February 21, 2025 • 43 mins
This week, TechStuff teams up with Part-Time Genius for a special crossover episode. Oz and Mangesh Hattikudur, host of Part-Time Genius, discuss a largely misunderstood group of machine destroyers. The Luddites. Joining them is tech journalist Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, to dig into the history of humans fighting against job automation, why we equate Luddites with technophobes and what we can learn from these 19th century rebels in the age of AI.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Thanks for tune into Tech Stuff. If you don't recognize
my voice, my name is Oz Valoshin, and I'm here
because the inimitable Jonathan Strickland has passed a baton to
Cara Price and myself to host Tech Stuff. The show
will remain your home for all things tech, and all
the old episodes will remain available in this feed. Thanks
for listening.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Guess what, Oz?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
What's that? Man? Gush?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Well, I am.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Super excited to do this crossover episode with you, but
before we get.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Started, maybe we should tell everyone what's.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Going on here one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So we are both podcast hosts.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
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 dogs
playing poker? Why does Liechtenstein 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 us as humans. But I
(00:55):
feel like we should let people in on a little secret.
We are also busy partners. A few years ago we
founded the company behind both our shows, which is called Kaleidoscope.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
We spend an awful lot of time together, but never
recording a podcast together until now, which is kind of crazy.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
That is true.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
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 2 (01:24):
Yeah. I'm so excited about this.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
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 2 (01:34):
So what do you know about luddites.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
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 2 (01:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I mean, I feel like we refer to my mom
as a Luddite a lot and half 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 4 (02:04):
Print it. I love it.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
That's that's real Bussif story, and that's the Atco vibes.
I love it.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
She is kind of the CEO or family.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
But uh, 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.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
As your countrymen.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
It employed almost.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
A million people, which is remarkable, right, and and textile
weavers were the largest single group of workers in the
country for over a century. People were really well employed,
and some of them even worked from home. And something
cropped up called the gig mill, And this is where
things get icy, right.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
The gig mill was a wooden.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Machine that napped up the wool or the cotton into
a softened fabric, and these mills started cropping up with
remarkable pace. So basically, 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 1 (03:27):
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 2 (03:46):
Dark satanic mills, dark satanic mills.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah, William Blake took up his pen, but I think
others took up more aggressive mesitch forks.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yes, yeah, so you're exactly right.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Like the workers or 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 weirdly,
each group leader went by the same name, General Lud.
Now the attacks were often prefaced with a note or
(04:20):
a 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 1 (04:29):
So this is the we are anonymous, we are legion
of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Completely who was Ned Lud 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 coincidence that ned Lud was also set to
(04:55):
reside there, considering the spirit of you know, 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 Ludites would pull stockings over their
faces during the night raids. One account talked about a
(05:16):
dude wearing a bloody mask made from a calf skin
to disguise himself. Some of the Ludites wore costumes, and
a few of the largest bands were led by men
in drag who called themselves General Lud's wife.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Isn't that incredible?
Speaker 4 (05:31):
Incredible?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
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
(05:53):
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 1 (06:06):
Wow, that's amazing. So it was like almost like an
open secret who was involved.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Then you'd make a coded hand gesture.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
The guard would sort of keep a straight face, keep
their cool, they 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
(06:47):
get into the secret meeting.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
That's incredible. So it's almost like a Masonic vibe as well.
But what I mean how they looked upon by the
broader British society and how much damage did they do?
