In short
Summary of The Culture Journalist Podcast Episode: "Is it time to bring back the Luddite movement?"
Episode Overview In this episode of *The Culture Journalist*, hosts Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick discuss the historical context and modern implications of the Luddite movement, featuring Brian Merchant, author of *Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion of Big Tech*. The episode explores the original Luddites' fight against exploitation and automation, drawing parallels to contemporary concerns about AI and technology's impact on labor.
Key Themes and Discussions
Understanding the Luddites
- Historical Context: The Luddites were a group of early 19th-century machinists and textile workers in England who opposed the industrial revolution's automation, fearing job loss and wage reduction.
- Misinterpretation: The term "Luddite" has evolved to imply someone who is resistant to technology, but Merchant argues that the Luddites were actually skilled workers fighting against exploitation rather than technology itself.
Modern Relevance
- AI and Automation: The discussion highlights the parallels between the Luddite movement and modern concerns about AI technologies, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, which threaten jobs and livelihoods.
- Contemporary Ludditism: The episode emphasizes that the essence of modern Luddism is not about rejecting technology but resisting its exploitation and the erosion of worker rights.
Key Takeaways
- Reclaiming the Term: There’s a growing movement to redefine what it means to be a Luddite today, viewing it as a noble stance against exploitation rather than backwardness.
- Labor Movements: The importance of collective action and the role of unions in advocating for workers’ rights against technology misuse is emphasized.
- Historical Lessons: Drawing lessons from the Luddite resistance can inform current labor struggles and highlight the importance of advocating for ethical technological practices.
Brian Merchant's Insights
- Merchant emphasizes that the Luddites were aware of the implications of machines on their work and communities, illustrating a strong sense of agency and solidarity.
- He critiques contemporary narratives that frame technology as an unassailable force of progress, arguing that society has the power to shape the trajectory of technological development.
Actionable Insights
- Saying No: The hosts and Merchant advocate for a modern approach where workers and communities can collectively refuse harmful technologies, drawing on historical examples of resistance.
- Cultural Reflection: The podcast encourages listeners to reflect on their relationship with technology and consider the ethical implications of new advancements.
Conclusion The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to engage in discussions around technology and worker rights, emphasizing the potential for a modern Luddite movement that champions ethical practices in the face of automation and AI. The Luddites, they suggest, were not just rebels against machines but pioneers of a more equitable approach to labor and technology.
Further Listening Listeners are encouraged to support *The Culture Journalist* through subscriptions for additional content and discussions related to culture and technology. For more insights, check out Brian Merchant's upcoming book, *Blood in the Machine*, available for pre-order.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00For the wages were low and the hours were long and the labor was all I could bear. Now you've got new machines for to take my place And you tell me it's not mine to share Greetings, pals. It's Andrea and Emily here with The Culture Journalist. A podcast about culture in the age of platforms. So with all the current talk around AI and automation and metaverses and what have you, I feel like the word Luddite is getting thrown around a lot. Emily, have you ever been called or called someone a Luddite? Like, what comes to mind when you hear that word? I think I sometimes call myself a Luddite when I'm feeling particularly disenchanted with technology or something.
0:49Like, oh, I wish I could just, you know, drop out and not have a phone and move to the mountains kind of thing. Oh, yeah. I feel that, too. And I feel like I've also heard you say that. Probably the most recent instance where I heard that term was in the context of a New York Times article from, I think, December of last year that was about these like cool teens in New York City who had started a Luddite club. Oh, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, like backlash against social media. We have flip phones and every week we meet in a park and turn off our phones and like write poetry and draw. Yeah, maybe the kids are all right after all.
1:32I definitely want to join that club. Me too. Well, what about you, Andrea? Like, what comes to mind when you hear that word? For how I've understood it, the Luddites were people, the group of people in the 1800s who, like, didn't like technology. And so they smashed a bunch of machines. So now that term is kind of synonymous with, you know, like, people who don't like technology. Or I feel like more often I hear it in context of like people who are not good at technology. Like just the other day I was, I was like buying some concert tickets from some, for someone and they had to transfer them to me.
2:05And the person was like, oh, forgive me. I'm a bit of a Luddite. So you might have to like walk me through how to use this app. So I feel like it's kind of shorthand for being bad at tech or like not being down with tech. Yes. Yes. Definitely that combo. But like, what are the actual origins of the term? do you know so i do now thanks to what we'll be talking about in today's episode the word luddite it turns out comes from a weaver named ned lud who's a potentially apocryphal robin hood like character from the 18th century who legend goes smashed two knitting frames in what was described as a fit of passion after he was whipped for not being productive enough wait and didn't he like hide out in Sherwood Forest or something like actual Robin Hood?
2:56Yeah, yeah, something like that. So then at the beginning of the 19th century, that guy became the inspiration for the Luddite movement, which appropriated Ludd's identity as the movement's folkloric founder and leader. They even signed their letters and proclamations as Ned Ludd. As for what the Luddites actually did and stood for, well, it turns out that we've been getting it wrong for a long time. Like Ludd, they did destroy machines, but not because they were some weirdo regressive sect. In reality, the Luddites were actually an underground network of early 19th century machinists and textile workers who took up arms against the industrialists looking to automate them out of a job.
3:43And they did this quite literally by smashing the factory equipment that threatened to put downward pressure on their wages, flood the market with poorly made imitations of the goods they were already producing, and in some cases, replace their jobs outright. Sound familiar? Well, TLDR, the Luddites were actually an early iteration of the labor movement, not anti-tech, but against the exploitation of workers. Their real story, and the story of how they came to be so misunderstood, is a deeply fascinating one. A saga of class struggle, power, and spilt blood that nearly brought England to its knees.
