The New Luddites: Why People Are Destroying Surveillance and AI Infrastructure

0:00They didn't win the public's trust. They didn't win the public support. They said, we're going to do this anyways. There was never a real negotiation of the social contract. It was tech companies chipping away at all these things. And nobody ever really got a serious vote.

0:18Brian Merchant:Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media podcast. As a reminder, 404 Media is a journalist-owned company and needs your support. Subscribers get bonus episodes, bonus segments, and early access to interview episodes like this one. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. Our guest today for this interview episode is Brian Merchant, my dear friend. So maybe this will be a little bit looser since Brian is my friend and mentor and I owe it all to him. Brian is the author of Blood and the Machine, which is a history of the Luddites and the Luddite movement. Your book is excellent. People should go read it. He's also got the Blood in the Machine newsletter and website, which continues that sort of work.

1:04Brian Merchant:Thank you for that illustrious introduction, Jason. I have to say that I'm... How long has the 404 podcast been going at this point? Since we launched, so August 2023, so two and a half years. Wow. So how should I feel that this is my first appearance? You finally scored an invite at long last. I got the invite. You got the invite while we watched the basketball game last night. I'm thrilled to be here. I am a big fan of 404 Media. I figured today, Brian, we could talk about so many different things. But I wanted to talk about the violent backlash to technology and to AI and kind of putting it in the historical context of the Luddites.

1:48Brian Merchant:I think there's been like a new Luddism movement, etc. I guess before we get into it, can you just do the very quick spiel on who the Luddites were so that we're framing them correctly, historically speaking, versus saying there are people who hated technology and that's it? The very brief version of what the Luddites were all about is that they were skilled workers, craftsmen, cloth workers, mostly at the beginning of the first industrial revolution. And as the first kind of wave of what we now call entrepreneurs started using capital to build some of the first factories and to organize production and to buy more mechanized machines that automated their jobs, the Luddites or those who had become the Luddites, the cloth workers, basically kind of started a peaceful protest at first because these factory owners, were using more and more automated machinery, not to fully automate the process, not to turn it over completely to machines, but basically to sort of justify paying new workers less.

3:00So they'd hire children, they'd hire migrant workers and itinerant workers, precarious labor, and they were undercutting the skilled craftsmen who had a system for hundreds of years that basically organized labor and production in the cloth trades in England. And so when those early factory owners took their capital and their influence and their resources to build those factories and to start concentrating sort of the power and wealth in their hands and sort of dictating the terms of how production would unfold, the Luddites rose up after spending about a decade trying to do things, quote, the right way and petitioning parliament, trying to get laws passed.

3:46Eventually, they had no choice because they were laughed out of parliament. Their wages were eroded to the bone, and they were quite literally starving. They organized a rebellion, essentially, against those factory owners, and they took up hammers, quite literally and organized sort of guerrilla raids to smash the machinery and the factories of the most sort of, quote, obnoxious owners in town. And so it's the movement spread all across the industrial districts of England in 1811 and really for the next couple of years brought England to the brink.

4:26Brian Merchant:Yeah, I wanted to start this conversation by framing it that way because I think what Blood in the Machine does now, your newsletter, is take that historical context and use it to help us understand this moment that we're seeing in technology and society today, where AI-powered job loss is threatening people, and you have people pushing back politically, but then you also have increasingly people pushing back violently. And I think the first article you did about this was people burning Waymos in downtown LA during the initial ICE raids. There's also here in LA, there's a lot of delivery robots and they're constantly being knocked over, bashed in with baseball bats, things like this.

5:16Brian Merchant:And so it's like the kind of like autonomous or semi-autonomous robots roaming the streets here have been something of like fair game for run-of-the-mill vandals, but then also more politically inclined protest. Yeah. And I think, so that's been, I think the debate all along is whether it's not, whether it's just people who see an easy target, something that's unmanned, you know, obviously doesn't have a driver in it who's going to get out and yell at you or try to fight you. And so it's something that, you know, I mean, they are all surrounded by, you know, a surveillance apparatus. So they're all taking video.

5:59So there is that, and people are doing it anyways. But I would argue a couple things. I think, according to my reporting, the prevalence of Waymo, which everybody knows is owned by Google, one of the big tech firms that has colonized our digital and everyday lives in many, many ways. That's an inextricable element of people's understanding of these vehicles, that these are sort of vestiges of big tech. They are avatars of big tech, kind of roaming the streets. So they see these autonomous vehicles, and it immediately, to a lot of people, it invokes anger, it invokes fear, like anger as in, I didn't ask for this, these things are driving around my neighborhood.

6:52And so when I was investigating the torching of the Waymos, which was clearly deliberate, somebody or multiple people, I don't even know if we to this day know who they

7:08Brian Merchant:are, if they were burner accounts. I'm not aware of anyone being arrested or caught for doing this, despite the fact that there's so many cameras on them and all that. I mean, maybe they were and I just didn't see. No, I don't think so. Yeah, it's kind of interesting that despite the fact that these are surveillance tech, that no one was really caught. Especially because they had to be summoned, right? So that's the other thing about this protest is that there were six of them, if I remember correctly. And they were summoned to a point in the block in downtown LA. And they were methodically set on fire.

