Brian Merchant, author: “Luddites are more dangerous to the rich than Robin Hood”

The Luddites have been a great historical resource. Any showy enemy of anything that looked like technological progress has been called a Luddite. Today with generative artificial intelligence and its critics, the word has been revived. The author and journalist Brian Merchant (Iowa City, USA, 1983) saw it coming and has written a book that reviews the Luddite revolt in England at the beginning of the 19th century and its similarities with current technologies: Blood in the Machine (Blood in the Machine, currently without a planned edition in Spanish) thus explores the origins of the current revolt against big technology.

Although the book has appeared in the midst of the AI ​​hype, Merchant began his research a decade ago: “Uber was growing and it was beginning to be seen that it was having a hard impact on taxi drivers, I heard the term Luddite from the pro-Uber sector and wrote an article titled You don't understand anything about Luddites”. Now in his book he remembers that the Luddite revolt was a labor struggle, not anti-technology, at a time when unions were prohibited. In a conversation with EL PAÍS from his residence in Los Angeles, Merchant clarifies the historical impact of the Luddites and the possible similar struggles that are being played today in Silicon Valley.

1. The Luddites were not against progress

The labor revolt over the loss of rights was more important than the destruction of textile machines: “The biggest mistake about the Luddites is to say that they were against technology and progress,” says Merchant. “They were against certain technologies because they recognized the way in which they were going to be used in their context against them as workers. It was a labor movement, against poverty, not anti-technology. The British Government began to mold them in this way almost immediately, it was keen to mock the Luddites and present the argument that they were against progress. It is very similar to how today people in positions of power in technology companies accuse those who complain about poor working conditions. It's the same story for 200 years.”

The book quotes a phrase from historian Eric Hobsbawm that explains this stage: “It was collective bargaining through riots.” According to Merchant, this tactic in a workers' struggle was very powerful for two reasons: “First, it was symbolic because everyone understood that what they were destroying was not just a machine. It was also the specific machine used to transfer wealth from the workers to the employer. Second, it was useful because they destroyed the equipment that businessmen needed.”

2. Why Robin Hood is better accepted than Ned Ludd

Ned Ludd was a legendary character. No one knows for sure if he existed. It was the legend of a teenager who would have broken the first machines at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In 1811, rebellious workers used his legendary name to sign letters and further scare: “Ludd probably never existed. But the incarnation of it would become a mascot, an organizational tool, a wink: a powerful 19th-century meme,” Merchant writes.

Ludd lived near Nottingham (United Kingdom), like another legendary figure who has been better treated by history. There must be a reason, says Merchant: “The Luddites organized a popular and powerful rebellion. People wrote popular songs about them. They were like Robin Hood. But it is interesting that Robin Hood has endured as a positive light, while the Luddites have not. He suggests that the myth of Ned Ludd is in some ways more dangerous to the elites and the wealthy than that of Robin Hood, which is a little more nebulous and open. The Luddites say: go ahead and break the machines of your oppression. Robin Hood says: steal from the rich and give to the poor. “I think that’s a little more tolerable.”

3. How are they similar to today's problems?

The background of the book is that the history of the Luddites is similar to what happens today in Silicon Valley, where a small group of corporations dominate new technologies. “The way technologies are developed has basically not changed. You have a handful of people with access to enough capital or political influence to be able to build a factory and use automation technologies. “Back then, the most aggressive owners didn’t ask anyone how to find a way to make this a win-win.”

Merchant has received criticism for equating the great businessmen of 19th century England with 21st century America. But there are details that he does not see that far away: “The technology development process is in some ways even more undemocratic today than then. There is this immense pool of capital available to Silicon Valley innovators through venture capital. Uber wasn't profitable for 10 years, but they had access to that capital. Did anyone really like that? Did it work for workers and delivery people? Nothing mattered, they just had more money and moved on.”

Artificial intelligence is just another stage in this process of an amazing new technology that survives for years until it finds a way to pay off, Merchant says: “They make things that are flashy and get a lot of publicity and investment. Not many people seem to like it, but they keep going because they have an unfathomable amount of capital. Is Sora, which will convert text to video, a good idea? I don't know, but there it is. It is a remarkably undemocratic way of developing technology. History, in a way, supports the fact that for 200 years technological development has not been in harmony with social stability. Then we correct and catch up, but why for two centuries, when there is a great new technology, the response is not 'oh great, let's see how this benefits society', but we react with fear? Merchant.

4. What is the price of progress?

The usual response from businessmen and economists is that these fears are the price of progress. Technological advances forcefully bring disruption and suffering. For the Luddites this argument was not evident from the beginning because not even the elites knew how it would end. “Economists say, yes, there is some dislocation, it is painful for some people, but new jobs are always created. Yes, the elites are getting richer. For the rest it may be painful in the short term, but let's look to the future. But always look at the people who say that. They are economists who have a job where they make a lot of money or are career academics. Those who despise the pain of others are always the ones in a position to do so,” says Merchant.

The changes brought about by technological innovations are sometimes not about the complete destruction of jobs, but about their denigration: “I would say that economists are right that it is not actually going to eliminate tons of jobs. In some cases it can. But there will be an erosion of vulnerable jobs. In the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites did not disappear. But the owners were able to use the new machines as justification for hiring children instead of skilled workers,” Merchant says.

For years, a kind of basic income for humans has been debated in Silicon Valley for the future work that machines will do. Merchant sees it as a poorly made band-aid: “A universal basic income would become small, it would be like a Band-Aid for a big structural problem. If tech companies seriously cared about the social problems they could cause, then we would see them pushing for things like universal healthcare or housing. It's the way you saw oil companies years ago saying we support a carbon tax. “They already knew it wasn’t going to happen,” he says.

5. From Hollywood screenwriters to the burned-out self-driving car

In February, a Waymo (Google) self-driving car in San Francisco seemed to have a problem and created a small traffic jam. A group of people surrounded him and in a while they had broken his windows and set him on fire, while others were recording. It is the first major destruction of a machine owned by a large technology company since the 1970s, when student activists attacked Hewlett Packard laboratories.

Will we see more similar cases? “The situation is so volatile that when I started writing this I said: 'No, no, despite the anger with Amazon or Uber and their conditions.' I think that's still the case, but we see a lot of anger in some places in the US. Whether they succeed in automating jobs or degrading working conditions for enough people, impoverishing more people, who knows. That attack on a Waymo car took me a little by surprise. I guess it's kind of a beacon for a lot of this anger that exists towards big tech and its impact.”

That attack was then something unprecedented. But so has the first more or less successful strike and negotiation that has included AI: that of Hollywood screenwriters. “The best thing about the writers' strike is that it showed how possible it is to achieve agreements like that. In the United States, things like this were unthinkable, that someone could tell his boss how he could use AI or avoid abusive uses of technology. “You can draw these red lines and say we refuse to use AI or let management use it on our behalf.”

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