to the point where,
you know, like as he would ride between his factories
into town.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Little children would would run.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
Up and taunt him and say, you know, the Luddites
are gonna get you, and he'll.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Try to whip them with a horsewhip.
Speaker 5 (20:21):
He was just like a classic like sort of mustache
twirling villain, like you really like these things that. His
quote was like I look forward to the day when
I like ride up to my saddle girths in Luddite blood.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
So he's gone, wow, yeah, So he's taunting them.
Speaker 5 (20:36):
He's sort of also turning his factory into a fortress,
so he's hiring mercenaries. So should the Luddites attack him,
they you know, he would gun them down before they
got there, or pour boiling oil on their heads. Things
like we would you know, associate with an assault on
a castle in medieval times or something. But it's an
extreme case because you got to remember that, like this
(20:59):
is on the front line of just industrial capitalism. This
is just taking shape right now, and no one really
knows what to make of it. A lot of factory
owners were like, ah, like I'm really torn. But if
I don't buy automating machinery, then my neighbor will and
he'll buy more of it and I won't be able
to compete then, And some factory owners say, I'm out
of the game. I don't want to contribute to the
(21:19):
ruination of working men's lives. I give up, I'm out. Others,
you know, continue to try to do it the old
way and buy from the weavers who work at home,
but it really sort of ultimately everybody has to compete
with men like Horsefall.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
So one of the.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
Things we were interested in was like how the Loveites
aren't just this group of people with the mallets to
break up these machines, but that they were actually kind
of savvy with pr as well. Yeah, is that something
you could talk about.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
Yeah, of course they were savvy in a way that
we might recognize today. The entire sort of construction of
their movement and the that they sort of chose to
go about building Luddism is really interesting, and it's decentralized.
It's almost meme based, right, So you have this figure
(22:10):
ned lud who is made up almost certainly, and you
have a set of tactics that can be replicated or emulated.
Where you write a threatening letter, you make sure it's
like posted out on the door, so it's like written
up in the newspapers or people see it and talk
about it and it causes a stir and you build
up this sense that your movement could be anywhere, right,
(22:33):
that's not your real names aren't attached to it.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
These letters are showing up anywhere.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
And it's it's replicable because if you're in a completely
different part of the country and you have the similar
grievances or ones that you want to address through, this
means you can just become a Lottite, right. You don't
have to have this central planning committee. You can just
gather your men in a pub as they did at
the time, and you can write your own letters. So
(23:00):
that's exactly what happens. It happens around Manchester and in
different parts of Nottinghamshire and all these different parts of
the Midlands of England, so they a lot of them
just kind of explodes.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
I remember when I first moved to New York, it
was a time of occupy Woolve Street and there was
this like very exciting feeling in the street downtown that
like people are taken the streets and that like the
authorities didn't know what to do. And then like a
few days past and the authorities decided to basically make
their tactics much more harsh, and then Occupy Wolf Street
was over right, So and it makes me think a
(23:34):
little bit about the Battle of Wolfitz mill in your
in your book.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Yeah, that's an analogy.
Speaker 5 (23:39):
I was thinking about a lot too, and black lives matter,
where you can basically take the core ideas and the
core grievances and then they mobilize them because you didn't
need sort of, you know, an approval structure where you
have like a hierarchy and leadership that has to be
consulted before you move on. But yeah, as you said,
(24:00):
the Ludites run into real trouble when a few things happen,
and that's when the state makes it a crime punishable
by death to break a machine. So now if you
break a machine, you can be strung up and you
can be hung. And they've sent tens of thousands of
troops to occupy the districts where Luddism is going on.
(24:23):
The state has it is the largest domestic occupation military
occupation of England in history, with just at one point
north of thirty thousand troops stationed just to fight the Ludites.
And then you finally have sort of this license given
by the state for industrialists to.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Fight fire with fire.
Speaker 5 (24:48):
Basically until this point, the Luddites are not violent except
against machines. They are breaking the machines, as this labor tactic,
as this strategy, but with the law passed, with the
army there and with like the mercenaries there, factory owners
are basically given license to shoot back. And so that's
what really happens at this famous Battle of Raffold's Mill,
(25:10):
when it's supposed to be sort of the crowning achievement
of the Luedtite movement. At that point, George Meller is
helping to lead this effort. He's gathered over one hundred
Ledtites and they're just going to go and attack Raffold's Mill,
and little do they know that this factory too has
been turned into a military fortress. So they get there
(25:31):
and guards open fire. A bunch of Ledites are gunned down,
they can't get inside. They basically have to call a retreat,
and somewhere between three and four Lutedites are believed to
have died, possibly even many more. But it's a big disaster.