4:23The tale of the first time machines came for human jobs is the subject of Blood in the Machine, an engrossing and exhaustively researched new book by tech journalist and LA Times columnist Brian Merchant. Brian is yet another former colleague of ours from Vice. We know there's a lot of them where his work included a documentary about what happens if you live off Soylent for a month, which is funny because I did a piece that was kind of like that, but with freeze dried food. He still runs Terraform motherboard speculative fiction publication, and he's also the author of the bestseller, The One Device, about the history of the iPhone.
5:03Blood in the Machine is due out in September via Little Brown and Company. You can find the pre-order link on our sub stack. But given all the chatter that's been happening around AI and labor, and some excellent recent columns Brian has penned about just that, we didn't want to wait to have him on. So today he's joining us to discuss the origins of the Luddite movement, the eerie similarities between the systems of automation these workers were up against and what we're dealing with with AI, and what a modern-day version of the Luddite movement might look like. Hint, it's already happening and it has nothing to do with smashing our phones, though you do you.
5:41We'll be right back with Bryant Merchant after the break. The Culture Journalist is an independent project that relies on word of mouth and is funded entirely by listeners like you. If this podcast adds something meaningful to your life, please consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber over at our sub stack, which, by the way, has a bunch of other cool stuff beyond podcast episodes. Paid subscribers receive full access to bonus episodes, along with essays, culture recommendations, playlists and more. You can join us in the fight against Internet monoculture for the price of a cup of coffee in today's economy.
6:20All right, pals, we're back here with Brian Merchant. Brian, thanks so much for coming on. Great to have you. Thanks for having me. So what got you interested in writing a book about the Luddites? And why does it feel like actually quite a topical thing to write about in 2023? Yeah, so it's kind of shocking how topical it has become, actually. I started thinking about this book six years ago, which feels insane to say out loud. I started the book because it seemed that the way that we were thinking about technology and the way that it gets deployed and the way that it sort of interacts with work and the way that it's used by, you know, startup founders and executives and managers sort of against workers was pretty unexamined.
7:18There was a lot of talk sort of about, you know, Facebook and misinformation. And it was like it was the the election that, you know, that sort of kindled a lot of the sort of stuff that we sort of more traditionally think about as sort of the tech lash. But there wasn't as much sort of interrogation going on of the trend lines between something like Uber or Lyft or Amazon and work. I mean, there were great stories out there, of course, about tech labor and so forth. But I didn't see the two sort of worlds of tech journalism and sort of labor reporting sort of meeting in the middle quite as much.
7:58And I had sort of for a long time had a bit of a fascination with the Luddites and the way that they're pretty misunderstood and maligned unfairly. I did a piece for Vice back, I think, in 2014, almost 10 years ago, that was titled something like, You've Got the Luddites All Wrong, because they had been enshrined in history as these machine-smashing morons who broke things that they didn't understand or just hated because they were barbarians and they weren't capable of understanding the potential of technology, which is just totally false, which is a myth. But that's the myth sort of perpetrated by the people who have an interest in having anybody who might protest the way a technology is rolled out to sort of malign the consumers who don't jump on board or the workers who don't jump on board as idiots.
8:55So it makes people a little nervous to sort of protest technology. It makes them feel like they're protesting progress. And no one wants to be thought of as someone who's backwards looking or stuck in the past. So telling this story felt like a way to address that long established sort of prejudice we have against being critical of technology. Yeah, it is funny how the term Luddite does have this negative connotation. Like, it's almost like a like a put down, like, oh, you're such a Luddite, you know. So for those who are unfamiliar with the history, like how does the way that we understand the term Luddite today, how is that a bit misleading as far as summing up like what they were actually about?
9:37The very first thing you have to say when you talk about the Luddites in a factual and meaningful way is that they did not in any way hate technology. They did not misunderstand technology. In fact, the opposite is true. They were skilled machinists who operated some of the most crucial machinery of the time, things like the stocking frame or the hand loom. They knew how to use that machinery very well. And because they knew that machinery very well, they also understood the implications of entrepreneurs. This was the beginning of the industrial revolution, sort of the early 1800s, using new kinds of machinery that would attempt to basically do their work more crudely.
10:21This is sort of early automation technology, and it can't really do a great job yet, which again, a lot of parallels to what we'll be talking about, I'm sure with AI. But the Luddites were angry because they recognized immediately what was going on. And that was that these entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to use this machinery to sort of speed the transition to factory style work away from a style of work where most of the Luddites either worked in small shops or at home with their families. They had a lot of autonomy over their lives. They weren't rich. These were mostly what we would today sort of recognize as working class or middle class in some cases.
11:06You know, a lot of them worked 30-hour weeks. They could take time off when they wanted. They could walk in their garden. They would work with their families at home singing songs. So when they saw the machinery that could sort of more crudely automate their work, they knew that this was going to be a grim future where they wouldn't be able to work according to their own schedules. They had a phrase for it. They didn't want to stand at the command of somebody else. And in the meantime, they saw that the entrepreneurs were using those machines to degrade wages. Since they could run them more cheaply, they only had to hire child labor or unskilled workers and get around all the regulations of the day, which required things like apprenticeship or how cloth had to be dressed a certain way before it could be manufactured.
11:51The entrepreneurs, just like a company like Uber or something today, sort of argued that, well, this was technology, this was different, they didn't have to play by the same labor rules and regulations that the previous generation did. So as a result, they basically saw their working conditions eroded by entrepreneurs quite purposefully. You know, These were smaller towns back then with just a few thousand people in them a lot of times. And these small economies were pretty finely tuned and they were very tradition bound. So when somebody set up a factory, you could just really see the seismic shift.
