Speaker 1: Guess what oz?
Speaker 2: What's that?
Speaker 3: Man? Gosh?
Speaker 4: Well, I am super excited to do this crossover episode
Speaker 4: with you, but before we get started, maybe we should
Speaker 4: tell everyone what's going on here. So we are both
Speaker 4: podcast hosts. I do Part Time Genius, a ridiculous general
Speaker 4: knowledge show that tackles some of the world's most important questions.
Speaker 4: I'd have to say things like what's the story behind
Speaker 4: dogs playing poker? Why does Lichtenstein export so many false teeth?
Speaker 4: And you are the brand new co host of Tech Stuff.
Speaker 4: It is a wildly popular show about the latest technology
Speaker 4: and what it says about does is humans. But I
Speaker 4: feel like we should let people in on a little secret.
Speaker 4: We are also business partners. A few years ago we
Speaker 4: founded the company behind both our shows, which is called Kaleidoscope.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 3: We spend an awful lot of time together, but never
Speaker 3: recording a podcast together until now, which is kind of crazy.
Speaker 1: That is true.
Speaker 3: So today we're producing a little bit of a network
Speaker 3: effect where we're doing a crossover between two Kaleidoscope shows,
Speaker 3: Part Time Genius and Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I'm so excited about this, And you know, we were
Speaker 4: having I think it was burgers and drinks with our
Speaker 4: palkate and she came up with a perfect topic for
Speaker 4: us both, which is Luddites.
Speaker 1: So what do you know about Luddites.
Speaker 3: I don't know a lot about Luddites. I know, I
Speaker 3: hear that word all the time, and I associate it
Speaker 3: with England in the past and today with people who
Speaker 3: are kind of branded as technophobes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, I feel like we refer to my mom
Speaker 4: as a Luddite a lot and have for a while,
Speaker 4: because you know when she told my dad like, oh,
Speaker 4: I need to check my email, and what that meant
Speaker 4: was he had to go into her email print out
Speaker 4: a stack of email.
Speaker 1: Print it.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 3: That's that's real classify story of Nomon. That's the ATCO vibes.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 1: She is kind of the CEO of our family.
Speaker 4: But you know, so I feel like most people probably
Speaker 4: think ludite means anti tech or being against adopting new technologies.
Speaker 4: But weirdly, that couldn't be further from the historical truth.
Speaker 4: So the best description is that the Luddites were a
Speaker 4: worker's rights movement, and these guys were your countrymen, specifically
Speaker 4: as your countrymen, So they loosely formed in the early
Speaker 4: eighteen hundreds in northern towns and villages in England. And
Speaker 4: at the time the wool and textile trade was the
Speaker 4: most important industry in Britain. It employed almost a million people,
Speaker 4: which is remarkable, right, and textile weavers were the largest
Speaker 4: single group of workers in the country for over a century.
Speaker 4: People were really well employed, and some of them even
Speaker 4: worked from home. And then something cropped up called the
Speaker 4: gig mill. And this is where things get dicey, right.
Speaker 4: The gig mill was a wooden machine that napped up
Speaker 4: the wool or the cotton into a softened fabric. And
Speaker 4: these mills started cropping up with remarkable pace. So basically,
Speaker 4: entrepreneurs use these mills to build factories and put hundreds
Speaker 4: of thousands of workers out of work. They brought in
Speaker 4: unpaid child labor, and they pushed families to the brink
Speaker 4: of starvation.
Speaker 3: Well, I am having an association here which is a
Speaker 3: William Blake poem and also Britain's most famous him Jerusalem,
Speaker 3: which the choruses and did those feet in ancient times
Speaker 3: walk upon England's mountains green? And did the countenance shine
Speaker 3: forth upon these dark satanic mills?
Speaker 1: Dark satanic mills.
Speaker 3: Dark satanic mills. Yeah, William Blake took up his pen,
Speaker 3: but I think others took up more aggressive hitchforks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're exactly right.
Speaker 4: Like the workers organized and bands of dozens of them
Speaker 4: would go out at night. They covered their faces with
Speaker 4: coal or with mass and they were armed with blacksmith hammers,
Speaker 4: and they'd actually break the machines right and and weirdly,
Speaker 4: each group leader went by the same name, General Lud. Now,
Speaker 4: the attacks were often prefaced with a note or a
Speaker 4: letter pinned to the door of the mill with a warning,
Speaker 4: if you do not pull down your frames, my company
Speaker 4: will visit and destroy them, signed ned Lud.
Speaker 3: So this is the we are anonymous, we are legion
Speaker 3: of the nineteenth century. Completely who was ned Lud?
Speaker 4: Though, so ned Lud was not a real person. He
Speaker 4: was a fictional character based on a myth about an
Speaker 4: apprentice who smashed his boss's device and then fled to
Speaker 4: Sherwood Forest, which I'm sure most of our listeners know
Speaker 4: from Robinhood. It's the wooded area where all those merry
Speaker 4: men took refuge, and it's not a quinc evidence that
Speaker 4: ned Lud was also set to reside there. Considering the
Speaker 4: spirit of righteous rebelliousness. Anyway, the movement grew pretty quickly,
Speaker 4: and before long there were about fifty machines a week
Speaker 4: that were getting destroyed, and the raids definitely got bigger
Speaker 4: and weirder as they went along. So many of these
Speaker 4: Luddites would pull stockings over their faces during the night raids.
Speaker 4: One account talked about a dude wearing a bloody mask
Speaker 4: made from a calf skin to disguise himself. Some of
Speaker 4: the Luddites wore costumes, and a few of the largest
Speaker 4: bands were led by men in drag who called themselves
Speaker 4: General Lud's Wife.
Speaker 1: Isn't that incredible?