And one of George Meller's sort of close friends, somebody
who he had sort of talked into joining the Ledite movement,
(25:54):
is one of the men who was gunned down, a
young apprentice and kind of sens sends George Meller off
the deep end, and he sort of you know, breaks
bad as it were, and he goes and assassinates the
other factory owner, William Horsefall in cold Blood.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
He assassinates, and it was that Hostel basically thought that
he'd won and ventured out of the factory fortress and
and Mellow was lying in wait or how did this happen?
Speaker 5 (26:25):
Yeah, I mean basically Horsefall was he was never afraid,
He was never cowed really, so it really does speak
again this sort of this tech titan mindset where like
you have to say, you know, people be damned, I
don't care if they hate me. I don't care if
it's even dangerous for me to be in the public.
(26:45):
I'm going to sort of run rough shot over these
norms and standards and just show that, you know, I
believe what I'm doing is right, is justified. Just kind
of like arc right back in the day. He had
also had to accept being despised by a lot of people.
So Horsefall was just he he had gone out and
wash was had a drink and was was riding home,
(27:08):
and they knew the route that he took from the
cloth market where he would sell his goods back to
his his factory.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
And his home.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
So they Yeah, they lay in wait and they ambushed
him on the way and they gunned him down.
Speaker 4 (27:21):
Tell us about this trial with with about Horsefall.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (27:25):
So again another indicator of how sort of widely liked
the Luddites were is that for a long time, well
both liked and feared, you should say, they would nobody
would inform on them like they would. There would be
entire towns where most people, with most working people would
know exactly who was involved right in a in a
(27:46):
factory raid, who smashed the factory owners automating machinery last night?
Who was behind this? No one would say a word. No,
The authorities could not get anybody to come forward. And
so it was the same with uh with the case
of Horsefall. When the authorities started making the rounds and
sort of pulling everybody in and interrogating them, nobody said
(28:08):
anything for months and months and months. So it finally
took the authorities basically putting a huge sort of bounty
or promising a big payment for anybody who brought in information.
And then one of the mothers of one of the
men sort of George, enlisted to go kind of assassinate
Horsefall said you got to take this, and then sort
(28:30):
of went and told the magistrate that it was George
and they and it finally flipped him. So it took
a long time before they could even get him, you know,
you get him behind bars. But you know, once they did,
I think it was understood that this would make a
good sort of show trial. Right, so it was going
(28:52):
to be George and a few of his compadres who
were believed to be there when they when they assassinated Horsefall.
But then it was going to be another round of
like over a dozen just Luddites who it had have
been involved in sort of the factory strikes and breaking
machines more broadly. So, I think the state understood that
(29:14):
this was their best chance at making this very unsympathetic.
The trial is is packed, it's it's like a big
sort of media event, and you know, the state uses
it to make this case not just about George and
the assassination, but of Luddism more broadly.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
So this is where for the one of the first
times you have this.
Speaker 5 (29:39):
Equation of Luddism to sort of backwards looking, to being dumb,
to being oh these these deluded men. Of course, it's
left out of the equation that they're that they're starving,
that their families can't eat, that that many of them
were involved in reform protest movements for decades, or try
(30:00):
to get things done the right way before it got
to this point. All of that, of course, is out
the window. It's just like, look at this, Look at
these Luedites who are willing to do.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Violence because they hate machines so much.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
So the state is not just wanting to convict George
in his compadres, is really looking to sort of use
this trials and opportunity to win the battle of ideas
and to smear the Luddite movement in a way that
I guess with quite effective ultimately.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 5 (30:28):
And at the time a lot of newspapers are still
financed by the monarchy, by its prince. Regent is running
the country at the time, and he does his office
does issue a lot of propaganda about the Leddites, you know,
from the beginning, off and on, and then really seizes
this moment to again, yeah, equate the Leddites as dummies,
(30:50):
as malcontents, as backwards looking destroying that which they do
not understand a lot of the key ingredients that would
sort of be stamped on history as as the Ludites
as we understand them today.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Well happened to the actual Luddites, to Georgi and co.
Speaker 5 (31:05):
They're hung, right, They're hung publicly, Yeah, outside of the
walls of York Castle. And it's a spectacle, you know,
it's an event like this is what happens when you
turn against progress. And then even more notable shortly after that,
they have the trial of the Lueddites just strictly for
(31:25):
machine breaking and they're all hung too, you know, over
a dozen people. You know, once again just sort of
underlining the fact that this is what will happen to
you if you oppose the machinery of the state, of
this approach that we have taken to industrialization.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Because the rich, the elite.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
In England at the time really liked industrialization obviously, like
they when factories are built on their lands, that's more taxes,
more income. They benefit from that, it contributes to the
war effort. In their eyes, they can produce a great
deal more so they have an interest in sort of
defending this centralized industrial approach that the Luddites threatened so
(32:08):
this sort of version of Luddism as backwards looking is
therefore sort of entered into the history books, and it
has remained as such ever since for two hundred years.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
It is it is crazy to think that like in
the beginning, there were offering ideas, trying to propose reforms.