Speaker 3 (06:57):
I mean they did a lot of damage. Account from
the time. This is from the Leeds Mercury. It reported
that since the commencement of the Luddite system in Nottingham,
forty two lace frames and five hundred and forty four
plain silk and cotton stalking frames have been destroyed and
that amount to about thirteen four hundred pounds in eighteen
(07:19):
eleven prices or about sixteen million dollars today.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Well, no wonder they were catching Peel's attention.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
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 1 (07:37):
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 against Big Tech, and lucky for us,
we managed to get him on the line to talk
(07:58):
about it. Let's dive in. I know, Manga Shonn'm very
excited to talk about the book, not in the Machine,
But maybe a good place to start would be why
did you decide to spend so much time writing a
four hundred page book about the Luddites.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Yeah, 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 lutite, it's this derogatory term, and I had just
kind of integrated this term ledite. Oh, someone who hates technology,
someone who gets angry when they have to use a
new technology, make them want to smash their phone, or
(08:33):
you know, just against progress. And so the minute that
it became clear to me 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
(08:55):
day weekend of my life, just like reading academic journal
articles about the Ledites. And I was a reporter for
Vice at the time, so I wrote this piece called
You've got the Luddites 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,
(09:16):
to grind their livelihoods away. And so like that sort
of key insight stuck with me 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
(09:38):
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 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. But there's all these examples of
ways that tech was really being used to hurt people,
(09:58):
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 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
(10:22):
unleashing on their lives.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
I also love that though you figured this out over
labor Day, right.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
There's something so funny about that. But take us into this.
Can you situate us in the history event year.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
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 4 (10:41):
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 like the billowing smoke
and like the coughing children working in factories. We're not
quite there yet. That is beginning to take shape. So
there have been a number of mechanical innovations. So you
(11:05):
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
by one person instead of say six, so it can
automate this task to a great degree. You still need
(11:29):
a worker to run 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
(11:50):
them into an early sort of version of the factory.
This is like the late seventeen nineties early eighteen hundreds
that I'm talking about here. 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
(12:11):
the machine. They're not anti technology, they're really good technicians
technologists in their homes, but they start to see the
emergence of the factory.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Who who are the innovators behind these kind of proto factories.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
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,
(12:46):
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. Arkright figured out a way to
sort of make an astonishing volume of yarn.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Right.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
I opened the book, in fact, with one of the
inventors who will later invent the power loom pouring like
this factory, and they're all ruminating all and is sort
of contemporary or 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's skilled labor,
that'll never happen. And then he sets about trying to
(13:26):
do it.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
I think you called arc Right the first startup founder
to launch a unicorn company, which I love. But how
did the Luddites start to fight back? I mean, what
kind of early industrial action did they take.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
So basically arc rights 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
(14:00):
largest industrial base of worker in England at the time,
England was a cloth producing country. 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
(14:20):
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 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
(14:42):
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 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 for social benefits, because they're just sort of tearing
(15:03):
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 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.
(15:24):
Now it's the working class pitted against these new industrialists.
It's illegal toform unions. 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 are
(15:47):
quite literally going without food. The Luddites 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
(16:12):
their market share, and now 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 Leddites emerged. They say, you've left us
no choice. They organized this gorilla rebellion to fight back.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Coming up, we meet some of the main characters in
this Ledite movement. Stick with us.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
And welcome back to the crossover between part time genius
and tech stuff, where 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 4 (16:49):
All of this. Yeah, So, George Meller is the Ledite
that I focus on the most in the book, and
we sort of follow his reluctance to take up 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
(17:11):
machines and they say, your factory has three hundred power
looms and 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. They
(17:33):
sign these letters ned Lud, 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 smash the machines, but only the machines that are
taking jobs and tearing up the social contract, just those
that are sort of transferring wealth into the hands of
(17:56):
the factory owner away from them. So it was a
very pointed tactic, and people love them. At the time.
People cheered the Luddites in the street. Magistrates would come
out and just kind of watch it happen. The factory
owners would be going, 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
(18:17):
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. You guys win. So for
at least six months or so, it worked to some extent.
