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plumsdeify's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
savaging's review
5.0
"Luddite" is what they call you if you’re slow to get a smartphone or you’re not sure if you want the sky filled with amazon delivery drones. The implication is you’re an old fart who’s scared of anything new.
But who were the actual Luddites? That’s what this book explores.
Imagine it’s the early 1800s, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England. You’re a skilled weaver or other textile worker. You have apprenticed to a master weaver for years to learn your craft. Your community enjoys some measure of prosperity and power because of this work and its value on the market. But just as you’re about to take the next step in your career, you’re no longer wanted.
Instead, the boss is filling the factory with machines, and replacing you with a crew of enslaved children — maybe orphans brought in from the city — who will risk their short lives and tiny limbs to keep those machines running. The cloth created from this is cheap and flimsy but your old boss can export it to other countries. He is growing monstrously rich while your family and neighbors are beginning to starve.
At the same time: it’s very illegal to even talk about forming a union.
So instead the Luddites formed underground cells of resistance. They met at night in the same Sherwood Forest that spawned the legend of Robin Hood. They said a mythical General Ludd was leading them. They raided the factories with massive hammers, to smash “all Machinery hurtful to Commonality.” They had each others' backs and kept each others' secrets. They wrote broadsides as 'Lady Ludd,' warning the factory owners, explaining their behaviors, demanding justice.
And they didn't win. They were hung. They were exiled to Australia. The new child-operated factories were making too much money, so the same class that was getting rich off of them passed a law that gave a death sentence to machine-breakers. As a final tragedy, their name turned into an insult, to call someone old and slow.
But. This book does something extraordinary: it tries to bend this long arc of history toward something like justice for the Luddites. Merchant shows how their resistance bought time. They made it a little more costly to destroy entire communities. The Luddites made factory owners a little worried about how far they could push immiseration. They set the groundwork. Eventually their sacrifices led to some workplace protections.
And as for the meaning of the name Luddite: maybe now, 200 years later, it can become an honorific instead of an insult. More people are adopting "Luddite" or "neo-Luddite" as a political stance. After reading this I'm joining them.
5 things the Luddites in this book taught me:
1) Don’t be naive. Look beyond the hype. Think about power — who has it, who’s seizing it, what they’ll do with it.
2) Don't buy the fantasy of full automation. From the beginning, deskilled (child) labor was supposed to be a temporary measure, until the process could be fully automated. But even after two centuries, degraded labor is required to power the looms.
3) Don't say robots are coming for your jobs. Your bosses are coming for your jobs. They’re the ones making the decisions to buy expensive technology in order to replace good jobs with bad ones, to strip power from the workers, and to create flimsy products in need of constant replacement.
4) Certain technologies aren't inevitable. We don't have to accept them. Those AI tools, filling your feed with deep-fakes, impersonating the voices of your loved ones in scam calls, making the internet less useful every month? The tools used by bosses to fire writers and artists and replace them with poorly-paid AI-handlers? Those gigworker apps, allowing corporations to treat workers as disposable, demolishing industries were workers have power? The surveillance technology used by the richest men in the world to harass workers so they have to urinate in bottles rather than take a bathroom break? The machinery used in war, in racist policing, in climate apocalypse? These are all Machines hurtful to Commonality. They can all be refused. They can all be broken.
5) But Luddism isn’t about hating or fearing technology. The Luddites themselves were technologists, devising new ways to improve their work. They tried to get factory owners to adopt machines that would make their lives easier — including one that would better measure the quality of their work, so they weren’t subject to the buyer’s whims about how much they should be paid. Factory owners refused.
So their legacy allows us now to ask: what technologies would strengthen commonality? We have bicycles, mass transit, and that apex of all human civilization: interlibrary loan. What else could be possible?
What would need to happen for ordinary people to have the power to steer technological development toward something that would benefit all of us rather than harm us? Can we even imagine it?
Merchant sums up his book by noting: “People tire quickly of being treated like automatons, it turns out. We’re all Luddites that way.”
Amen. No war but class war, and no general but General Ludd!
But who were the actual Luddites? That’s what this book explores.
Imagine it’s the early 1800s, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England. You’re a skilled weaver or other textile worker. You have apprenticed to a master weaver for years to learn your craft. Your community enjoys some measure of prosperity and power because of this work and its value on the market. But just as you’re about to take the next step in your career, you’re no longer wanted.
Instead, the boss is filling the factory with machines, and replacing you with a crew of enslaved children — maybe orphans brought in from the city — who will risk their short lives and tiny limbs to keep those machines running. The cloth created from this is cheap and flimsy but your old boss can export it to other countries. He is growing monstrously rich while your family and neighbors are beginning to starve.
At the same time: it’s very illegal to even talk about forming a union.