7:50So I went down the next day and you could see the charred husk. I mean, these things burnt to a crisp. They burnt right down to the chassis. They were like, to the point where it was like, I think they didn't know how to transport them. They were just smoldered into the ground.

8:06Brian Merchant:I mean, I'm looking at the photos now. They don't even look like cars. They're barely recognizable. They're just like piles of ash, essentially. Yeah, they are. And so they had to be, I'm sure, strategically removed from the road somehow. And so when I reported it out and was talking to people who were there at the scene, they claimed to have heard people yelling about the spy cars. So that was very much in the air, the fact that these were tools of surveillance. In addition to just making a very striking image, it sent a message. And that was a year ago. And if anything, tensions are only higher now.

8:47Certainly Silicon Valley has not been deterred from continuing to show up at White House dinners, continuing to partner with the Trump administration, continuing to seek out defense contracts.

9:03Brian Merchant:Well, I think one of the things that kind of directly ties this to the Luddite movement is that the Luddite movement was largely a labor organizing movement. And we're going to talk about some technologies here that people are attacking, burning, fucking with that are maybe less tied, are more like surveillance technologies and less like things that directly threaten jobs. And I think with a Waymo, you kind of have both in that they are these roving surveillance cameras, but then they also sort of threaten the cab industry. Yeah, absolutely. And then there's also a big debate, at least here in LA, about who should be allowed to use public infrastructure, meaning the roads in this case.

9:50Brian Merchant:But a lot of the backlash to delivery robots are like, well, these delivery robots are taking up the sidewalks, which are already very few and far between in Los Angeles. is it's like notoriously a dangerous place for pedestrians. And you have these robots with like faces on them driving around the sidewalks and getting stuck. My dog almost got run over by one when I was walking him once. And it's just like there is a backlash to it. And I think there's also the fact that the people who use these things, they're able to kind of like abstract themselves away from dealing with society to some degree.

10:26Brian Merchant:It's like part of the point of Waymo is like, Like, well, you don't even have to talk to an Uber driver. You don't have to interact with society at all. And with the delivery robots, it's like, for a while you call the restaurant and they send a delivery person over and you open the door and you tip them or whatever. Then during the pandemic, it's like, well, contactless delivery, just leave it at the door. And then with the delivery robots, it's like, well, we've gotten rid of the person altogether or that person is using an Xbox controller to drive these from a college campus in Nebraska or something.

10:57Yeah. And before, I think that's all absolutely correct. That is the intention here, I think. And that even sort of, this sort of insight or this comment is so old at this point that I've even forgotten who said it's just received wisdom. But you can view a lot of these services, and especially the Uber for X wave of 10 or 15 years ago, as what rich college boys want. They're all trying to design apps that would do what their mothers used to do for them without having to talk to anybody. Get a ride somewhere, listen to music, get food handed to them directly without making them uncomfortable at all.

11:39So I think that that holds true on one level. And I wanted to go back to sort of, I think, the broader point and the commonality between all of this stuff is that the labor element is real and that, I think, was ultimately sort of the motivating factor once the Luddites sort of did rise up and they couldn't make a living doing their work anymore. But even the foundation of their discontent underneath that was the fact that they were getting left out of the picture. They didn't have a seat at the table. Technological development was only serving a few people and it was being done profoundly anti-democratically.

12:25And so that's, I think, the common thread. They were protesting a way that the way of life was being changed against their will. And the prospect of having to sit with a boss for the first time, have to ask to go to the bathroom, sit in a windowless building and work for 10 hours a day instead of working at home on terms and hours that you dictated. That's how the Luddites used to work. And that's how they were used to... It was a much better way of life. And they were fighting against the imposition of the factory system by the hands of a few people. So similarly, I would argue that if you go back to sort of the first measures when San Francisco and California more broadly was sort of trying to vote on allowing these cars onto the roads, there was tremendous public backlash.

13:24There was tremendous public outpouring of protests. People were against it pretty overwhelmingly. And they wanted a few major things from the tech companies that the tech companies never gave up. They wanted transparent data sharing. and there have been some measures, half measures, and nods towards some conciliatory measures, but they're not behaving as a public stakeholder or somebody that's part of the government. Again, it's flying in the face of public will. And so whether or not the statistics indicate that they're 3 % safer or fewer traffic, or whatever the data says, that Google or Waymo bandied about in those hearings, they didn't win the public's trust.

14:19They didn't win the public support. They said, we're going to do this anyways. And I think that has been the unifying theme of a lot of these technologies, from the delivery robots to the driverless vehicles to a lot of the AI tech. So yeah, what recourse do most people have to say, we don't like this. We don't want AI in our schools. We don't want a Waymo roaming my city block. We would rather not have this. What can you do? Your options, democratically, are very limited. It's typically been, oh, you don't like it? Too bad. Learn to like it. Learn to be okay with it. And so it's totally unsurprising that you see demonstrations of vandalism or worse.

