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Blood in the Machine
The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
Description
The true story of what happened the first time machines came for human jobs, when an underground network of 19th century rebels, the Luddites, took up arms against the industrialists that were automating their work—and how it explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech today.
The most pressing story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley, Seattle, or even Shenzhen. It begins two hundred years ago in rural England, when working men and women rose up en masse rather than starve at the hands of the factory owners who were using machines to erase and degrade their livelihoods.
They organized guerilla raids, smashed those machines, and embarked on full-scale assaults against the wealthy machine owners. They won the support of Lord Byron, inspired Mary Shelley, and enraged the Prince Regent and his bloodthirsty government. Before it was over, much blood would be spilled—of rich and poor, of the invisible and of the powerful. This all-but-forgotten and deeply misunderstood class struggle nearly brought 19th century England to its knees.
We live now in the second machine age, when similar fears that big tech is dominating our lives and machines replacing human labor run high. We worry that technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are ousting workers from factories, and artificial intelligence will soon remove drivers from cars. How will this all reshape our economy and the way we live? And what can we do about it?
The answers lie in the story of our first machine age, when mechanization first came to British factories at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Intertwined with a lucid examination of our current age, the story of the Luddites, the working-class insurgency that took up arms against automation (at a time when it was punishable by death to break a machine), Blood in the Machine reaches through time and space to tell a story about how technology changed our world—and how it's already changing our future.
The most pressing story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley, Seattle, or even Shenzhen. It begins two hundred years ago in rural England, when working men and women rose up en masse rather than starve at the hands of the factory owners who were using machines to erase and degrade their livelihoods.
They organized guerilla raids, smashed those machines, and embarked on full-scale assaults against the wealthy machine owners. They won the support of Lord Byron, inspired Mary Shelley, and enraged the Prince Regent and his bloodthirsty government. Before it was over, much blood would be spilled—of rich and poor, of the invisible and of the powerful. This all-but-forgotten and deeply misunderstood class struggle nearly brought 19th century England to its knees.
We live now in the second machine age, when similar fears that big tech is dominating our lives and machines replacing human labor run high. We worry that technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are ousting workers from factories, and artificial intelligence will soon remove drivers from cars. How will this all reshape our economy and the way we live? And what can we do about it?
The answers lie in the story of our first machine age, when mechanization first came to British factories at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Intertwined with a lucid examination of our current age, the story of the Luddites, the working-class insurgency that took up arms against automation (at a time when it was punishable by death to break a machine), Blood in the Machine reaches through time and space to tell a story about how technology changed our world—and how it's already changing our future.
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Praise
“This is an absolutely indispensable, shocking, and fascinating tale by one of today’s most important technology writers. This riveting book is as much a work of history as it is an urgent examination of our ability to resist the overwhelming changes technology is wreaking on our lives. The Luddites knew that automation, job loss and the consolidation of wealth aren’t inevitable. We can shape these forces if we’re willing to break a loom or two.”—Christopher Leonard, New York Times bestselling author of Kochland and The Lords of Easy Money
"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