12:25You could see, OK, well, you know, now there's 100 orders that are being taken up by that factory. That's 100 fewer orders for the workers. before they became Luddites. They lobbied parliament for reforms to get things like minimum wages to protect their livelihoods, to get controls on the industry. And they were just rebuffed over and over and over again for a course of about a decade. And they really were sort of pushed to the brink in a lot of ways before they organized quite intentionally this method of resistance, they would send a threatening letter to a factory owner in town or an entrepreneur in town and say, we know that you have the automating machinery.
13:08And that automating machinery is degrading our lives, taking our jobs, quote unquote, taking our bread is what they would say. And it very much was. So they gave them a chance to take down the automating machinery. And if they did not, well, then they would either sneak into the factory, break in or hold the owner up at gunpoint while they went in with a giant hammer and they would smash the machines that were doing the automation. All the old machines that were sort of part of the standard of the day, they didn't smash those, especially at first. They only smashed sort of the implements of exploitation, the things that were being used expressly to sort of degrade their jobs.
13:54And they would do this, you know, over and over again. They smashed thousands and thousands of frames or machines this way. So why and how do you think it took on such a negative meaning in the first place or negative connotation in the first place? The reason that we have this derogatory conception of them is because starting it From the very onset of the Industrial Revolution, it was sort of a bit of counter propaganda from the crown, from the state, that these deluded wretches, they would call them, they made them out to be terrorists, savages, delusional people. They had been brainwashed by some malign force, and they just couldn't see that what they were destroying was the technology that was leading to progress.
14:41And that's a complete fiction, right? These machines were benefiting a very small handful of people who were reaping the profits for themselves and becoming very wealthy in the process. And it was pretty evident to working class people everywhere that the state was full of shit. But they had little other recourse because the Luddites were super popular. They were the Robin Hoods of the day. And in order to combat that, sort of the elites of the day had to make this case that, well, no, these are all just idiots. They don't actually know it's good for them. If they would just see that this is going to lead to economic progress, it's making England richer as a whole.
15:25You know, ultimately, the state had to step in and, you know, just brutally crack down on the uprising. And, you know, the book covers that story of what happened and how they imposed capital punishment laws. So if you broke a machine, you could be put to death and lots of lives were. So really, it's they just sort of seize the narrative, those those in power and recast it from being what what they really were, which is anti exploitation to anti advancement, of course, not qualifying as like who is getting advanced here and what's getting advanced. Yep, 100%. That's exactly what happened. And once the state, you know, the other part of the equation was that they had, they marshaled thousands, tens of thousands of troops, the largest domestic occupation in British history, it took to put down the Luddites.
16:19So there was sometimes 35 ,000 troops in the Midlands of England and in the impacted areas. And so once they had forcefully put the Luddites down and then hung dozens of them, well, there wasn't really a countervailing cultural force that could continue to make its case. They had been pretty thoroughly stamped out. So, yeah, the elite messaging sort of won the day. It's so crazy how all of this, it almost sounds like a civil war. And then this has been like erased from our memory, our collective memory for the most part. I mean, people would describe it as being on the brink of civil war. If you were in the south of London or around London, it really looked to you like the north of England was just on the brink of revolution.
17:11And the elites of the day were genuinely worried that the working class people were going to rise up and overthrow the monarchy. That's why they responded so forcefully and so aggressively. And you can see also, like, just fast forwarding to today, you can see how having this message of Luddites being just sort of ignorant, backwards people would work in, you know, the elite's favor. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know, like I read, you know, technology criticism online and I see this like less now, but there was a while where it was like every time anyone said anything critical about, you know, questioning a technology or a tech company, the writer always had to be like, I'm not a Luddite or like, I love technology.
18:02And it's like there's something shameful about, which is weird, right? Like when you think about it. Yeah, it's really powerful. This sort of case that has been made time and time again, and sort of there have been these revitalizations of the Luddite sort of ethos from time to time. And it usually attends a tech boom or, you know, in the 90s, there was an actual neo-Luddite movement by some writers and thinkers and academics that wasn't didn't make as big of a splash as the as the original Luddite uprising. But it comes back time and time again to contest this because it, yeah, it has become such almost a commonsensical sort of understanding of the world that, well, technology is progress.
18:49And it's very deterministic to just think that, you know, like, well, things are just going to accelerate in this direction and we better find ways to adapt because it's not true at all. Technology is built by people and it is iterative. And at every step along the way, we have choices and we can regulate technology. We can decide not to build a given technology. We can decide to outlaw a certain technology. These are all choices that a society can make and has made in the past. But when you have power that becomes so concentrated and wealth that becomes so concentrated as it has with Silicon Valley, it becomes very difficult to sort of politically oppose the so-called march of technological progress, this narrative that they have put literally billions or hundreds of billions of dollars behind perpetuating.
19:45So it's more difficult now than ever to sort of stand up to this narrative and turn it back. But we are seeing that happening to a great degree. fortunately. Yeah, I like this idea that, you know, implicit to your book, I guess, or in some ways explicit that maybe redefining what a Luddite means can be like a path to normalizing forms of resistance. We're like, you don't have to be against all technology to like see what is going on and people who are benefiting from this and suffering from this. That's right. 100%. Yeah. Right. Maybe calling yourself a Luddite is actually like a cool thing, like make Luddites cool again.
20:25Like it actually means taking a humanistic and holistic perspective on technological advancement, not going backwards. Yeah, you know, I'm not the only one invested in this project at this point. But I would say that that is one of the one of the hopes that readers of this book will come away with is that, you know, there is nothing shameful about being a Luddite. In fact, it was a fairly noble struggle. And they won some real victories. They blazed paths that we should all be thankful for. they refused to quote unquote, you know, lay down and die in a ditch. Like as the historians sort of tongue in cheek describe, that's what the elites expected of them to say, well, your time is done now.
