This piece originally appeared in the Washington Free Beacon.
Everyone knows about the Luddites. They hated technology; they hated progress; they hated happiness. And what’s more, they were fools, thinking that technology would ruin everything, when it obviously improves all of our lots.
In the tech bro equivalent of "They hate us for our freedom," Microsoft’s attorney perfected the caricature during the company’s 1998 antitrust hearings: "The 19th-century reactionaries … fearful of competition, went around smashing machines with sledgehammers to arrest the march of progress driven by science and technology." Few of us know more than Bill Gates’s lawyer about the movement, but that hasn’t stopped people from brandishing the term against anyone who dares to think about technology before using it—or, scandalously, not using it.
Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech should do something to correct our collective ignorance. The book offers a rapid-fire history of the movement’s origins, motivations, and eventual defeat, with a heavy emphasis on the similarities between the Luddites’ times and our own. This is no disinterested survey, for those readers looking to bone up on their British labor movements. Merchant’s mission is rather to draw explicit connections between the Luddites and us, so that we can apply their insights, strategies, and inspiration to our own rage against the machine.