Speaker 4: So there are in fact famous illustrations from the time
Speaker 4: of Ludite leader's in dress with factories burning in their background.
Speaker 4: Supposedly it was an homage to the women who had
Speaker 4: also lost their jobs of yarn spinning to automation, so
Speaker 4: it was kind of in solidarity with them. Anyway, words
Speaker 4: spread about the machine breakers and their cause became really,
Speaker 4: really popular. As you can imagine, Basically everyone knew who
Speaker 4: was involved, and sometimes these raids even began occurring in
Speaker 4: full daylight, but no one talked like the villagers did
Speaker 4: not snitch.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's amazing. So it was like almost like an
Speaker 3: open secret who was involved.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but they were still pretty cautious. So the Luddites
Speaker 4: had all these codes and handshakes to protect themselves. Like
Speaker 4: if you were going to a meeting at a local pub,
Speaker 4: there was a process, right, So first you'd make eye
Speaker 4: contact with a Luddite guard who was posted across the room.
Speaker 4: Then you'd make a coded hand gesture. The guard would
Speaker 4: sort of keep a straight face, keep their cool, they
Speaker 4: might even look bored, take a drink, but then they
Speaker 4: would suddenly return the gesture. And then you'd actually head
Speaker 4: into the back, maybe up a narrow staircase, to a
Speaker 4: smaller room, and then you'd have to say a password,
Speaker 4: and the password was win work, so you'd say that
Speaker 4: to a guard and then finally you'd get into the
Speaker 4: secret meeting.
Speaker 3: That's incredible. So it's almost like a Masonic vibe as well.
Speaker 3: But what I mean, how they how they looked upon
Speaker 3: by the broader British society and how much damage did
Speaker 3: they do?
Speaker 4: I mean they did a lot of damage. One account
Speaker 4: from the time, this is from the Leeds Mercury. It
Speaker 4: reported that since the commencement of the Ludite system in Nottingham,
Speaker 4: forty two lace frames and five hundred and forty four
Speaker 4: plain silk and cotton stocking frames have been destroyed, and
Speaker 4: that amounts to about thirteen four hundred pounds in eighteen
Speaker 4: eleven prices or about sixteen million dollars today.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Well, no wonder they were catching people's attention.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the Luodites in the early nineteenth century weren't
Speaker 4: so much anti technology as really they wanted a humane
Speaker 4: adaptation of technology. And that's I think where some of
Speaker 4: this distinction comes in.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm definitely fascinated by everything you're saying, mangsh But
Speaker 3: I guess if we really want to dig into the
Speaker 3: understanding of the Luddite movement, there's someone we should talk to,
Speaker 3: Brian Merchant, who wrote an incredible four hundred page book
Speaker 3: about it. It's called Blood in the Machine, The Origins
Speaker 3: of the Rebellion. Again big tech, and lucky for us,
Speaker 3: we managed to get him on the line to talk
Speaker 3: about it. Let's dive in. I know, Mange, shouldn't I
Speaker 3: were excited to talk about the book Blood in the Machine,
Speaker 3: But maybe a good place to thought would be why
Speaker 3: did you decide to spend too much time writing a
Speaker 3: four hundred page book about the Luddites.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: There's a couple different answers to that, And the first
Speaker 5: is that I had sort of spent a long time
Speaker 5: as a tech journalist. So you hear it, the term ludite,
Speaker 5: it's this derogatory term, and I had just kind of
Speaker 5: integrated this term lutite. Oh, someone who hates technology, someone
Speaker 5: who gets angry when they have to use a new technology,
Speaker 5: makes them want to smash their phone, or you know,
Speaker 5: just against progress.
Speaker 2: And so the minute that it became clear to me.
Speaker 5: That that was in no way the truth, sort of
Speaker 5: like all of my you know, journalistic instincts kicked in
Speaker 5: and there's nothing that a journalist likes to do more
Speaker 5: than to overturn an assumption. Right, So like I spent
Speaker 5: I spent like the nerdiest labor day weekend of my life,
Speaker 5: just like reading academic journal articles about the Ledites. And
Speaker 5: I was a reporter for Vice at the time. So
Speaker 5: I wrote this piece called You've got the Lutites all
Speaker 5: wrong because it was clear to me that they're not backwards,
Speaker 5: they're not anti progress, they're anti bosses using technology to
Speaker 5: sort of exploit them, to grind their livelihoods away, and
Speaker 5: so like that sort of key insight stuck with me
Speaker 5: because that was over ten years ago. So it was
Speaker 5: really at the same time that we started seeing more
Speaker 5: of the fallout from the labor forces at Amazon, the
Speaker 5: warehouse workers who were working and often really degrading and
Speaker 5: inhuman conditions. When it started to be clear that Uber,
Speaker 5: after initially seeming to be this great thing, was starting
Speaker 5: to squeeze its drivers, and we had stories about drivers
Speaker 5: who couldn't afford rent were sleeping in their cars. So
Speaker 5: this was all before the AI boom and the fear
Speaker 5: that AI was going to replace our jobs. There's all
Speaker 5: these examples of ways that tech was really being used
Speaker 5: to hurt people or it was having a deleterious effect
Speaker 5: on their lives. And then that kind of collided with
Speaker 5: this thinking about the Luddites, and I said, maybe this
Speaker 5: is a good lens to sort of look at these
Speaker 5: emergent resistances to technology. Maybe we should understand more about
Speaker 5: why people have real issues, real complaints about some of
Speaker 5: the forces that technology is unleashing on their lives.
Speaker 4: I also love that though you figured this out over
Speaker 4: labor day. There's something so funny about that. But take
Speaker 4: us into this. Can you situate us in the history
Speaker 4: event year. I think it's the eighteen hundreds, Yorkshire, Northern
Speaker 4: Nish England. Can you paint a picture of the times
Speaker 4: that we're talking about.