And so George Meller is up in the West Riding,
(18:39):
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 what we should
be doing locally, because prices are flowing here right in
our town, in Huddersfield, which is the broader area that
(19:00):
George Miller 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. And in the book,
I'd chart George Miller's sort of ambivalence to full throated
(19:22):
embrace of this idea of Luddism, of becoming a Luddite,
and then he becomes the local sort of ned lud
or General Luod, leading other workers into battle against the
men that are quite literally causing them to starve.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
One of these is William Horsfall, right.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
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, little children would up and taunt him and say,
(20:01):
you know, the Ludites are going to get you, and
he'll try to whip them with a horse whip. He
was just like a classic like sort of villain, twhirling 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. So
he's gone, wow, yeah, So he's taunting them. He's sort
(20:21):
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
(20:42):
you got to remember that, like this is on the
front lines 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 in some
factory in er say I'm out of the game. I
(21:02):
don't want to contribute to the 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 the weavers who work at home, but it really
sort of ultimately everybody has to compete with men like horsefall.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
So one of the 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.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, is that something you could talk about.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
Yeah, of course they were savvy in a way that
we might recognize today. The entire sort of construction of
their movement and the way 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
(21:55):
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,
(22:18):
that's not your real names aren't attached to it. These
letters are showing up anywhere, 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 lot ofite. Right. You don't have to have this
central planning committee. You can just gather your men in
(22:39):
a pub as they did at the time, and you
can write your own letters. And so 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 lot is them just kind of explodes.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
I remember when I first moved to New York, it
was a time of occupyable street, and there's this like
very exciting feeling in the street downtown that like people
are taking 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 occupied wool Stream was over right. So,
(23:18):
and it makes me think a little bit about the
Battle of wolfitz Mill in your in your book.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
Yeah, that's an analogy 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,
(23:43):
as you said, 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
(24:06):
ludism is going on, 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 Luteddites. And then you finally have
sort of this license given by the state for industrialists
(24:30):
to fight fire with fire. 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
the mercenaries there, factory owners are basically given license to
shoot back. And so that's what really happens at this
(24:52):
famous Battle of ratholds Mill, when it's supposed to be
sort of the crowning achievement of the Luedtite movement. At
that point point, George Miller 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
(25:13):
military fortress. So they get there 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 Ltedites are believed to have died, possibly
even many more. But it's a big disaster. And one
of George Miller's sort of close friends, somebody who he
(25:35):
had sort of talked into joining the Ledite movement, is
one of the men who was gunned down, a young apprentice,
and it kind of sends George Miller off the deep
end and he sort of you know, breaks bad as
it were, and he goes and assassinates the other factory owner,
(25:57):
William Horsefall in cold blood.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Fascinating. It was hostel basically thought that he'd won and
ventured out of the factory fortress and Mellow was lying
in wait or how did this happen?
Speaker 4 (26:09):
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.
(26:29):
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
was had a drink and was riding home. And they
(26:52):
knew the route that he took from the cloth market
where he would sell his goods back to his factory
and his home. So they yeah, they lay in wait,
and they ambushed him on the way and they gunned
him down.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Tell us about this trial with about horse Fall.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
Yeah. 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, most working people would
know exactly who was involved right in a in a
(27:30):
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, nobody
(27:52):
said 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
(28:14):
then sort 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
(28:36):
it was going 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 ludites
who had have been involved in sort of the factory
strikes and breaking machines more broadly, so I think the
(28:57):
state understood that 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.
(29:19):
So this is where for the one of the first
times you have this 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
(29:42):
movements for decades, or trying 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 Luddites who are willing to
do violence because they hate machines so much.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
So the state is not is not just wanting to
convict George and his compadres, is really looking to sort
of use this trials and opportunity to win the battle
of ideas and to smear the Labdite movement in a
way that I guess with quite effective.
Speaker 4 (30:11):
Ultimately. Yeah, that's right, 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 Luedites, you know, from the beginning, off and on,
and then really seizes this moment to again, yeah, equate
(30:32):
the Lueddites as dummies, 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 the Luddites as we understand them today.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
What happened to the actual Luddites? To George and co.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
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 Ludites just strictly for
(31:09):
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. Because the rich,
the elite in England at the time really liked industrialization obviously,
(31:31):
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 Luod
height'es threatened. So this sort of version of Luddism as
(31:55):
backwards looking is therefore sort of entered into the history
books and it has remained as such ever since for
two hundred years.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Of the state.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
But where does the Lutti movement go, Like does it
peter out?