21:14We're doing the factories now. We can run that with children. We don't need you anymore. By engaging in this resistance, they really sort of did a lot to sort of foment class consciousness. They were integral in sort of the early formation of trade unions. They sort of elucidated the negative impacts of technology. And, you know, they also won some real immediate sort of concessions and victories too. In some places where they were the strongest, they pushed the machinery out, the automating technology out for decades. And that gave them time to sort of recalibrate and strengthen their communities so they wouldn't just be kind of blown over or steamrolled by it.
21:59You know, they raised wages in a lot of cases, sometimes only temporarily, but by employing this tactic, which historians have called collective bargaining by riot, they really did improve their immediate conditions and circumstances. So they sort of pointed the way in a lot of ways. And that has become more apparent. Again, it's not just me, There's a number of sort of writers and podcasters and academics and labor leaders who are, you know, straight up Luddite fans now. You know, there's another podcast called This Machine Kills. And they just, the Luddites are central to kind of their voice and sort of their MO.
22:42and you're seeing Luddite pop back up into like Twitter bios, into the discourse where people are just kind of embracing it in a way that you never would have seen 10 years ago. So I think that reclaiming that term is a good thing. Obviously, you need to do a lot more than that to really sort of confront power, but it's a good start. With my feet on the ground and my back to your wheels And now the smoke is rising, the steel is all aglow I'm walking down a jobless road and where am I to go? Tell me where am I to go? Do you ever wonder why you never hear any ads on this podcast? It's because we do everything all by ourselves and support it entirely through generous contributions from listeners just like you.
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24:00what's so striking when you read this book and you know the story of these uprisings is that the machines would just show up on the factory floor or the workers would you know see what people were building and the workers would just like smash the machines it's such an invocative image. I think you lean into it at times. And part of why it's such an evocative image is that we just can't really imagine ourselves doing this today. I would walk into my office and someone would be like, we're going to replace you, a writer, with AI. And then I would throw my laptop out the window or something. I can't tell whether we should be thinking of these workers as having almost a greater sense of their power and agency and pride than workers do today or if the fact that they had to do this was that they were like so disempowered that property destruction and violence was the only option.
24:56What's your hunch about this? Yeah, it's a little bit of both. You know, the Luddites were the interesting thing. One interesting thing about the Luddites was that they were sort of early decentralized resistance and they were organized around this figurehead. And that allowed different groups in different parts of the cloth manufacturing industry with completely different grievances to sort of organize under the same banner and to sort of mobilize a greater show of force. You know, they would all sign their letters, General Ludd or King Ludd. So it gave the sense of this united movement. And in some cases, there was only tenuous links.
25:39They would meet each other through delegates and through cells. But by and large, a lot of it was pretty autonomous. So they had their own grievances. One group might want to raise wages or prevent people from paying them in goods and not money. Another group might be expressly concerned about automation and wanting to head that off before it becomes a problem. And they're not quite starving yet, but they can see that they might be soon. But you also have to remember that this was a time when that principle that we were talking about, that machinery and technology equals progress, that was not in the equation.
26:18It was completely an open question. There was a real open-ended debate. And it wasn't like today where it was like, oh, are the robots coming for our jobs or not? What should we do about it? It was machines are being put into factories. Is this a good thing or not? Should we or should we not do this? To a lot of intellectuals and a lot of public debaters who were not in this sort of aggressive laissez-faire Adam Smith contingent, it really was an open question. Like maybe we just shouldn't do machines. So the Luddites were operating on a completely different sort of moral environment where they could really say no and be cheered and smashing that machinery could be seen as a heroic act.
27:05And they had, you know, this was a tactic that had been deployed before over past decades as machinery sort of began to appear over the course of the 1700s. So they knew it was a tactic in their arsenal and they knew that they did have power. So your point to them having more power or more sort of awareness of that power and a little more solidarity, that's true. they did know that they could use force as a tactic to win real world concessions. So it wasn't just like that their backs are pushed up against the wall. What else are we going to do? At least we can maybe smash something. No, it was very well considered.
27:46It was, okay, this is the biggest sort of automator in town. He's got this many machines. If we break those machines, it can restore some balance to the trade and set this precedent where other entrepreneurs are afraid to adopt them. And maybe we can start to sort of wind things back because we don't really have any other choice or because we've exhausted every other option. So this is a tactic that we have in our arsenal that we can do to show our power. I think workers then did sort of benefit from not having this sort of ideology that what they were doing was dumb. I think working people said, that's awesome.
28:30You know, that way to stand up for yourselves. And they were supported not just by other cloth workers, but by, you know, coal workers and shoemakers and hat makers, all kinds of different workers, even if their trade wasn't being impacted by automation directly. They saw the moral economy of what was going on and they decided that the Luddites were right. Yeah, I've been doing a little bit of research on the arts and crafts movement, which happens like more towards the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th century. And like, it's interesting because so much of the like rhetoric around that, which is also, you know, starts in England was, oh, we need to restore the kind of pride in workmanship and autonomy of the worker that has been lost.
29:22Like as a result of the things that the Luddites were fighting against, you know? Yeah, 100%. And that was a those were chief concerns of the Luddites, too. I mean, you know, they had a lot of pride in their work. They ran their looms and their stocking frames and it was hard work. Sometimes it wasn't pleasant work, but they produced high quality garments. And if they did, they were pleased with it and they could sell that. And it was a transaction that felt good to everyone involved. You know, there is this sort of the system of the standard of kind of fair price. And it worked for about 200 years where the merchant wouldn't overcharge or wouldn't try to gouge anybody.
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30:09The, you know, the weaver would ask for a fair price. Everybody was in it together. And one of the things that the machines did was sort of scramble that compact. And it also churned out shoddier stuff. And it did really infuriate the Luddites and the people who would become Luddites because they would either be forced to speed up their operations or try to buy machinery themselves and lose that pride in their work, which was also – work is also an identity. So you can't really separate those two things as much in some cases as the economic problems that the Luddites would suffer. It was that loss of pride and status and autonomy that really was most injurious to a lot of these workers.