They were like, you know, targeting just these specific machines
and then you know, they become the enemy of the state.
But where does the Luttite movement go, Like does it
peter out? Like do they have any wins in this
whole process?
Speaker 5 (32:39):
Yeah, I want it just for one second to what
you just said there. I think it's really interesting that
they did, like they proposed even something that would sort
of like that sounds today like something that like Andrew
Yang or Bill Gates has said, you know, tax like
the productivity of the machines a little bit like.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
The robot tax, the robot tax.
Speaker 5 (32:59):
It would work this same way. They had the same idea.
These are not radical, you know, Bill Gates is hardly
a radical. Were they really did try in good faith
to sort of suggest ways to build a better runway
to the future rather than one where just a handful
of rich guys to get to hoard all the gains
from it at everyone else's expense, and they just well,
(33:23):
leudism is what it came to. So the trials are
in eighteen thirteen. There are sort of more sporadic sort
of ebbs and flows of Leutism until about eighteen nineteen,
but by far the most explosive years of Lettism are
eighteen eleven eighteen twelve, and then sort of when it's
(33:44):
crushed in eighteen thirteen. But importantly, there are some Lutedites who,
for instance, were all sort of Lutedites by night and
then reform politicians or reformers by day, and so that
sort of thread continues, and it feeds into the broader
workers movement, people who are fighting for the right to
(34:07):
collectively bargain to repeal these acts that prevented them from
forming unions that were on the books, and so Luddites
sort of take on more of a political character. But
the broader tale or legacy of Leutism is this transference
into the reform movement where people actually do finally win concessions,
(34:28):
the right to unionize, the right to fight for better conditions.
It sort of segues in even to the right to vote,
so Lueddites are really vital in activating sort of a
political consciousness. There's a famous book called The Making of
the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson, and his
whole sort of meaty middle of the book is all
about the Luttites, because it's this explosive, catalyzing event that
(34:52):
gets workers from all over the country to sort of
go like, hey, this is kind of happening in my
industry too. It has the same broad shape, like I
have like the same grievances against my boss and over
the way he's using machinery and they're fighting back in
this way, and I can kind of imagine myself doing that.
So he argues that it really just sort of forms
(35:14):
class consciousness in England.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
For one of the first times.
Speaker 4 (35:18):
Coming up, lessons we can learn from the Luddites. Stick
with us, Welcome back to Part Time Genius and Tech Stuff,
our first crossover episode where we're talking to the wonderful
(35:41):
writer Brian Merchant, all about Luddites. Let's get back into it.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
On the very first page of the book, you write, quote,
this could be today, and you ask the reader to quote,
imagine millions of ordinary people plagued by a fear that
technology is accelerating out of control. They worry that machines
are coming to take away that job, upend the order
of their lives. Inequality is rempant, and power is wielded
by those commanding wealth and new technologies. You don't need
(36:07):
a great imagination to picture the scene. How do you
understand what's happening right now today through the lens of
your work on the LA lights.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 5 (36:19):
The corollaries are so stark that you barely do need
any imagination at all to see them. I mean, it's
just right there, especially with generative AI and the way
that it's being used in a lot of creative industries
right now. But more broadly, there's a ton of anxieties
(36:41):
around AI and what it's going to mean for the
broader economy and for working people.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
It's almost to a t.
Speaker 5 (36:50):
You can kind of go down the list of things
that are happening and it's like, well, they had these
machines and they could create stuff that was cheaper but.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Not really better.
Speaker 5 (37:01):
You had to have people to like sort of go
oversee the output to make sure you could still use it.
But you could still make enough of a case that
you can de skill or sort of move work away
from this column of skilled workers and put it over
here in this column. So when you're looking at you know,
artists or illustrators or copywriters or a lot of creative
(37:23):
workers who are seeing the impacts already of generative AI
on their livelihoods, like this is the form it's taking, right.
It's not that it's being automated away completely, but the
fear is just that it's kind of a wrecking ball
to the norms and standards of their livelihoods, and that
(37:43):
suddenly somebody who has access to mid journey and no
training as an artist at all can kind of, you know,
if a company wants to, you know, take the risk
running a foul right now of copyright law or whatever
things that are still undecided, they can do that. Instead,
they can produce output if they need images for their
you know, PowerPoint slides or for their their magazines or
(38:06):
whatever whatever it may be.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
Who are who are the Laddites of today? I mean,
is it my engage's mother who who requires their emails
to be printed out? Is Itoni? Is it Christian Small's
the Amazon factory worker who led that industrial action? I mean,
who in this sort of spectrum. Do you identify the
new Lottites.