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Like do they have any wins in this whole process?
Speaker 4 (32:22):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Like the robot tax.
Speaker 4 (32:42):
The robot tax, it would work the same way. They
had the same idea. These are not radical, you know,
Bill Gates is hardly a radical. It was they 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 is
get to get to hoard all the gains from it
(33:02):
at everyone else's expense, and they just well, 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,
(33:26):
and then sort of when it's crushed in eighteen thirteen.
But importantly, there are some Luedites who, for instance, were
a sort of lutites 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
(33:49):
are fighting for the right to collectively bargain to repel
these acts that prevented them from forming unions that were
on the books and so ie it's sort of take
on more of a political character. But the broader tail
or legacy of Leutism is this transference into the reform
movement where people actually do finally win concessions, the right
(34:12):
to unionize, the right to fight for better conditions. It
sort of segues in even to the right to vote.
So Luedtites 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
(34:36):
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 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 class
(34:59):
consciousness when for one of the first times.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Coming up lessons we can learn from the Luddites to
stick with us. Welcome back to Part Time Genius and
Tech Stuff, our first crossover episode where we're talking to
the wonderful writer Brian Merchant all about Ludites.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Let's get back into it.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
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 their jobs up in the
order of their lives. Inequality is rempant, and power is
wielded by those commanding wealth and new technologies. You don't
(35:42):
need 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 Luddites.
Speaker 4 (35:52):
Yeah, I mean 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
(36:15):
ton of anxieties around AI and what it's going to
mean for the broader economy and for working people. It's
almost to a t. 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 not really better. You had to have
(36:36):
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 workers who are
(36:59):
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 of their livelihoods, and that
suddenly somebody who has access to mid journey and no
(37:21):
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 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 whatever whatever it may be.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Who are the who are the Latites of today? I mean,
is it Mangish'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 respectrum do you identify than new Ludites.
Speaker 4 (38:01):
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. About a lot of
the grievances that Amazon workers have do come from the
company's insistence on, you know, using technological tools to sort
(38:22):
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 Ludites of today are are
(38:44):
largely 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
(39:04):
twenty three against the way that the studios were hinting
that 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
(39:27):
that sort of want to deploy AI in the similarly
top down way, with you know, executives saying well, AI
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
(39:49):
is going to be a nightmare. It is a nightmare
because it's taking more time to get medicine to patients
who need it, and I can't overwrite it because it's
built in. It's Again, it's the issue always when it's
top down, when the technology is rammed through by management
or thrust upon working a population who has no real
(40:10):
democratics say, and how it's 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. So I think as some of the objectives
(40:33):
of AI companies become a little more pointed, as they
try to infiltrate further into workplaces and people feel the
heat more, I do think with it we'll start to
see even more resistance there.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
I think that's what was so eye opening about all
this was that Luddites really weren't against progress or technology,
but really the social costs that we're coming from this.
But ever since writing this book, and I'm sure talking
with friends and stuff, has anyone taken up the term
lu A as a badge of honor besides me?
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Uh, yeah, there are It's like the rested development. There
are dozens of us dozens, but no there I think
it's you are seeing it pop up more and more.
There are a number of of podcasts and cultural figures
and people who identify more directly with the Luttites. It's hard.
(41:28):
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 some message that today I found out the
Luddites kick ass, or today I found out the Ludites
(41:49):
were awesome. And it's it's happening all the time. 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
(42:13):
angry about. I think seeing what we're seeing and 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, I hate
(42:37):
it all. But 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 lud eight story, it's like, oh, yeah,
well that's not all that different than us today, So
(42:59):
maybe I am a lotite.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
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.
Speaker 4 (43:13):
Check it out.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
It's called System Crash.