31:01I can put myself into the mindset thinking about, I don't know, employers being like, we can replace you with chat GPT and like the loss of pride. And also like, no, you can't. All the writing is going to be really crappy then. Yep. It's such a good analogy. It's eerie, all the similarities, because yeah, another thing that the machines would do is they would do that sort of entry level work that, you know, The easier work that could be automated and that sort of deprived craftsmen or workers who would want to start out in the trade and learn that hard stuff, there wasn't that avenue. And that's another thing that I think chat GPT and all these image generators, it's going to suck up a lot of that baseline, quote unquote, easy to produce work or stuff that managers or editors for corporate materials or something isn't going to care as much whether or not it is of a certain quality.
31:57But that's where writers can cut their teeth. You know, so many writers, you know, do journalism or write essays, but they make the bulk of their money, especially freelancers working for corporate clients, working for marketing firms, working for ad agencies. And that's where we're seeing a lot of sort of the AI being used to sort of gobble up the easier stuff to do. It's not like AI is going to, you know, replace a long form essay in New York magazine or something. It's going to replace the content. But that, you know, and Ted Chiang made this point in a great New Yorker piece recently. Like that's where people learn how to write.
32:37You know, that's where you cut your teeth. I wrote about 9 ,000 blog posts, you know, before I became a better or employable journalist. Maybe I didn't want to write that many blog posts, but I did. And it was great practice. And so I think we're losing that. We're going to see ChatGPT used to degrade prices. It's going to be used as leverage against workers. So it's like, well, we could just use ChatGPT to churn this out. But it would be nice to have a human touch, but we're not going to pay you your same rate as before. We used to pay you$250. Now we're going to pay you$150 because we have ChatGPT and we really could.
33:18So it becomes this leverage, this tool that employers can use to drive down prices. And in a lot of cases, they will use it. And it will lead to sort of a lot of garbage on the internet, both garbage images and garbage written content. And it will sort of lead a lot of already precarious writers and freelancers and illustrators to feel that squeeze even more. Totally. I mean, this is just such a great point about sort of the long term, like sort of multi-generational impact that this can potentially have, how it really it's the erasure of barriers of entry into careers. I mean, you're already seeing so much of a loss, especially in journalism of institutional knowledge.
34:02You know, I'm constantly like looking around and being like, where is the next generation of journalists? Like, where are they even learning to do stuff? Because even without AI and chat GPT, it's so hard to get these entry level gigs and to really like learn from other people. It's just it's just striking what a short sighted view it actually is. So it's like the impact's not just you're going to have less people, less humans writing, you know, short listicles or quick blog posts or content roundups. The impact is going to be, you know, you were saying, well, let's not, you know, ChatGPT is not going to replace the person writing the 12 ,000 word New Yorker feature.
34:38But it might be preventing them from getting to that point in the first place, which is really, really scary. A hundred percent. You know, another great example of how it's worked in, you know, real world scenarios is there's a science fiction magazine called Clark's World. Very few people are making a living writing science fiction short stories. But it is still a market and it's important to a lot of people. And it's important in the ways that you're describing. You know, the next Kim Stanley Robinson is cutting his teeth, writing short stories. The next N.K. Jemisin is cutting their teeth, writing short stories.
35:18But this magazine has been deluged with so many obvious AI generated submissions that are just patently garbage that the magazine, which is one of the, you know, more prestigious magazines in the sci-fi world, had to close its submissions to all unsolicited submissions. Wow. Closed them off. So that means that the only people that can submit are people who know the editor. And, you know, Neil Clark, the editor, it's a tiny operation. He just does not have the capacity to read through a billion garbage AI submissions. It's a temporary measure, but still, so what happens then? It's all the established people, people who already know the craft, know the trade a little bit, have the relationships.
36:08And in a lot of cases, it's just sort of strengthening the gatekeepers far from knocking them down. And I think that is going to happen a lot more as you see people trying to use these things to spam out content in different contexts. there's going to be this growing sort of suspicion of stories and of content and a premium put on the relationships that established writers or illustrators have with editors and managers. So you can see kind of how it exactly is going to sort of knock out a lot of those opportunities for up and coming, you know, writers, illustrators, content creators, that kind of thing.
36:52I don't want to go too much into this, but just an offhand comment that I feel like this anxiety was maybe what was playing into the whole drama online around that magazine byline the other week, where it was like this New York Times profile about a small, you know, new publication out of New York that like wasn't, it came out that they weren't paying their writers or whatever, which I have thoughts about that. But, you know, I think the outcry of how could a magazine not pay their writers, I think it might have been kind of informed by this underlying anxiety that like, you know, oh, who can afford to write now?
37:31Yeah, exactly. Who can afford to sort of go into these trades that, you know, as you said, they're already sort of shrinking. They're already squeezed. Revenues are drying up. There's layoffs all over the place. It's already an extremely tough industry. So there's already people who are probably reluctant to go into it in the first place. And it is going to encourage a certain kind of person, you know, whatever, more independent wealth or more security to take up journalism or illustrating. And that's going to be a great loss ultimately for the field in general. And yeah, it's really, I mean, I think the comparison between the two periods is a really interesting one to chew on because I mentioned how they took so much pride in their work and creating these good cloth products or garments.
38:25I mean, that was something that, you know, it was essentially made by an artisan with great skill. And it was your clothing wasn't mass manufactured. It was something that you would wear, like you would have like one coat and only a few pairs of garments at most. So it was really important that they were high quality, that it was something that we probably don't have a lot of like empathy into that mindset about how sort of the clothing was viewed. And now we're at this moment where so much content and back then, of course, the rich people could still afford to have the finely woven garments and top tier stuff.