15:10Yeah.

15:11Brian Merchant:To put this, I guess, back into a historical context, were the Luddites successful? As in, did destroying these looms and things like this lead to meaningful protections for workers or any sort of political progress on that front? Yeah. I mean, I argue, there's a whole chapter in my book where I argue that the Luddites were a lot more successful than people give them credit for. So on the number one, they were incredibly popular in their day, right? Just like there was kind of like this recent, like kind of like, oh shit moment where after the Molotov cocktail guy, you know, threw it at Sam Altman's house and it was proliferated on social media And people were like, you know, oh, good.

16:00You know, like that was a sentiment. It was another kind of like Brian Thompson, Luigi moment where people were like celebrating, you know, roundly the people who were, you know, attacking this executive. And it like, it really shook, you know, understandably so, a lot of people in Silicon Valley. But to that end, yeah, the Luddites like often operated with impunity. They would go in broad daylight sometimes in kind of a parade to go smash up a factory that was full of automated looms. And so people would cheer in the streets when the Luddites went and smashed these machines. They got folk songs written about them and hymns.

16:45General Ludd's Triumph, it survives today. Chumba Wumba. I get knocked down, I get up again. They do a version of General Let's Try It because it still survives today.

16:55Brian Merchant:Did not know that. Did not know that. That's what I'm here to share the knowledge. Anyways, the point is that they were successful in the short term. In the very, very short term, they got a bunch of factory owners to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, okay, we'll put the prices back to what they were so you can make a living, we can make a living. That didn't last very long, of course, but it did establish this sort of short-term truce, number one. Number two, it sort of seeded the reform movement. Workers were not allowed to collectively bargain or form unions by law. And so a lot of the Luddites, after they were crushed by the state.

17:35So the state did organize an incredible effort of force to combat the Luddites, and they used more troops than they had fighting the war against Napoleon to put down the Luddites. It was like the biggest domestic occupation of England. So they fought a war basically against the Luddites and eventually crushed them outright. And the Luddites were hung and they made a big show trial and hung them at York Castle. So like, you know, lots of Luddites were killed. And yet they inspired, you know, a future generations of workers both to fight for reform. A lot of the Luddites themselves went on to join the reform movement, which did lead to winning the right to collectively bargain.

18:20It sort of imprinted culture. And so, yeah, so you had real reform, some cultural imprinting, and then some subsequent actual sabotage movements that took after the Luddites. So it was in some ways, you know, actually a pretty, it was certainly important and certainly crucial. And I think without Britain, like really turning to kind of propagandize against the Luddites, I think we'd think of the Luddites like Robin Hood, right? As heroes who faced down enormous odds and may have lost their battle, but may yet win the war and may yet find a way to have technology serve everybody's interests and not just a few.

19:03Brian Merchant:I want to talk about FLOC now because speaking of sort of the democratic process and lack thereof, one of the through lines of my reporting on this is that so many communities have signed FLOC contracts without much public debate. And so basically, police will use discretionary funds, or maybe there will be a city council meeting, or there was a city council meeting years ago where the city agreed to buy flat cameras, and then people didn't go to it, and they didn't really know what was happening. And now they're finding out through our reporting and other reporting that this surveillance is incredibly invasive.

19:46Brian Merchant:This surveillance may or may not lead to reduced crime. This surveillance is being filtered up to ice. And you have cameras at playgrounds and all this sort of thing. and so uh i wanted to talk i guess a little bit about this story you did called across the u.s people are dismantling and destroying flock surveillance cameras um and it was like a series of basically like people bashing these cameras and um you know there was one in la mesa which is a suburb of san diego uh there was some in eugene uh in springfield yeah there are some in some in Oregon and in Virginia. And in Virginia, there's like one guy who went around and personally dismantled like a dozen of them before he got caught.

20:38Brian Merchant:And they left a little sticker that said, ha ha, get wrecked, you surveilling fucks. That one was in Eugene, I think. Yeah. You know, it's just one of those, I think, technologies that comes along and just kind of unifies everybody in their creepiness. They're just giant surveillance cameras that are just being set up in communities and watching everybody at all times. And that is just something that inherently gets under people's skin. It's like a true bipartisan issue. Anybody who is interested in civil liberties tends to think this is a terrible idea. And so it's not something that you want where you live.

21:27And so again, when people don't have democratic recourse, and they feel like they're not being listened to, and they're in fact not being listened to, when most often, again, as you said, these things are tremendously unpopular. but it just shows again the trajectories, where our state has been going in general. Obviously, there are exceptions and it's not an even path, but it's just more gear for cops, more surveillance technology, more partnerships with inscrutable firms that store and manage this data and occasionally lose it. It's another sense where It feels like it's an otherwise unaccountable entity that people can't push back on normal means.

22:18So yeah, I'm not surprised. People are breaking them, smashing them, sending political messages.

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