Blood in the Machine

The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

By: Brian Merchant

Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin

Longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year

The "rich and gripping" true story of the first time machines came for human jobs—and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today (Naomi Klein)

The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods.

The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees.

Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it?

The answers lie in Blood in the Machine. Brian Merchant intertwines a lucid examination of our current age with the story of the Luddites, showing how automation changed our world—and is shaping our future.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Brian Merchant (P)2022 Little, Brown & Company

Critic reviews

“I’ve thrown around the word ‘Luddite’ often in my work, mainly as a cheap insult, so Brian Merchant’s rich and absorbing history of the movement was, for me, both a revelation and an embarrassment. The embarrassment is at how little I’d known about them, and how the lessons I’d taken from their effort were based on a silly caricature. The revelation, in Brian’s deft telling, is that technology never has to be inevitable, that we humans have agency over how we live with the machines, and that perhaps the best way to figure out what to do about the future is to look to the past.”—Farhad Manjoo, New York Times Opinion columnist

“A rich and gripping account of a chronically misunderstood historical chapter, one with urgent relevance to our own time, as we once again pit humans against machines.”—Naomi Klein, New York Times Bestselling author of This Changes Everything

"A thrilling history and a stirring manifesto for seizing the means of production, or smashing it, when necessary. Automation has always been about turning people into machines: brainless and disposable. To be a Luddite is to demand a say in the future. It's not enough to ask what a machine does—we have to ask who it does it for and who it does it to."—Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother and The Internet Con

Timely Warning

Our era of gig-work, wage theft and labor automation provides the starkest parallel of the plight of the Luddites that I’ve seen in my lifetime. Brian Merchant connects the rise of capital, “enclosure”, chattel slave plantations and child labor to the act of “framebreaking”, placing the enterprise in a new light.

The Luddites are renewed and recontextualized as victims of predatory capital. While their name ultimately became an epithet for ignorance and backwardness, the author reveals the cloth workers as clear-eyed about what the new machines and factories would mean to their families and livelihoods, and their actions as purely rational and community-minded. It wouldn’t have been as effective without Uber/Lift/DoorDash providing such vivid modern examples.

The author spends a great deal of time Lord Byron and Percy and Mary Shelley, as contemporary defenders of the Luddites, and connects them with the latter Shelley’s most famous creation. This was ambitious, but it’s a bit of an eye-roll; one can imagine a modern day Byron tossing a Like to a Luddite social post before doomscrolling on, a 19th century #hashtagactivisim.

Still, absolutely recommended and timely.

Timely reminder…

Recommended reading for those interested in a historical take on how prior technology disruptions affected the job market and society as a whole. Many parallels with the coming wave of job displacement from AI. The government needs to take a proactive role this time to prevent what happened 200 years ago. 📖 🤖 💪 🩸

An important history lesson

This book rewrites the false history of the Luddites and give them the credit and legacy they deserve as co-founders of the anti-capitalist worker’s movement.

Long live King Ludd !

Amazing book. I will never use Luddite in demeaning way again. Enlightening, informative and engaging.

An enlightening book

The effort that the author had spent into the book is definitely obvious to whoever that reads it. I appreciate the context and the arrangement of different narratives as to paint the complex picture and its dynamics.

Thought-provoking and disturbing

The parallels between the time of the Luddites and now, where the benefits of labor are increasingly funneled to the rich, are disturbing.

Story and Message is good, but it’s quite long.

The content and writing is very good. But it is way too long for my liking.

One Sided Moralizing

I was hoping for a history of the Luddite movement or a thoughtful analysis of how society responds to rapid technological advancement. Instead I got a series of disconnected vignettes mixed with interjections where the author doesn’t seem able to help themselves pointing out how factory exploitation in 1800 is just like (insert modern tech company). It’s not that I agree or disagree, it’s just not an insightful or interesting read

The bias of the author can not be understated

As relevant today as the Luddite rebellion stands, Blood in the Machine swings history as a blunt cleaver. The author takes every opportunity to hammer home who the “good” people are and who the “bad” are without an ounce of nuance or restraint to the point that piece cannot be considered useful as anything but a propagandized rallying cry thinly veiled as a historical recount. The modern lens is applied excruciatingly at every opportunity no matter how loose a connection actually exists, for example the pityingly bad use of the work from home movement being briefly tied to spinners. There are serious parallels to be considered and the luddites have been unfairly the butt of jokes for two centuries and yet I could not recommend this to anyone looking for actual perspective or historical recount. Pop history at its worst.