39:06It was, you know, everybody else that suddenly had to start buying the mass manufactured stuff that falls apart more easily. But it's something that's interesting to think about now, this relationship to the actual product of this sort of artisanal labor. And now I see like it's I think it's a real question. It's not much less interesting to me is like, oh, can AI do art? Like what is art? But what are the conditions for the people who still hope to do art? Like what is it? What premium? Yeah, right. And what premium are we going to put on being able to do that? And, you know, so many questions still.
39:44We're in this insane hype cycle where it really has been just this volcanic eruption of Silicon on Valley hype that I think I'm starting to see some of the dust settling. And I think, you know, it's not going to be as capable as a lot of people think. A lot of it really just can't work, but that doesn't mean managers and in some cases, editors and executives are going to try to use it anyways. So it's going to force this question of, on top of the economic headwinds, like what sort of premium? How are we going to value as a, you know, collective society, this, this product of, of, of writing or of, of drawing or of painting or of content creation?
40:29It's really in flux. And I think it's, it is an apt comparison because, you know, I think the fear is the more pronounced fears. And I think it's a little apocalyptic, but that a lot of that sort of goes away because it's just cheaper to have the machines produce it and then have sort of a, but I think that's, you know, I, I don't really worry about that as much as I do about sort of this immediate period of sort of economic distress that it's going to cause this community of writers and artists and illustrators and content creators. Right. Like you said, it's not going to be able to replace everything, but that's not necessarily going to stop the entrepreneurs and the tech rose from then just like shifting the narrative and the economy and everything towards what it can do and other things just sort of will just wither away if not just get replaced so sort of you know towards that you recently published an excellent column in the la times about this but is talking about what the story of the industrial revolution can teach us about what ai's impact on labor markets might look like.
41:36Will we experience this transformation as something, you know, sudden and apocalyptic, like we've been sort of conditioned to see in sci-fi movies, or is it going to be more slow and gradual? And then also we've been talking a lot about the similarities between these times, but what are actually some of the differences between these moments in history of automation where the comparison kind of breaks down? Yeah. Yeah. To the first question, definitely not apocalyptic. It's not going to take anything over or enslave anybody or just immediately start doing jobs wholesale. But it's also not going to be this totally gradual thing either.
42:24I think it's better to think of it as a train wreck less than an apocalypse. It's going to cause some real dislocations and some immediate impacts. I have illustrator friends who I also use as sources on this who've told me it's been a terrible year. They've seen their work dried up. A lot of these illustrators and artists especially, they do a lot of their work for ad agencies, marketing companies. And those companies who do a lot of this stuff for internal presentations, internal materials, stuff to show clients, that stuff never sees the light of day. So they don't have to worry about backlash from other artists saying, hey, you're using MidJourney or whatever.
43:09And they don't have to worry about this sort of other element that we haven't talked about, which is actually a pretty good segue into the second question that you asked, which is they don't have to worry about the IP issues, which is still unresolved in a lot of the questions around whether or not it's even legal for companies to be selling a product that was trained on the work of other artists and writers and then sort of spitting out a simulacra of that work. So we're seeing it happen sort of already. So this dislocation, it's coming in lower rates, it's coming in less frequent work, it's hitting freelancers first, unions and unionized workplaces have a tool to push back against this, as we've seen the screenwriters and the WGA do.
43:59do when they had that stipulation in their contract that said the studios can't use AI to produce a script. And the studio basically said, we won't accept that. The subtext being, we want to leave the door open to doing that. And again, kind of feeding into what we talked about earlier, that's not so much because they think that they can write a good succession script with chat GPT. It's because they think that they can feed some inputs into chat GPT, spit out something that resembles a script, and then pay a writer to do a rewrite, which is a lot less money than producing original work. And they get less residuals or anything that they do for doing that work.
44:45So it's again, it's a way not to replace the job outright. It's a way to break it down and to sort of break the power of the worker in this case. Right. And to wrestle creative control over the IP from the get-go. Right. Exactly. And so that I would say is one of the biggest differences now. I mean, we spoke about one of the differences, which is that they were operating in a very different moral economy. The workers could really sort of be more aggressive and be supported. Again, like it is hard to say how much that, 200 years of being told that technology equals progress, what the effect that has had on the mindset of the modern worker, and whether or not some group just did start smashing open AI servers or something, whether or not thousands of people would stand up and cheer them, or whether or not the commentary at would be able to silence them and say, this is backwards or whatever.
45:42So there There are a lot of open questions, but clearly people feel a lot less comfortable doing that today, as you pointed out. But yeah, the other difference is sort of like the composition of the struggle. The Luddites had grown up working in the same shops together in the same towns. They knew each other. They were bonded by blood. In some cases, they were family. They were family friends. It was one reason it was so hard to oppose them the way that the state and the crown usually did, which was by sending in a spy to sort of disrupt a pro-democracy meeting or something. You couldn't really credibly sort of be an agent provocateur among 15 guys who'd known each other their entire lives.
46:22So you had these really powerful bonds of solidarity. That was a real difference in that moment. And it did allow them to sort of draw from more power. today that you know workers i think it's interesting that we're starting to see some more freelance solidarity around precisely this issue i mean there have been groups that have been doing you know god's work frankly to try to get freelancers to sort of bond closer together and to to agitate for for their collective rights because it is really hard it's such a diffuse pool. We're online all the time. It's harder to build solidarity. But there are groups, you know, that have started meeting on Zoom more frequently, sort of getting comfortable with each other.