Speaker 3 (43:16):
I actually love System Crash and I've been binging it
this week. But that's it for today's Part Time Genius.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
And today's tech stuff for this week.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
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 ludight fact we missed
or have a topic you want us to cover, be
short of writers about those two
Speaker 1 (43:38):
And thank you so much for listening to both Part
Time Genius and Tech Stuff
Thanks for tune into Tech Stuff. If you don't recognize
my voice, my name is Oz Valoshin, and I'm here
because the inimitable Jonathan Strickland has passed a baton to
Cara Price and myself to host Tech Stuff. The show
will remain your home for all things tech, and all
the old episodes will remain available in this feed. Thanks
for listening.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Guess what, Oz?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
What's that? Man? Gush?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Well, I am.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Super excited to do this crossover episode with you, but
before we get.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Started, maybe we should tell everyone what's.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Going on here one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So we are both podcast hosts.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
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 dogs
playing poker? Why does Liechtenstein 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 us as humans. But I
(00:55):
feel like we should let people in on a little secret.
We are also busy partners. A few years ago we
founded the company behind both our shows, which is called Kaleidoscope.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
We spend an awful lot of time together, but never
recording a podcast together until now, which is kind of crazy.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
That is true.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
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 2 (01:24):
Yeah. I'm so excited about this.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
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 2 (01:34):
So what do you know about luddites.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
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 2 (01:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I mean, I feel like we refer to my mom
as a Luddite a lot and half 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 4 (02:04):
Print it. I love it.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
That's that's real Bussif story, and that's the Atco vibes.
I love it.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
She is kind of the CEO or family.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
But uh, 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.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
As your countrymen.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
It employed almost.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
A million people, which is remarkable, right, and and textile
weavers were the largest single group of workers in the
country for over a century. People were really well employed,
and some of them even worked from home. And something
cropped up called the gig mill, And this is where
things get icy, right.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
The gig mill was a wooden.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Machine that napped up the wool or the cotton into
a softened fabric, and these mills started cropping up with
remarkable pace. So basically, 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 1 (03:27):
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 2 (03:46):
Dark satanic mills, dark satanic mills.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah, William Blake took up his pen, but I think
others took up more aggressive mesitch forks.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yes, yeah, so you're exactly right.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Like the workers or 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 weirdly,
each group leader went by the same name, General Lud.
Now the attacks were often prefaced with a note or
(04:20):
a 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 1 (04:29):
So this is the we are anonymous, we are legion
of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Completely who was Ned Lud 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 coincidence that ned Lud was also set to
(04:55):
reside there, considering the spirit of you know, 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 Ludites would pull stockings over their
faces during the night raids. One account talked about a
(05:16):
dude wearing a bloody mask made from a calf skin
to disguise himself. Some of the Ludites wore costumes, and
a few of the largest bands were led by men
in drag who called themselves General Lud's wife.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Isn't that incredible?
Speaker 4 (05:31):
Incredible?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
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
(05:53):
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 1 (06:06):
Wow, that's amazing. So it was like almost like an
open secret who was involved.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Then you'd make a coded hand gesture.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
The guard would sort of keep a straight face, keep
their cool, they 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
(06:47):
get into the secret meeting.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
That's incredible. So it's almost like a Masonic vibe as well.
But what I mean how they looked upon by the
broader British society and how much damage did they do?