Speaker 5: So this is the very beginning days of the industrial revolution.
Speaker 5: It's not yet quite at the point where if you
Speaker 5: just kind of close your eyes and you say, like
Speaker 5: peak industrial Revolution and you're imagining the billowing smoke and
Speaker 5: like the coughing children working in factories.
Speaker 2: We're not quite there yet. That is beginning to take shape.
Speaker 5: So there have been a number of mechanical innovations. So
Speaker 5: you had like the steam engine that's allowing for new
Speaker 5: sources of power. You have water power coming onto the scene,
Speaker 5: and then you have basically all of these inventions that
Speaker 5: allows the work of weaving a garment to be done
Speaker 5: by one person instead of say six, So it can
Speaker 5: automate this task to a great degree.
Speaker 2: You still need a worker to run.
Speaker 5: The machine to make sure it's not screwing up, but
Speaker 5: it is speeding up the process by which you can
Speaker 5: produce goods. And industrialists and factory owners realize that they
Speaker 5: can start buying these machines, machines like the gig mill,
Speaker 5: the shearing frame that automate different parts of the clothing trade,
Speaker 5: and that they can organize them into an early sort
Speaker 5: of version of the factory. This is like the late
Speaker 5: seventeen nineties early eighteen hundreds that I'm talking about here,
Speaker 5: and it's in the midlands of England around Nottingham and Yorkshire,
Speaker 5: and so you have workers who are used to working
Speaker 5: at home with their families running the machine. They're not
Speaker 5: anti technology, they're really good technicians technologists in their homes,
Speaker 5: but they start to see the emergence of the factory.
Speaker 3: Who are the innovators behind these kind of proto factories.
Speaker 5: The most famous is there's a man named Richard Arkwright
Speaker 5: and he's generally considered to be the father of the factory.
Speaker 5: You can go in these buildings today and kind of
Speaker 5: see for yourself really awful working conditions. There's no ventilation,
Speaker 5: there are multiple stories up to six stories, so it's noisy,
Speaker 5: and it's just sort of churning out the yarn right
Speaker 5: that used to be spun by hand. And so Arkwright
Speaker 5: really kind of helped automate away the first sort of
Speaker 5: rung of cloth workers. Arkwright figured out a way to
Speaker 5: sort of make an astonishing volume of yarn.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: I opened the book, in fact, with one of the
Speaker 5: inventors who will later invent the power loom touring like
Speaker 5: this factory, and they're all ruminating all and his sort
Speaker 5: of contemporaries are saying, well, it's one thing to make yarn.
Speaker 5: That was just that's just women's work. It's another altogether
Speaker 5: to automate like weaving a finished garment like that skilled
Speaker 5: labor that'll never happen. And then he sets about trying
Speaker 5: to do it.
Speaker 3: I think you called Arkwright the first startup founder to
Speaker 3: launch a unicorn company, which I love. But how did
Speaker 3: the laudite start to fight back? What kind of early
Speaker 3: industrial action did they take?
Speaker 5: So basically arc Right's blueprint spreads around the country. People
Speaker 5: recognize that you can sort of concentrate labor, and before
Speaker 5: long this method of industrialization starts to lower prices and
Speaker 5: the artisan workers, the skilled workers, who are still the
Speaker 5: largest industrial base of worker in England.
Speaker 2: At the time, England was a cloth producing country.
Speaker 5: It exports it all over the world, so you have
Speaker 5: more workers doing this than ever and they start to
Speaker 5: see this work basically being transferred from that domestic system
Speaker 5: where they're working at home into the factory system where
Speaker 5: they're either going to have to compete on price they
Speaker 5: have to start working for less, or they have to
Speaker 5: go work in the factory where it's just a very
Speaker 5: dehumanizing and often dangerous place to work. So they start
Speaker 5: to form different modes of resistance, and first they go
Speaker 5: to Parliament and say, hey, these industrialists are using machinery
Speaker 5: that violate these number of rules on the books, like
Speaker 5: we have laws that say how long you have to
Speaker 5: be an apprentice for we have laws that say how
Speaker 5: many threads have to go into a certain garment for
Speaker 5: it to be sold on the market. And they're just
Speaker 5: laughed out of Parliament time and time again, saying all
Speaker 5: we want is a minimum wage, or maybe we could
Speaker 5: figure out a way to get attacks on the output
Speaker 5: that they're making that can sort of pay for social benefits,
Speaker 5: because they're just sort of tearing up the social contract.
Speaker 5: And this isn't the twenty first century. We don't have
Speaker 5: a globalized economy. I can't go get a job at
Speaker 5: Starbucks pretty much. Weaving is the only thing I know
Speaker 5: how to do. So you throw us a bone. Parliament
Speaker 5: does not, so they box them out for like ten
Speaker 5: years of fighting, and we get to eighteen o nine,
Speaker 5: they tear up all the rules altogether. Now it's the
Speaker 5: working class pitted against these new industrialists. It's illegal toform unions.
Speaker 5: There's no recourse at all, there's no democracy. So you
Speaker 5: have a really volatile situation. And finally there's the crop
Speaker 5: failure and then some intense tariffs placed on exports during
Speaker 5: the Napoleonic War, and people.
Speaker 2: Are quite literally going without food.
Speaker 5: That Luttites would often say, you know, the factory owners
Speaker 5: have stolen our bread, because again, to them, it didn't
Speaker 5: look like the complex machinations of a globalized economy. It
Speaker 5: looked like they had a job, they got a fair wage.
Speaker 5: And then one day somebody built a giant factory started
Speaker 5: selling crappier stuff, taking away their market share, and now
Speaker 5: that guy had money. It didn't look complicated to them.