47:05You're seeing sort of more bonding between different areas of work and more solidarity. Yeah, there's this great open letter written by Molly Crabapple and sort of disseminated through through CARE, the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting that really just called on newsrooms to just not use generative AI. But it remains the case that there's just far less organization, certainly far less organization than would be required for something like a more militant kind of struggle. And the other, you know, chief way of addressing this is through copyright law, which is really interesting. So you have all these class action lawsuits and a lawsuit from Getty saying that these images especially have been used without consent for profit.
47:57And I think, especially when you get when those questions start to be raised by more powerful industries, like the music industry, which was, you know, capable of stopping the rise of Napster, It will be a really interesting showdown, I think, because that seems to be where a lot of this is going to be contested and played out this go around. You know, less hammers to the machinery kind of approach and more of a eight million cease and desist class action lawsuits, that kind of thing. Yeah. Just like that moment with file sharing, for example, in music industry, whether, you know, obviously the parties who are able to sort of fight back against this stuff, like the major labels, probably like, you know, big publishing houses who have the deep pockets to actually like figure out how to fight back.
48:53you know we have to see whether the result that is achieved is one that is advantageous to everyone or advantageous to them like in the case of spotify the solution that the labels arrived at for recovering money from the lost sales due to file sharing was one that was favorable to them and then vastly disempowering to you know ordinary musicians yeah so So 100 percent. It's going to. Yeah, I know. And that's the really hard thing is even if that even if they're successful and which it's it's an open question to me because, you know, that that fight between sort of the the Recording Artists Association and Napster took place 20 years ago.
49:43And Silicon Valley was not nearly as powerful and as well capitalized. I mean, now it is just there's just so much money in Silicon Valley, so much political power. It is it's a different playing field. So I think it really will be interesting to see, you know, how that influences any major court cases or sort of legal battles there. And then, yeah, the second part is exactly what you said. I couldn't agree more. Or, you know, even if they do stop the wholesale reproduction of cultural works, then there's no doubt going to be an effort to sort of at least appropriate some of them for greater profit.
50:23And, you know, it's going to be harder to protect the independent artists and those who are already more precarious.
50:33to pivot slightly something that's been kind of notable in following some of these giant ai companies are sort of the leaders of the ai arms race especially sam altman and open ai is that a lot of the people sort of leading the charge on this are big supporters of ubi like you know oh, this is inevitable. People are going to be out of work, but we're going to give people a monthly stipend or whatever to survive on. Are they just being realistic or should we be reading this as kind of sinister indication of the sort of world they are imagining they will bring about or even hoping that they will bring about?
51:20Yeah. I tend to fall more on the sinister end of the column, not necessarily that they're, you know, putting their fingers together and cackling maniacally in a dark room somewhere. I think that they genuinely believe that that would be a good policy or that will be needed in the future. But the reason that they also believe it is because they also tend to believe in their own products and their own company's inevitable rise to domination and bringing about this set of conditions that will necessitate everybody, you know, getting a payout from the state just to eke by, which, you know, to my mind is incredibly dystopian.
52:07Like the amounts that have ever been proposed for UBI are just so small that, you know, it's almost meaningless in the modern world when you are looking at the gulfs between the people like Sam Altman and those who are proposing it. It's more a way of saying, I also wrote a column about how a lot of these people selling AI products are also selling this narrative of apocalypse, about bringing about this world where jobs will disappear and where you need something like UBI. So I think it plugs into that mindset where if they're saying, OK, well, I'm for this UBI because the product I'm selling is so powerful.
52:47It's going to rewire the economy, rewire society as we know it. So as a fig leaf, I'm willing to support this policy because, oh boy, my software is just so, so powerful. And that also kind of gets people thinking like, well, shit, if it's that powerful, then I better sign up. So it's almost like a marketing tactic. It's almost sort of elevating both their own products, their own egos, their own importance and their own ability to navigate the marketplace. So, yeah, I'm pretty skeptical for both those reasons. And the economic historian Aaron Beninov makes a similar point, too, that you tend to see UBI brought up in conjunction with a lot of these jobs apocalypse narratives as a further way to strengthen that sort of ideology.
53:38In my book, that's something that Andrew Yang brings up. I don't know if anyone remembers Andrew Yang, but for a few years, he was all about this jobs apocalypse narrative. You know, very interestingly, he imagined a kind of Luddite uprising happening, especially with truck drivers. And I think, again, it's part of where he comes from as a tech entrepreneur that it's part just sort of that set's collective ego where they think that they're capable of that level of disruption. But I think that that's genuinely the policy that he thought would be good to address that. He's since, I think, almost given it up.
54:18He's got a weird centrist project, too, which also speaks to sort of the level of political commitment that these people actually have to bringing those sort of reforms. I haven't seen Sam Altman do anything beyond just kind of say, oh, yeah, we might need a UBI because this is so powerful until he actually starts, you know, same with regulations. And he talks a big game about, oh, we need to be regulated. Oh, yeah. Until he actually accepts any or actually, you know, changes the practices of his firm. Count me a dyed in the wool skeptic. Yeah, it's similar to the whole AI doomerism thing of, you know, this is possibly going to cause a catastrophic physical danger to everyone on Earth.
55:01They're talking about that more than the labor thing, I feel like these days. Oh, 100%. Then that just becomes a way of sort of showing how powerful they are and then hopefully getting in the room so that they can have a seat at the table when it comes to regulating this stuff. Yep, I think that's right. And I think it is pretty, I think it's pretty cynical. And I think that it also like moves the Overton window, you know, if everybody's worried that, you know, that OpenAI is going to accidentally create Skynet, then that becomes a regulatory focus, which they know is kind of helpless, because what are you what are you actually going to regulate there?
55:36They're not actually interested in, say, making sure that the DOD doesn't use any of the AI services. Too many of the tech companies would profit from having a contract like that. Or regulate, yeah, like all these open letters that you're seeing, you know, about anti-AI. It's a little bit like, well, what if we try this novel tactic of instead trying to regulate, you know, what the humans do with it or allow to do with it and not just look at the tech as like this hermetically sealed problem. to itself. Yep, 100%. I think that, yeah, they I think that on some level, they know that, especially given Congress's history of successfully regulating these things, that it's going to, you know, not amount to much.