Speaker 3 (06:57):
I mean they did a lot of damage. Account from
the time. This is from the Leeds Mercury. It reported
that since the commencement of the Luddite system in Nottingham,
forty two lace frames and five hundred and forty four
plain silk and cotton stalking frames have been destroyed and
that amount to about thirteen four hundred pounds in eighteen
(07:19):
eleven prices or about sixteen million dollars today.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Well, no wonder they were catching Peel's attention.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
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 1 (07:37):
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 against Big Tech, and lucky for us,
we managed to get him on the line to talk
(07:58):
about it. Let's dive in. I know, Manga Shonn'm very
excited to talk about the book, not in the Machine,
But maybe a good place to start would be why
did you decide to spend so much time writing a
four hundred page book about the Luddites.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Yeah, 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 lutite, it's this derogatory term, and I had just
kind of integrated this term ledite. Oh, someone who hates technology,
someone who gets angry when they have to use a
new technology, make them want to smash their phone, or
(08:33):
you know, just against progress. And so the minute that
it became clear to me 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
(08:55):
day weekend of my life, just like reading academic journal
articles about the Ledites. And I was a reporter for
Vice at the time, so I wrote this piece called
You've got the Luddites 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,
(09:16):
to grind their livelihoods away. And so like that sort
of key insight stuck with me 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
(09:38):
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 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. But there's all these examples of
ways that tech was really being used to hurt people,
(09:58):
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 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
(10:22):
unleashing on their lives.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
I also love that though you figured this out over
labor Day, right.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
There's something so funny about that. But take us into this.
Can you situate us in the history event year.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
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 4 (10:41):
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 like the billowing smoke
and like the coughing children working in factories. We're not
quite there yet. That is beginning to take shape. So
there have been a number of mechanical innovations. So you
(11:05):
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
by one person instead of say six, so it can
automate this task to a great degree. You still need
(11:29):
a worker to run 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
(11:50):
them into an early sort of version of the factory.
This is like the late seventeen nineties early eighteen hundreds
that I'm talking about here. 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
(12:11):
the machine. They're not anti technology, they're really good technicians
technologists in their homes, but they start to see the
emergence of the factory.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Who who are the innovators behind these kind of proto factories.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
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,
(12:46):
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. Arkright figured out a way to
sort of make an astonishing volume of yarn.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Right.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
I opened the book, in fact, with one of the
inventors who will later invent the power loom pouring like
this factory, and they're all ruminating all and is sort
of contemporary or 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's skilled labor,
that'll never happen. And then he sets about trying to
(13:26):
do it.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
I think you called arc Right the first startup founder
to launch a unicorn company, which I love. But how
did the Luddites start to fight back? I mean, what
kind of early industrial action did they take.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
So basically arc rights 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
(14:00):
largest industrial base of worker in England at the time,
England was a cloth producing country. 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
(14:20):
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 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
(14:42):
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 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 for social benefits, because they're just sort of tearing
(15:03):
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 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.
(15:24):
Now it's the working class pitted against these new industrialists.
It's illegal toform unions. 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 are
(15:47):
quite literally going without food. The Luddites 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
(16:12):
their market share, and now 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 Leddites emerged. They say, you've left us
no choice. They organized this gorilla rebellion to fight back.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Coming up, we meet some of the main characters in
this Ledite movement. Stick with us.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
And welcome back to the crossover between part time genius
and tech stuff, where 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 4 (16:49):
All of this. Yeah, So, George Meller is the Ledite
that I focus on the most in the book, and
we sort of follow his reluctance to take up 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
(17:11):
machines and they say, your factory has three hundred power
looms and 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. They
(17:33):
sign these letters ned Lud, 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 smash the machines, but only the machines that are
taking jobs and tearing up the social contract, just those
that are sort of transferring wealth into the hands of
(17:56):
the factory owner away from them. So it was a
very pointed tactic, and people love them. At the time.
People cheered the Luddites in the street. Magistrates would come
out and just kind of watch it happen. The factory
owners would be going, 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
(18:17):
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. You guys win. So for
at least six months or so, it worked to some extent.