Speaker 5: It looked like theft, and it felt like theft. So
Speaker 5: it just all goes up in flames. The Luddites emerged.
Speaker 5: They say, you've left us no choice. They organized this
Speaker 5: gorilla rebellion to fight back.
Speaker 4: Coming up, we meet some of the main characters in
Speaker 4: this Ludite movement. Stick with us and welcome back to
Speaker 4: the crossover between part time genius and tech stuff where
Speaker 4: we're talking to the wonderful author Brian Merchant. So could
Speaker 4: you tell us a little bit about George Meller and
Speaker 4: his role in.
Speaker 1: All of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, George Meller is the Ledite that I.
Speaker 5: Focus on the most in the book, and we sort
Speaker 5: of follow his reluctance to take up the hammer, so
Speaker 5: to speak. But he's watching the first sort of uprising happen,
Speaker 5: which happens in Nottingham. What they do is they first
Speaker 5: send letters to the owners of the obnoxious machines and
Speaker 5: they say, your factory has three hundred power looms and
Speaker 5: it's putting twelve hundred of our brothers out of work.
Speaker 5: Take down those machines or you'll get a visit from
Speaker 5: ned Lud's army. Ned Lud is this apocryphal figure who
Speaker 5: was supposed to have sort of rebelled against his master,
Speaker 5: but they use him as this avatar.
Speaker 2: They sign these letters ned Lud.
Speaker 5: You know you're going to get a visit from ned
Speaker 5: Lud's army, And then sure enough, a lot of factory
Speaker 5: owners do ned Lud's army shows up with hammers in hand.
Speaker 5: They hold up an overseer at gunpoint, and they sneak
Speaker 5: into the factory and they smashed the machines.
Speaker 2: But only the machines that are that are taking.
Speaker 5: Jobs and tearing up the social contract, just those that
Speaker 5: are sort of transferring wealth into the hands of the
Speaker 5: factory owner away from them. So it was a very
Speaker 5: pointed tactic and people loved them at the time. People
Speaker 5: cheered the Ludites in the street. Magistrates would come out
Speaker 5: and just kind of watch it happen.
Speaker 2: The factory owners would be going.
Speaker 5: What are you gonna do something about this, buddy, and
Speaker 5: they and they're like, well, they kind of have a point.
Speaker 5: So at first the Luddites were super popular. They were winning,
Speaker 5: they won concessions. A bunch of factory owners said, I
Speaker 5: don't want any part of this. Just you know, we'll
Speaker 5: raise the prices again, We'll stop using these machines.
Speaker 2: You guys win.
Speaker 5: So for at least six months or so, it worked
Speaker 5: to some extent. And so George Meller is up in
Speaker 5: the West Riding, which is these days a few hours
Speaker 5: north of Nottingham, and he's reading about this in the newspaper,
Speaker 5: and he's saying, these guys have it right. This is
Speaker 5: what we should be doing locally, because prices are falling
Speaker 5: here right in our town, in Huddersfield, which is the
Speaker 5: broader area that George Meller and his cohort worked, and
Speaker 5: they had been watching their wages go down, their coworkers
Speaker 5: literally starving, sometimes quite desperately, so conditions were extremely dire.
Speaker 5: And in the book, I'd chart George Miller's sort of
Speaker 5: ambivalence to full throated embrace of this idea of Luddism,
Speaker 5: of becoming a Luddite, and then he becomes the local
Speaker 5: sort of ned lud or general lud, leading other workers
Speaker 5: into battle against the men that are quite literally causing
Speaker 5: them to starve.
Speaker 3: One of these is William Horstfel Right.
Speaker 5: Yes, William's Horsefall is one of the two most hated
Speaker 5: factory owners in town, and in part because he was
Speaker 5: just like he was so unabashed to the point where,
Speaker 5: you know, like as he would ride between his factories
Speaker 5: into town.
Speaker 2: Little children would would run.
Speaker 5: Up and taunt him and say, you know, the Luddites
Speaker 5: are gonna get you, and he'll.
Speaker 2: Try to whip them with a horsewhip.
Speaker 5: He was just like a classic like sort of mustache
Speaker 5: twirling villain, like you really like these things that. His
Speaker 5: quote was like I look forward to the day when
Speaker 5: I like ride up to my saddle girths in Luddite blood.
Speaker 2: So he's gone, wow, yeah, So he's taunting them.
Speaker 5: He's sort of also turning his factory into a fortress,
Speaker 5: so he's hiring mercenaries. So should the Luddites attack him,
Speaker 5: they you know, he would gun them down before they
Speaker 5: got there, or pour boiling oil on their heads. Things
Speaker 5: like we would you know, associate with an assault on
Speaker 5: a castle in medieval times or something. But it's an
Speaker 5: extreme case because you got to remember that, like this
Speaker 5: is on the front line of just industrial capitalism. This
Speaker 5: is just taking shape right now, and no one really
Speaker 5: knows what to make of it. A lot of factory
Speaker 5: owners were like, ah, like I'm really torn. But if
Speaker 5: I don't buy automating machinery, then my neighbor will and
Speaker 5: he'll buy more of it and I won't be able
Speaker 5: to compete then, And some factory owners say, I'm out
Speaker 5: of the game. I don't want to contribute to the
Speaker 5: ruination of working men's lives. I give up, I'm out. Others,
Speaker 5: you know, continue to try to do it the old
Speaker 5: way and buy from the weavers who work at home,
Speaker 5: but it really sort of ultimately everybody has to compete
Speaker 5: with men like Horsefall.
Speaker 1: So one of the.
Speaker 4: Things we were interested in was like how the Loveites
Speaker 4: aren't just this group of people with the mallets to
Speaker 4: break up these machines, but that they were actually kind
Speaker 4: of savvy with pr as well. Yeah, is that something
Speaker 4: you could talk about.
