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