56:20The one thing that I will, that first letter that actually called for a pause in their corner, I will say that that was interesting, because you actually very rarely see a concrete ask or demand from like concerned, even concerned members of it said a six month pause. Of course, it didn't happen. Of course, there were too many vested interests elsewhere. But introducing that sort of idea into the sort of cultural lexicon a little bit, there's just, I wouldn't say there's a lot, but there's a hint of Luddism in it. And I at least got people thinking that, you know, a pause might not be enough or these guys may be full of shit, but at least there is a space for saying no.
57:06So that at least was a little bit interesting. The rest, I think, you know, it's in the air to some extent. And as I said earlier, it's in the air with the sort of more of the cultural class with people who are talking about Luddites positively. And it's in the air increasingly with workers who after a few years of a few successes, at least organizing places like Amazon and seeing some real solidarity among rideshare drivers, even if most of those efforts haven't been largely successful yet, it does feel like there's opportunity and there's opportunity in these movements and efforts rising to sort of say no to generative AI.
57:47And I think there is a real opportunity for a more collective movement for Luddism in the way that it was meant to be understood, in the way that it actually worked for working people. I think there is a moment to reclaim that and to wave that banner and to, you know, who knows, we'll see, maybe pick up a hammer too. So on that note, you know, what would the 21st century answer to the Luddite uprising look like? You just mentioned some of the places that were maybe kind of already starting to see this happen. You know, where else do you think there's space for it? Or, you know, what can people do who are feeling akin to this and would want to partake in something like that?
58:30So I think the best distillation that we have so far has arrived only recently, and it is these sort of frank disavowals of AI or the ask that it not be adopted in the workplace. The striking screenwriters in the WGA, that provision is saying, you cannot use a generative AI to produce a script. You cannot do it. That is the line being drawn in the sand. The care open letter written by Molly and some others and signed by thousands of people now that says, do not use this in your workplace, at your magazine, at your publication. Do not use mid-journey. Just say no. So these are the fronts that I feel like are opening up.
59:18And that right there is a form of bloodism, recognizing that a particular technology can have a drastically negative effect on your livelihood, on society, on the way that we live and work, and just feeling empowered to say no, and feeling empowered to join others in saying no. The first step, and we're seeing the reason that the writers have as much power as they do is because they do have a union. The Luddites, interestingly, did not have unions. They were illegal at the time. So they had to sort of be creative about how they structured themselves. But we do have, you know, the capacity or again, it's been really hard and the tech companies especially are throwing up all kinds of blockades and making it almost impossible.
1:00:07But we do have that venue. We do have this sense now that we can refuse, that we can refuse a technology as being detrimental to society. And we saw that sort of beginning with some of the facial recognition stuff a few years ago that cities have banned, saying, okay, this is a bridge too far. We don't want Clearview AI just scanning people's faces and putting them into a database. That's a no. So we are seeing this stage where we can erect limits. And I think the question is, is whether a movement grows and a strong movement, a powerful movement grows around that disavowal and what happens there.
1:00:49That would be the modern day Luddites. No to generative AI, no to facial recognition, no to invasive workplace surveillance, that kind of thing. Love that. Basically, the no, it's just the answer is in, you know, the labor movement. It's I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be. I mean, I think not everybody has access to the labor movement. That is probably the best place where you can issue a demand in a contract and sort of have a say. And the biggest, again, the biggest problem with all of this is that the way that we develop and deploy technology is so top down, right? Like we give billions of dollars to venture capitalists to then fund the projects that they want to see funded.
1:01:34They fund projects that are within their ideological purview. And then those companies then disseminate their ideas and their products to the rest of society. And then we're forced to play defense. So given that that's the landscape, the union is probably the best way that you can sort of navigate some of those proposed technological changes. Again, I think, you know, you don't need the union. You can stand up and say no in an open letter or if you do have sort of a mass. It doesn't necessarily need to be through an organized structure, but that's where you're going to have the most power and the most organization and the best hopes of enacting that refusal.
1:02:11But there are other ways. And there are, you know, it doesn't have to be sabotage, but, you know, there are guerrilla tactics and more informal tactics as well. But it's all sort of seeding this level of consciousness that is encouraging on that level that we don't have to accept all the technologies that are thrust upon us by Silicon Valley. We can fight back. Well, Brian Merchant, just such a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing this story and the theory that, you know, the Luddites are punk, actually. They were. They were and are. Hell yeah.
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From the publisher
Hey friends. Have you ever fantasized about smashing your phone or throwing your computer into the sea? If so, you’re in good company, because today’s episode is all about the story of the Luddites, an underground network of early 19th century machinists and textile workers in England who took up arms against industrialists looking to automate them out of a job. They did this, quite literally, by smashing the machines that threatened to put downward pressure on their wages and flood the market with poorly made imitations of the goods they were producing. Sound familiar?
Their real story — and the story of how the word “Luddite” came to connote being “bad at technology,” which is the opposite of what these people were — is the subject of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion of Big Tech, an engrossing and exhaustively researched new book by Los Angeles Times technology columnist and Terraform co-founder Brian Merchant. It isn’t due out until September, but given all the chatter that’s been happening around tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT, we didn’t want to wait to have him on.
Brian joins us to discuss how the Luddites were actually an early iteration of the labor movement — not anti-tech, but anti-exploitation — the eerie similarities between the systems of automation these workers were up against and AI, and what a 2023 version of the Luddite movement might look like. Hint: It’s already happening, and it has nothing to do with smashing out phones, though you do you.
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