Speaker 5: Yeah, of course they were savvy in a way that
Speaker 5: we might recognize today. The entire sort of construction of
Speaker 5: their movement and the that they sort of chose to
Speaker 5: go about building Luddism is really interesting, and it's decentralized.
Speaker 5: It's almost meme based, right, So you have this figure
Speaker 5: ned lud who is made up almost certainly, and you
Speaker 5: have a set of tactics that can be replicated or emulated.
Speaker 5: Where you write a threatening letter, you make sure it's
Speaker 5: like posted out on the door, so it's like written
Speaker 5: up in the newspapers or people see it and talk
Speaker 5: about it and it causes a stir and you build
Speaker 5: up this sense that your movement could be anywhere, right,
Speaker 5: that's not your real names aren't attached to it.
Speaker 2: These letters are showing up anywhere.
Speaker 5: And it's it's replicable because if you're in a completely
Speaker 5: different part of the country and you have the similar
Speaker 5: grievances or ones that you want to address through, this
Speaker 5: means you can just become a Lottite, right. You don't
Speaker 5: have to have this central planning committee. You can just
Speaker 5: gather your men in a pub as they did at
Speaker 5: the time, and you can write your own letters. So
Speaker 5: that's exactly what happens. It happens around Manchester and in
Speaker 5: different parts of Nottinghamshire and all these different parts of
Speaker 5: the Midlands of England, so they a lot of them
Speaker 5: just kind of explodes.
Speaker 3: I remember when I first moved to New York, it
Speaker 3: was a time of occupy Woolve Street and there was
Speaker 3: this like very exciting feeling in the street downtown that
Speaker 3: like people are taken the streets and that like the
Speaker 3: authorities didn't know what to do. And then like a
Speaker 3: few days past and the authorities decided to basically make
Speaker 3: their tactics much more harsh, and then Occupy Wolf Street
Speaker 3: was over right, So and it makes me think a
Speaker 3: little bit about the Battle of Wolfitz mill in your
Speaker 3: in your book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's an analogy.
Speaker 5: I was thinking about a lot too, and black lives matter,
Speaker 5: where you can basically take the core ideas and the
Speaker 5: core grievances and then they mobilize them because you didn't
Speaker 5: need sort of, you know, an approval structure where you
Speaker 5: have like a hierarchy and leadership that has to be
Speaker 5: consulted before you move on. But yeah, as you said,
Speaker 5: the Ludites run into real trouble when a few things happen,
Speaker 5: and that's when the state makes it a crime punishable
Speaker 5: by death to break a machine. So now if you
Speaker 5: break a machine, you can be strung up and you
Speaker 5: can be hung. And they've sent tens of thousands of
Speaker 5: troops to occupy the districts where Luddism is going on.
Speaker 5: The state has it is the largest domestic occupation military
Speaker 5: occupation of England in history, with just at one point
Speaker 5: north of thirty thousand troops stationed just to fight the Ludites.
Speaker 5: And then you finally have sort of this license given
Speaker 5: by the state for industrialists to.
Speaker 2: Fight fire with fire.
Speaker 5: Basically until this point, the Luddites are not violent except
Speaker 5: against machines. They are breaking the machines, as this labor tactic,
Speaker 5: as this strategy, but with the law passed, with the
Speaker 5: army there and with like the mercenaries there, factory owners
Speaker 5: are basically given license to shoot back. And so that's
Speaker 5: what really happens at this famous Battle of Raffold's Mill,
Speaker 5: when it's supposed to be sort of the crowning achievement
Speaker 5: of the Luedtite movement. At that point, George Meller is
Speaker 5: helping to lead this effort. He's gathered over one hundred
Speaker 5: Ledtites and they're just going to go and attack Raffold's Mill,
Speaker 5: and little do they know that this factory too has
Speaker 5: been turned into a military fortress. So they get there
Speaker 5: and guards open fire. A bunch of Ledites are gunned down,
Speaker 5: they can't get inside. They basically have to call a retreat,
Speaker 5: and somewhere between three and four Lutedites are believed to
Speaker 5: have died, possibly even many more. But it's a big disaster.
Speaker 5: And one of George Meller's sort of close friends, somebody
Speaker 5: who he had sort of talked into joining the Ledite movement,
Speaker 5: is one of the men who was gunned down, a
Speaker 5: young apprentice and kind of sens sends George Meller off
Speaker 5: the deep end, and he sort of you know, breaks
Speaker 5: bad as it were, and he goes and assassinates the
Speaker 5: other factory owner, William Horsefall in cold Blood.
Speaker 3: He assassinates, and it was that Hostel basically thought that
Speaker 3: he'd won and ventured out of the factory fortress and
Speaker 3: and Mellow was lying in wait or how did this happen?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean basically Horsefall was he was never afraid,
Speaker 5: He was never cowed really, so it really does speak
Speaker 5: again this sort of this tech titan mindset where like
Speaker 5: you have to say, you know, people be damned, I
Speaker 5: don't care if they hate me. I don't care if
Speaker 5: it's even dangerous for me to be in the public.
Speaker 5: I'm going to sort of run rough shot over these
Speaker 5: norms and standards and just show that, you know, I
Speaker 5: believe what I'm doing is right, is justified. Just kind
Speaker 5: of like arc right back in the day. He had
Speaker 5: also had to accept being despised by a lot of people.
Speaker 5: So Horsefall was just he he had gone out and
Speaker 5: wash was had a drink and was was riding home,
Speaker 5: and they knew the route that he took from the
Speaker 5: cloth market where he would sell his goods back to
Speaker 5: his his factory.
Speaker 2: And his home.