So instead the Luddites formed underground cells of resistance. They met at night in the same Sherwood Forest that spawned the legend of Robin Hood. They said a mythical General Ludd was leading them. They raided the factories with massive hammers, to smash “all Machinery hurtful to Commonality.” They had each others' backs and kept each others' secrets. They wrote broadsides as 'Lady Ludd,' warning the factory owners, explaining their behaviors, demanding justice.
And they didn't win. They were hung. They were exiled to Australia. The new child-operated factories were making too much money, so the same class that was getting rich off of them passed a law that gave a death sentence to machine-breakers. As a final tragedy, their name turned into an insult, to call someone old and slow.
But. This book does something extraordinary: it tries to bend this long arc of history toward something like justice for the Luddites. Merchant shows how their resistance bought time. They made it a little more costly to destroy entire communities. The Luddites made factory owners a little worried about how far they could push immiseration. They set the groundwork. Eventually their sacrifices led to some workplace protections.
And as for the meaning of the name Luddite: maybe now, 200 years later, it can become an honorific instead of an insult. More people are adopting "Luddite" or "neo-Luddite" as a political stance. After reading this I'm joining them.
5 things the Luddites in this book taught me:
1) Don’t be naive. Look beyond the hype. Think about power — who has it, who’s seizing it, what they’ll do with it.
2) Don't buy the fantasy of full automation. From the beginning, deskilled (child) labor was supposed to be a temporary measure, until the process could be fully automated. But even after two centuries, degraded labor is required to power the looms.
3) Don't say robots are coming for your jobs. Your bosses are coming for your jobs. They’re the ones making the decisions to buy expensive technology in order to replace good jobs with bad ones, to strip power from the workers, and to create flimsy products in need of constant replacement.
4) Certain technologies aren't inevitable. We don't have to accept them. Those AI tools, filling your feed with deep-fakes, impersonating the voices of your loved ones in scam calls, making the internet less useful every month? The tools used by bosses to fire writers and artists and replace them with poorly-paid AI-handlers? Those gigworker apps, allowing corporations to treat workers as disposable, demolishing industries were workers have power? The surveillance technology used by the richest men in the world to harass workers so they have to urinate in bottles rather than take a bathroom break? The machinery used in war, in racist policing, in climate apocalypse? These are all Machines hurtful to Commonality. They can all be refused. They can all be broken.
5) But Luddism isn’t about hating or fearing technology. The Luddites themselves were technologists, devising new ways to improve their work. They tried to get factory owners to adopt machines that would make their lives easier — including one that would better measure the quality of their work, so they weren’t subject to the buyer’s whims about how much they should be paid. Factory owners refused.
So their legacy allows us now to ask: what technologies would strengthen commonality? We have bicycles, mass transit, and that apex of all human civilization: interlibrary loan. What else could be possible?
What would need to happen for ordinary people to have the power to steer technological development toward something that would benefit all of us rather than harm us? Can we even imagine it?
Merchant sums up his book by noting: “People tire quickly of being treated like automatons, it turns out. We’re all Luddites that way.”
Amen. No war but class war, and no general but General Ludd!
sayshara's review against another edition
informative
sad
medium-paced
4.5
A good read with lots to think about, especially as someone working on automation tools. Probably would have given it a 5, but I had a hard time keeping track of the historical figures and timeline in the order they were introduced.
natebragg's review
informative
slow-paced
4.25
A fairly dense yet interesting read on the history of the Luddites and the parallels between Industrial Revolution-era Britain and modern-day North America through the lens of the 19th-century Luddites and the 21st-century tech companies.
Merchant uses a unique premise to look at technology's impact on politics, labor, and industry, plus the ways that states have historically worked to support companies in clashes between corporations/entrepreneurs and the working class in both the past and present.
This book really made me think and taught me a lot about a part of history that I'm ashamed to say I knew little about. I recommend reading it if you enjoy history and tend to side with the working class in conflicts with the elites/those in power.
I'll be looking for more of Merchant's writing moving forward and continuing my trend of reading tech-focused non-fiction.
Merchant uses a unique premise to look at technology's impact on politics, labor, and industry, plus the ways that states have historically worked to support companies in clashes between corporations/entrepreneurs and the working class in both the past and present.
This book really made me think and taught me a lot about a part of history that I'm ashamed to say I knew little about. I recommend reading it if you enjoy history and tend to side with the working class in conflicts with the elites/those in power.
I'll be looking for more of Merchant's writing moving forward and continuing my trend of reading tech-focused non-fiction.
arebe's review
informative
reflective
tense
slow-paced
3.0
Interesting history of the Industrial revolution, regency politics, and how it all connects to present day labor struggles. I enjoyed learning about individuals like George Mellor and Mary Godwin and thru them now different parts of society reacted to mechanisation. The writing was a bit repetitive and unsubtle at times.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Murder, Violence, Death, and Injury/Injury detail
hrgisahero's review against another edition
5.0
Let’s rise up!! This was a great history, if anything, it did not delve deep enough into the history of the Luddites. I found it fascinating, I knew vaguely some of it but not to this degree. Unions or bust.