Speaker 5 (38:26):
Yeah, I think of those three options, Christian Smalls is
the closest, although he is also I think, just a
very traditional and effective union organizer. But a lot of
the grievances that Amazon workers have do come from the
company's insistence on, you know, using technological tools to sort
(38:47):
of surveil them or sort of like gamify their workplace.
They have to be so productive, you know all the
stories about how long they have to complete a task.
You know drivers that are peeing in bottles because they
don't want to get docked for stopping when they're delivering
a package. So those are all sort of technologically motivated.
But I would say the Ledites of today are largely,
(39:10):
but not entirely, people who see AI or technologies creeping
into their workplaces and are willing to sort of refuse
the way that it's being deployed against them. So the
most powerful example, I think are the writers and actors
in Hollywood who really took a stand in twenty twenty
three against the way that the studios were hinting that
(39:33):
they wanted to use AI, which is to write scripts
or to generate scripts and then have writers rewrite them
for less money, less fees, less intellectual property, thus again
not necessarily eliminating the role of the writer, but degrading
it significantly. You have nurses who are fighting hospitals that
sort of want to deploy AI in the similarly top
(39:55):
down way, with executives saying, well, a I should be
used for this and this and this, instead of saying, nurses,
how would you find AI useful? In which context might
you want to use this now? Instead, it's like, you
must use AI to make this diagnosis. If you do
it incorrectly, then we can penalize you. And the nurses
are looking at this and saying this is going to.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Be a nightmare.
Speaker 5 (40:15):
It is a nightmare because it's taking more time to
get medicine to patients who need it, and I can't
override it because it's built in. It's again, it's the
issue always comes when it's top down, when the technology
is rammed through by management or thrust upon working a
population who has no real democratics say in how it's
(40:36):
then used. So I've talked to nurses educators who are
seeing AI handed down by administrators to put into the classrooms,
and again usually The issue isn't just that the AI exists,
it's the way that bosses are forcing people to use
it that they don't like.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
So I think as some of the objectives.
Speaker 5 (40:58):
Of AI companies because come a little more pointed as
they try to infiltrate further into workplaces and people feel
the heat more, I do think with it will start
to see even more resistance there.
Speaker 4 (41:10):
I think I think that's what was so eye opening
about all this was that Luedtites really weren't against progress
or technology, but but really the social costs that we're
you know, coming from this. But ever since writing this book,
and I'm sure talking with friends and stuff, has anyone
taken up the term LA as a badge of.
Speaker 5 (41:30):
Honor besides me, h, yeah, there are It's like the
rested development.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
There are dozens of us, dozens.
Speaker 5 (41:41):
But no, I think it's you are seeing it pop
up more and more.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
There are a number.
Speaker 5 (41:47):
Of of podcasts and cultural figures and people who identify
more directly with the Luttites. It's hard. It's hard to
overcome that to you know. It's and I think a
lot of people are kind of wondering whether do we
just reclaim the term outright do we say what we're
doing is something different? But like no, I, since I've
written this book, I think not a day goes by
where somebody tags me in some thread or sends me
(42:09):
some message that today I found out the Ludites kick ass,
or today I found out the Ludites were awesome.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
And it's happening all the time.
Speaker 5 (42:18):
Artists, writers, librarians, archivists, journalists, people are you know, sort
of at least recognizing, you know, that the Luddites were
right at least to have a wide range of grievances.
You know, there can be disagreement about their tactics, but
their critique what they were angry about.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
I think seeing what we're seeing and.
Speaker 5 (42:41):
Right now it looks a lot like AI is going
to be unleashed by a handful of extremely large companies
that are more than likely to pocket most of the games,
then it's not hard to see, you know, where where
the grievances is. I think again, most Ludites even today
are not just like no, AI smash it.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
I hate it all, But.
Speaker 5 (43:03):
It's like, we absolutely have to make sure that this
technology is not just primarily exploiting people for the benefit
of a few execs in Silicon Valley, right, And I
think that that is something that just kind of intuitively
is seen by more people now, and so when they
hear the Luddite story, it's like, oh, yeah, well that's
not all that different than us today, So maybe I
(43:24):
am a Loedite.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Thank you so much, Brian, Yeah, my pleasure. If you
want to hear more from Brian, I'm sure have him
back on tech stuff really soon. And he also has
his own brand new podcast. Check it out. It's called
System Crash.
Speaker 4 (43:38):
I actually love System Crash and I've been binging it
this week. But that's it for today's Part Time Genius.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
And today's tech stuff for this week.
Speaker 4 (43:44):
If you like what you hear, hit us up on
Twitter or Instagram, or drop us a line in the
Apple Reviews. Also, you can check out Kaleidoscope's other shows.
And if you have a great Luddite fact we missed
or have a topic you want us to cover, be
short or write us about those two.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
And thank you so much for listening to both Part
Time Genius and Text
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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