Speaker 5: So they Yeah, they lay in wait and they ambushed
Speaker 5: him on the way and they gunned him down.
Speaker 4: Tell us about this trial with with about Horsefall.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So again another indicator of how sort of widely liked
Speaker 5: the Luddites were is that for a long time, well
Speaker 5: both liked and feared, you should say, they would nobody
Speaker 5: would inform on them like they would. There would be
Speaker 5: entire towns where most people, with most working people would
Speaker 5: know exactly who was involved right in a in a
Speaker 5: factory raid, who smashed the factory owners automating machinery last night?
Speaker 5: Who was behind this? No one would say a word. No,
Speaker 5: The authorities could not get anybody to come forward. And
Speaker 5: so it was the same with uh with the case
Speaker 5: of Horsefall. When the authorities started making the rounds and
Speaker 5: sort of pulling everybody in and interrogating them, nobody said
Speaker 5: anything for months and months and months. So it finally
Speaker 5: took the authorities basically putting a huge sort of bounty
Speaker 5: or promising a big payment for anybody who brought in information.
Speaker 5: And then one of the mothers of one of the
Speaker 5: men sort of George, enlisted to go kind of assassinate
Speaker 5: Horsefall said you got to take this, and then sort
Speaker 5: of went and told the magistrate that it was George
Speaker 5: and they and it finally flipped him. So it took
Speaker 5: a long time before they could even get him, you know,
Speaker 5: you get him behind bars. But you know, once they did,
Speaker 5: I think it was understood that this would make a
Speaker 5: good sort of show trial. Right, so it was going
Speaker 5: to be George and a few of his compadres who
Speaker 5: were believed to be there when they when they assassinated Horsefall.
Speaker 5: But then it was going to be another round of
Speaker 5: like over a dozen just Luddites who it had have
Speaker 5: been involved in sort of the factory strikes and breaking
Speaker 5: machines more broadly. So, I think the state understood that
Speaker 5: this was their best chance at making this very unsympathetic.
Speaker 5: The trial is is packed, it's it's like a big
Speaker 5: sort of media event, and you know, the state uses
Speaker 5: it to make this case not just about George and
Speaker 5: the assassination, but of Luddism more broadly.
Speaker 2: So this is where for the one of the first
Speaker 2: times you have this.
Speaker 5: Equation of Luddism to sort of backwards looking, to being dumb,
Speaker 5: to being oh these these deluded men. Of course, it's
Speaker 5: left out of the equation that they're that they're starving,
Speaker 5: that their families can't eat, that that many of them
Speaker 5: were involved in reform protest movements for decades, or try
Speaker 5: to get things done the right way before it got
Speaker 5: to this point. All of that, of course, is out
Speaker 5: the window. It's just like, look at this, Look at
Speaker 5: these Luedites who are willing to do.
Speaker 2: Violence because they hate machines so much.
Speaker 3: So the state is not just wanting to convict George
Speaker 3: in his compadres, is really looking to sort of use
Speaker 3: this trials and opportunity to win the battle of ideas
Speaker 3: and to smear the Luddite movement in a way that
Speaker 3: I guess with quite effective ultimately.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 5: And at the time a lot of newspapers are still
Speaker 5: financed by the monarchy, by its prince. Regent is running
Speaker 5: the country at the time, and he does his office
Speaker 5: does issue a lot of propaganda about the Leddites, you know,
Speaker 5: from the beginning, off and on, and then really seizes
Speaker 5: this moment to again, yeah, equate the Leddites as dummies,
Speaker 5: as malcontents, as backwards looking destroying that which they do
Speaker 5: not understand a lot of the key ingredients that would
Speaker 5: sort of be stamped on history as as the Ludites
Speaker 5: as we understand them today.
Speaker 3: Well happened to the actual Luddites, to Georgi and co.
Speaker 5: They're hung, right, They're hung publicly, Yeah, outside of the
Speaker 5: walls of York Castle. And it's a spectacle, you know,
Speaker 5: it's an event like this is what happens when you
Speaker 5: turn against progress. And then even more notable shortly after that,
Speaker 5: they have the trial of the Lueddites just strictly for
Speaker 5: machine breaking and they're all hung too, you know, over
Speaker 5: a dozen people. You know, once again just sort of
Speaker 5: underlining the fact that this is what will happen to
Speaker 5: you if you oppose the machinery of the state, of
Speaker 5: this approach that we have taken to industrialization.
Speaker 2: Because the rich, the elite.
Speaker 5: In England at the time really liked industrialization obviously, like
Speaker 5: they when factories are built on their lands, that's more taxes,
Speaker 5: more income. They benefit from that, it contributes to the
Speaker 5: war effort. In their eyes, they can produce a great
Speaker 5: deal more so they have an interest in sort of
Speaker 5: defending this centralized industrial approach that the Luddites threatened so
Speaker 5: this sort of version of Luddism as backwards looking is
Speaker 5: therefore sort of entered into the history books, and it
Speaker 5: has remained as such ever since for two hundred years.
Speaker 4: It is it is crazy to think that like in
Speaker 4: the beginning, there were offering ideas, trying to propose reforms.
Speaker 4: They were like, you know, targeting just these specific machines
Speaker 4: and then you know, they become the enemy of the state.
Speaker 4: But where does the Luttite movement go, Like does it
Speaker 4: peter out? Like do they have any wins in this
Speaker 4: whole process?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I want it just for one second to what
Speaker 5: you just said there. I think it's really interesting that
Speaker 5: they did, like they proposed even something that would sort
Speaker 5: of like that sounds today like something that like Andrew
Speaker 5: Yang or Bill Gates has said, you know, tax like
Speaker 5: the productivity of the machines a little bit like.
Speaker 1: The robot tax, the robot tax.