And so George Meller is up in the West Riding,
(18:39):
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 what we should
be doing locally, because prices are flowing here right in
our town, in Huddersfield, which is the broader area that
(19:00):
George Miller 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. And in the book,
I'd chart George Miller's sort of ambivalence to full throated
(19:22):
embrace of this idea of Luddism, of becoming a Luddite,
and then he becomes the local sort of ned lud
or General Luod, leading other workers into battle against the
men that are quite literally causing them to starve.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
One of these is William Horsfall, right.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
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, little children would up and taunt him and say,
(20:01):
you know, the Ludites are going to get you, and
he'll try to whip them with a horse whip. He
was just like a classic like sort of villain, twhirling 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. So
he's gone, wow, yeah, So he's taunting them. He's sort
(20:21):
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
(20:42):
you got to remember that, like this is on the
front lines 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 in some
factory in er say I'm out of the game. I
(21:02):
don't want to contribute to the 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 the weavers who work at home, but it really
sort of ultimately everybody has to compete with men like horsefall.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
So one of the 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.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, is that something you could talk about.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
Yeah, of course they were savvy in a way that
we might recognize today. The entire sort of construction of
their movement and the way 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
(21:55):
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,
(22:18):
that's not your real names aren't attached to it. These
letters are showing up anywhere, 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 lot ofite. Right. You don't have to have this
central planning committee. You can just gather your men in
(22:39):
a pub as they did at the time, and you
can write your own letters. And so 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 lot is them just kind of explodes.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
I remember when I first moved to New York, it
was a time of occupyable street, and there's this like
very exciting feeling in the street downtown that like people
are taking 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 occupied wool Stream was over right. So,
(23:18):
and it makes me think a little bit about the
Battle of wolfitz Mill in your in your book.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
Yeah, that's an analogy 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,
(23:43):
as you said, 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
(24:06):
ludism is going on, 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 Luteddites. And then you finally have
sort of this license given by the state for industrialists
(24:30):
to fight fire with fire. 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
the mercenaries there, factory owners are basically given license to
shoot back. And so that's what really happens at this
(24:52):
famous Battle of ratholds Mill, when it's supposed to be
sort of the crowning achievement of the Luedtite movement. At
that point point, George Miller 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
(25:13):
military fortress. So they get there 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 Ltedites are believed to have died, possibly
even many more. But it's a big disaster. And one
of George Miller's sort of close friends, somebody who he
(25:35):
had sort of talked into joining the Ledite movement, is
one of the men who was gunned down, a young apprentice,
and it kind of sends George Miller off the deep
end and he sort of you know, breaks bad as
it were, and he goes and assassinates the other factory owner,
(25:57):
William Horsefall in cold blood.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Fascinating. It was hostel basically thought that he'd won and
ventured out of the factory fortress and Mellow was lying
in wait or how did this happen?
Speaker 4 (26:09):
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.
(26:29):
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
was had a drink and was riding home. And they
(26:52):
knew the route that he took from the cloth market
where he would sell his goods back to his factory
and his home. So they yeah, they lay in wait,
and they ambushed him on the way and they gunned
him down.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Tell us about this trial with about horse Fall.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
Yeah. 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, most working people would
know exactly who was involved right in a in a
(27:30):
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, nobody
(27:52):
said 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
(28:14):
then sort 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
(28:36):
it was going 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 ludites
who had have been involved in sort of the factory
strikes and breaking machines more broadly, so I think the
(28:57):
state understood that 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.
(29:19):
So this is where for the one of the first
times you have this 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
(29:42):
movements for decades, or trying 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 Luddites who are willing to
do violence because they hate machines so much.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
So the state is not is not just wanting to
convict George and his compadres, is really looking to sort
of use this trials and opportunity to win the battle
of ideas and to smear the Labdite movement in a
way that I guess with quite effective.
Speaker 4 (30:11):
Ultimately. Yeah, that's right, 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 Luedites, you know, from the beginning, off and on,
and then really seizes this moment to again, yeah, equate
(30:32):
the Lueddites as dummies, 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 the Luddites as we understand them today.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
What happened to the actual Luddites? To George and co.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
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 Ludites just strictly for
(31:09):
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. Because the rich,
the elite in England at the time really liked industrialization obviously,
(31:31):
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 Luod
height'es threatened. So this sort of version of Luddism as
(31:55):
backwards looking is therefore sort of entered into the history
books and it has remained as such ever since for
two hundred years.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Of the state.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
But where does the Lutti movement go, Like does it
peter out?
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Like do they have any wins in this whole process?
Speaker 4 (32:22):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Like the robot tax.