Speaker 5: It would work this same way. They had the same idea.
Speaker 5: These are not radical, you know, Bill Gates is hardly
Speaker 5: a radical. Were they really did try in good faith
Speaker 5: to sort of suggest ways to build a better runway
Speaker 5: to the future rather than one where just a handful
Speaker 5: of rich guys to get to hoard all the gains
Speaker 5: from it at everyone else's expense, and they just well,
Speaker 5: leudism is what it came to. So the trials are
Speaker 5: in eighteen thirteen. There are sort of more sporadic sort
Speaker 5: of ebbs and flows of Leutism until about eighteen nineteen,
Speaker 5: but by far the most explosive years of Lettism are
Speaker 5: eighteen eleven eighteen twelve, and then sort of when it's
Speaker 5: crushed in eighteen thirteen. But importantly, there are some Lutedites who,
Speaker 5: for instance, were all sort of Lutedites by night and
Speaker 5: then reform politicians or reformers by day, and so that
Speaker 5: sort of thread continues, and it feeds into the broader
Speaker 5: workers movement, people who are fighting for the right to
Speaker 5: collectively bargain to repeal these acts that prevented them from
Speaker 5: forming unions that were on the books, and so Luddites
Speaker 5: sort of take on more of a political character. But
Speaker 5: the broader tale or legacy of Leutism is this transference
Speaker 5: into the reform movement where people actually do finally win concessions,
Speaker 5: the right to unionize, the right to fight for better conditions.
Speaker 5: It sort of segues in even to the right to vote,
Speaker 5: so Lueddites are really vital in activating sort of a
Speaker 5: political consciousness. There's a famous book called The Making of
Speaker 5: the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson, and his
Speaker 5: whole sort of meaty middle of the book is all
Speaker 5: about the Luttites, because it's this explosive, catalyzing event that
Speaker 5: gets workers from all over the country to sort of
Speaker 5: go like, hey, this is kind of happening in my
Speaker 5: industry too. It has the same broad shape, like I
Speaker 5: have like the same grievances against my boss and over
Speaker 5: the way he's using machinery and they're fighting back in
Speaker 5: this way, and I can kind of imagine myself doing that.
Speaker 5: So he argues that it really just sort of forms
Speaker 5: class consciousness in England.
Speaker 2: For one of the first times.
Speaker 4: Coming up, lessons we can learn from the Luddites. Stick
Speaker 4: with us, Welcome back to Part Time Genius and Tech Stuff,
Speaker 4: our first crossover episode where we're talking to the wonderful
Speaker 4: writer Brian Merchant, all about Luddites. Let's get back into it.
Speaker 3: On the very first page of the book, you write, quote,
Speaker 3: this could be today, and you ask the reader to quote,
Speaker 3: imagine millions of ordinary people plagued by a fear that
Speaker 3: technology is accelerating out of control. They worry that machines
Speaker 3: are coming to take away that job, upend the order
Speaker 3: of their lives. Inequality is rempant, and power is wielded
Speaker 3: by those commanding wealth and new technologies. You don't need
Speaker 3: a great imagination to picture the scene. How do you
Speaker 3: understand what's happening right now today through the lens of
Speaker 3: your work on the LA lights.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 5: The corollaries are so stark that you barely do need
Speaker 5: any imagination at all to see them. I mean, it's
Speaker 5: just right there, especially with generative AI and the way
Speaker 5: that it's being used in a lot of creative industries
Speaker 5: right now. But more broadly, there's a ton of anxieties
Speaker 5: around AI and what it's going to mean for the
Speaker 5: broader economy and for working people.
Speaker 2: It's almost to a t.
Speaker 5: You can kind of go down the list of things
Speaker 5: that are happening and it's like, well, they had these
Speaker 5: machines and they could create stuff that was cheaper but.
Speaker 2: Not really better.
Speaker 5: You had to have people to like sort of go
Speaker 5: oversee the output to make sure you could still use it.
Speaker 5: But you could still make enough of a case that
Speaker 5: you can de skill or sort of move work away
Speaker 5: from this column of skilled workers and put it over
Speaker 5: here in this column. So when you're looking at you know,
Speaker 5: artists or illustrators or copywriters or a lot of creative
Speaker 5: workers who are seeing the impacts already of generative AI
Speaker 5: on their livelihoods, like this is the form it's taking, right.
Speaker 5: It's not that it's being automated away completely, but the
Speaker 5: fear is just that it's kind of a wrecking ball
Speaker 5: to the norms and standards of their livelihoods, and that
Speaker 5: suddenly somebody who has access to mid journey and no
Speaker 5: training as an artist at all can kind of, you know,
Speaker 5: if a company wants to, you know, take the risk
Speaker 5: running a foul right now of copyright law or whatever
Speaker 5: things that are still undecided, they can do that. Instead,
Speaker 5: they can produce output if they need images for their
Speaker 5: you know, PowerPoint slides or for their their magazines or
Speaker 5: whatever whatever it may be.
Speaker 3: Who are who are the Laddites of today? I mean,
Speaker 3: is it my engage's mother who who requires their emails
Speaker 3: to be printed out? Is Itoni? Is it Christian Small's
Speaker 3: the Amazon factory worker who led that industrial action? I mean,
Speaker 3: who in this sort of spectrum. Do you identify the
Speaker 3: new Lottites.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think of those three options, Christian Smalls is
Speaker 5: the closest, although he is also I think, just a
Speaker 5: very traditional and effective union organizer. But a lot of
Speaker 5: the grievances that Amazon workers have do come from the
Speaker 5: company's insistence on, you know, using technological tools to sort
Speaker 5: of surveil them or sort of like gamify their workplace.
Speaker 5: They have to be so productive, you know all the
Speaker 5: stories about how long they have to complete a task.
Speaker 5: You know drivers that are peeing in bottles because they
Speaker 5: don't want to get docked for stopping when they're delivering
Speaker 5: a package. So those are all sort of technologically motivated.
Speaker 5: But I would say the Ledites of today are largely,
Speaker 5: but not entirely, people who see AI or technologies creeping
Speaker 5: into their workplaces and are willing to sort of refuse
Speaker 5: the way that it's being deployed against them. So the
Speaker 5: most powerful example, I think are the writers and actors
Speaker 5: in Hollywood who really took a stand in twenty twenty
Speaker 5: three against the way that the studios were hinting that
Speaker 5: they wanted to use AI, which is to write scripts
Speaker 5: or to generate scripts and then have writers rewrite them
Speaker 5: for less money, less fees, less intellectual property, thus again
Speaker 5: not necessarily eliminating the role of the writer, but degrading
Speaker 5: it significantly. You have nurses who are fighting hospitals that
Speaker 5: sort of want to deploy AI in the similarly top
Speaker 5: down way, with executives saying, well, a I should be
Speaker 5: used for this and this and this, instead of saying, nurses,
Speaker 5: how would you find AI useful? In which context might
Speaker 5: you want to use this now? Instead, it's like, you
Speaker 5: must use AI to make this diagnosis. If you do
Speaker 5: it incorrectly, then we can penalize you. And the nurses
Speaker 5: are looking at this and saying this is going to.
Speaker 2: Be a nightmare.
Speaker 5: It is a nightmare because it's taking more time to
Speaker 5: get medicine to patients who need it, and I can't
Speaker 5: override it because it's built in. It's again, it's the
Speaker 5: issue always comes when it's top down, when the technology
Speaker 5: is rammed through by management or thrust upon working a
Speaker 5: population who has no real democratics say in how it's
Speaker 5: then used. So I've talked to nurses educators who are
Speaker 5: seeing AI handed down by administrators to put into the classrooms,
Speaker 5: and again usually The issue isn't just that the AI exists,
Speaker 5: it's the way that bosses are forcing people to use
Speaker 5: it that they don't like.
Speaker 2: So I think as some of the objectives.
Speaker 5: Of AI companies because come a little more pointed as
Speaker 5: they try to infiltrate further into workplaces and people feel
Speaker 5: the heat more, I do think with it will start
Speaker 5: to see even more resistance there.
Speaker 4: I think I think that's what was so eye opening
Speaker 4: about all this was that Luedtites really weren't against progress
Speaker 4: or technology, but but really the social costs that we're
Speaker 4: you know, coming from this. But ever since writing this book,
Speaker 4: and I'm sure talking with friends and stuff, has anyone
Speaker 4: taken up the term LA as a badge of.
Speaker 5: Honor besides me, h, yeah, there are It's like the
Speaker 5: rested development.
Speaker 2: There are dozens of us, dozens.
Speaker 5: But no, I think it's you are seeing it pop
Speaker 5: up more and more.
Speaker 2: There are a number.
Speaker 5: Of of podcasts and cultural figures and people who identify
Speaker 5: more directly with the Luttites. It's hard. It's hard to
Speaker 5: overcome that to you know. It's and I think a
Speaker 5: lot of people are kind of wondering whether do we
Speaker 5: just reclaim the term outright do we say what we're
Speaker 5: doing is something different? But like no, I, since I've
Speaker 5: written this book, I think not a day goes by
Speaker 5: where somebody tags me in some thread or sends me
Speaker 5: some message that today I found out the Ludites kick ass,
Speaker 5: or today I found out the Ludites were awesome.
Speaker 2: And it's happening all the time.
Speaker 5: Artists, writers, librarians, archivists, journalists, people are you know, sort
Speaker 5: of at least recognizing, you know, that the Luddites were
Speaker 5: right at least to have a wide range of grievances.
Speaker 5: You know, there can be disagreement about their tactics, but
Speaker 5: their critique what they were angry about.
Speaker 2: I think seeing what we're seeing and.
Speaker 5: Right now it looks a lot like AI is going
Speaker 5: to be unleashed by a handful of extremely large companies
Speaker 5: that are more than likely to pocket most of the games,
Speaker 5: then it's not hard to see, you know, where where
Speaker 5: the grievances is. I think again, most Ludites even today
Speaker 5: are not just like no, AI smash it.
Speaker 2: I hate it all, But.
Speaker 5: It's like, we absolutely have to make sure that this
Speaker 5: technology is not just primarily exploiting people for the benefit
Speaker 5: of a few execs in Silicon Valley, right, And I
Speaker 5: think that that is something that just kind of intuitively
Speaker 5: is seen by more people now, and so when they
Speaker 5: hear the Luddite story, it's like, oh, yeah, well that's
Speaker 5: not all that different than us today, So maybe I
Speaker 5: am a Loedite.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Brian, Yeah, my pleasure. If you
Speaker 3: want to hear more from Brian, I'm sure have him
Speaker 3: back on tech stuff really soon. And he also has
Speaker 3: his own brand new podcast. Check it out. It's called
Speaker 3: System Crash.
Speaker 4: I actually love System Crash and I've been binging it
Speaker 4: this week. But that's it for today's Part Time Genius.
Speaker 3: And today's tech stuff for this week.
Speaker 4: If you like what you hear, hit us up on
Speaker 4: Twitter or Instagram, or drop us a line in the
Speaker 4: Apple Reviews. Also, you can check out Kaleidoscope's other shows.
Speaker 4: And if you have a great Luddite fact we missed
Speaker 4: or have a topic you want us to cover, be
Speaker 4: short or write us about those two.
Speaker 3: And thank you so much for listening to both Part
Speaker 3: Time Genius and Text