Speaker 4 (32:42):
The robot tax, it would work the same way. They
had the same idea. These are not radical, you know,
Bill Gates is hardly a radical. It was they 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 is
get to get to hoard all the gains from it
(33:02):
at everyone else's expense, and they just well, 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,
(33:26):
and then sort of when it's crushed in eighteen thirteen.
But importantly, there are some Luedites who, for instance, were
a sort of lutites 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
(33:49):
are fighting for the right to collectively bargain to repel
these acts that prevented them from forming unions that were
on the books and so ie it's sort of take
on more of a political character. But the broader tail
or legacy of Leutism is this transference into the reform
movement where people actually do finally win concessions, the right
(34:12):
to unionize, the right to fight for better conditions. It
sort of segues in even to the right to vote.
So Luedtites 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
(34:36):
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 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 class
(34:59):
consciousness when for one of the first times.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Coming up lessons we can learn from the Luddites to
stick with us. Welcome back to Part Time Genius and
Tech Stuff, our first crossover episode where we're talking to
the wonderful writer Brian Merchant all about Ludites.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Let's get back into it.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
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 their jobs up in the
order of their lives. Inequality is rempant, and power is
wielded by those commanding wealth and new technologies. You don't
(35:42):
need 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 Luddites.
Speaker 4 (35:52):
Yeah, I mean 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
(36:15):
ton of anxieties around AI and what it's going to
mean for the broader economy and for working people. It's
almost to a t. 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 not really better. You had to have
(36:36):
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 workers who are
(36:59):
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 of their livelihoods, and that
suddenly somebody who has access to mid journey and no
(37:21):
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 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 whatever whatever it may be.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Who are the who are the Latites of today? I mean,
is it Mangish'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 respectrum do you identify than new Ludites.
Speaker 4 (38:01):
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. About a lot of
the grievances that Amazon workers have do come from the
company's insistence on, you know, using technological tools to sort
(38:22):
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 Ludites of today are are
(38:44):
largely 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
(39:04):
twenty three against the way that the studios were hinting
that 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
(39:27):
that sort of want to deploy AI in the similarly
top down way, with you know, executives saying well, AI
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
(39:49):
is going to be a nightmare. It is a nightmare
because it's taking more time to get medicine to patients
who need it, and I can't overwrite it because it's
built in. It's Again, it's the issue always when it's
top down, when the technology is rammed through by management
or thrust upon working a population who has no real
(40:10):
democratics say, and how it's 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. So I think as some of the objectives
(40:33):
of AI companies become a little more pointed, as they
try to infiltrate further into workplaces and people feel the
heat more, I do think with it we'll start to
see even more resistance there.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
I think that's what was so eye opening about all
this was that Luddites really weren't against progress or technology,
but really the social costs that we're coming from this.
But ever since writing this book, and I'm sure talking
with friends and stuff, has anyone taken up the term
lu A as a badge of honor besides me?
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Uh, yeah, there are It's like the rested development. There
are dozens of us dozens, but no there I think
it's you are seeing it pop up more and more.
There are a number of of podcasts and cultural figures
and people who identify more directly with the Luttites. It's hard.
(41:28):
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 some message that today I found out the
Luddites kick ass, or today I found out the Ludites
(41:49):
were awesome. And it's it's happening all the time. 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
(42:13):
angry about. I think seeing what we're seeing and 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, I hate
(42:37):
it all. But 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 lud eight story, it's like, oh, yeah,
well that's not all that different than us today, So
(42:59):
maybe I am a lotite.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
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.
Speaker 4 (43:13):
Check it out.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
It's called System Crash.
Speaker 3 (43:16):
I actually love System Crash and I've been binging it
this week. But that's it for today's Part Time Genius.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
And today's tech stuff for this week.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
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 ludight fact we missed
or have a topic you want us to cover, be
short of writers about those two
Speaker 1 (43:38):
And thank you so much for listening to both Part
Time Genius and Tech Stuff
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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