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legal and administrative and customer support at robert half. We know talent learn more at robert half dot com, slash invisible. This is ninety nine percent, invisible, I'm roman, mars, brian merchant is attack reporter and he'd been covering the industry for years when he started Is this term that kept coming up special When we would report something critical about technology, we would get charges. Oppian luddites like most will bring new at least vaguely what this term luddite meant if we know them at all. We usually know them by in this derogatory light. We usually you stand the luddites to be technophobe sore or people who hate technology or and ignore always been this kind of term that had just sort of lodged itself into the general consciousness.

But ass time went on and, as Brian watched tech grow into the disruptive behemoth it is today he starts to get more curious about the actual luddites. Were these people whose name gets thrown around so often today and our conversations about new technology and what did they actually believe? One day I just sort of decided to dig into the term and very quickly. I stumbled upon an academic paper about how they weren't doats or just confused malcontents. They were a powerful organization with some very, very good points about why They were upset about technology and they had a very good case to make against how technology is explaining them the story so much more complex. More nuanced, and if anything, we should be sympathetic to the luddites, especially given either and that we can learn about them and how they sort of illuminated out of the crisis is still ongoing. Today, Brian

a new book out about the luddites, with a very metal title, called blood in the machine and explores how english texts workers in the nineteenth century rose up against a groan. trend of automation and the machines that were threatening their livelihoods. The history feels honestly a little too today, and so we wanted to have brine on the road to tell us what we can learn from the original luddites. So, let's set the scene in your book. You say that the textile industry, which were the first to be automated, so can you described by what was textile work like before automated machines, so it it varied a lot, but textile work was often sort of work. Today we would kind of understand to be good sort of middle class work a lot of times

The cloth workers would work at home. They were some of the first work from home proponents. In that sense, there would usually work about thirty hours a week. They could take breaks when they wanted, they could walk in there. and a lot of them had little farms to provide a little extra subsistence or a little extra value. The children would help spin, the yarn, it was a family affair They would sing. You know it was all it was hard work. It wasn't always. You know totally great. From you know, they would haggle with the merchants who had come to buy the cloth, but they could work on their own terms and they really built these communities. It was this way for two hundred years and it had really sort of neo brought together. A bunch of trade fins and norms and standards that, until a sort of the late seventeen hundreds when you started to see some new Friends begin to impinge on that that they had of very well established sort of nice lifestyle and those trends it you're talking about. They involved

introduction of a bunch of new machines that automated the weaving work that human been doing for hundreds of years and perhaps the most severe and of those machines was the power them. Could you tell us about it? Yeah, it's a device that automates the process of weaving itself, something that a lot of people thought was impossible for a long time, because weaving with such skilled work, The power loom once connected to a power source like water or steam. It could automate the process of weaving andrews producing the goods in the first place, and that is a big deal there. hundreds of thousands of weavers more than any in any of these other trades, the biggest sort of industrial workforce england at the beginning of the industrial revolution, so huge huge number of jobs stand to be automated and when people start to get angry about this. There aren't even many power looms in operation. The idea, it's the fact that their there that entrepreneurs are being

in to use them promising to use them. It's the long shadow that these things cast that really works people. So you describe these technological innovations. Led to increase animation, but but there was also the rise of just the factory as a space where production happens so keep us a little bit more about that, so the factory was still kind of a novel concept at the time that you could organise labour more efficiently. If you gathered at all under one roof under one mercier and just start lining the place with machines, and this had not been done before the seventeen hundreds, in a meaningful way. So when it started happening, immediately caused alarm bells to ring among cloth workers everywhere, who saw pretty viscerally what their lives were going to look like in the future. If this mode of work took over their industry, I mean it's as

egg, the factory itself is almost as important as any one of these new machines like when it comes to change, the dynamics of work at the time. One hundred per cent yeah, in fact, though, the luddites and and the people become luddites had saying, and that was what they hated most of all- was to court and quote stand at their command. They hated idea of becoming subservient to anyone to an overseer, two to a factory boss when they live their whole lives with autonomy in a working hard, but with flexibility and and and with dignity. If to stand at the command of somebody else, all that was out the window. It's the difference between working at home with your family, with your friends, taking breaks to walk in the garden and sitting in a six story, building with whirring machinery and cloth fibre choking your lungs and somebody telling you when you can and cannot stand up to take a break,

with one of those really surprised by in your book, is the role of that automation played in creating child labour. Could you talk about that and why one led to the other yeah So you don't need as much skill to these new machines, and so on you could do. You can hire children, women hard up weavers who, used to be more gainfully employed and in The conditions letter sort of out of the public eye there, these great big buildings and they were purposefully built outside of major towns and cities because they knew people would both protest, the jobs that they were taking and soon enough. They knew that they would protest the conditions inside and its truly Dangerous brutal work you, their limbs are lost frequently chill or pulled into the machines disease would spread through.

Dormitories, and so many children died that they had to ship them out of town and distribute them two different on marked graveside, so because they were afraid they would attract too much attention if they started filling in these mass graves right next to it, truly awful, truly awful having stuff, and that is one thing- that cloth workers, the middle class, We were seeing and they're saying this is what the factories does. This is what automated machinery is leading us to its doing this to the most vulnerable of us. But we're all were all vulnerable here so We see this rising discontent about automation, so. From there. How did the luddite movement began in we wind as its article us? So at the and of the seventeen hundreds in response to the french revolution. A lot of the british working class start to build a class consciousness and start to sort of agitate for

reform and better conditions. The crown responds in an authoritarian manner and one important they do. Is they ban the act? combining or organizing or forming a union, as we would understand it today, so that option is off the table. Workers cannot agitate collectively for change that illegal they can be brought in and arrested if they, if they do that so as we enter first decade of the eighteen hundreds and we start to see those big factories spring at buying machinery. The workers don't have that option of of you know coming together and saying hey. How are we going to deal with this? They try to anyways. So they form this nebulous trade organisation. They go to parliament, they say hey. These entrepreneurs are wrecking our trade They are ignoring laws that are on the books. Can we deal with this? we deal listen and with this in a democratic way, so that we are

benefit a little bit from this new immense economic boom. That's that's happening, and so it doesn't just get concentrated on the top and we're just sought. Their whims and they get denied. And finally, the british people at the time just says we ve had enough of this. They wipe all those regulations on the books. So now they don't even have nominal. Regulations are laws to appeal to you know they go to their employers. They say: hey, let's work out deals. Let's find a way that we can sort of introduce this technology more gradually. So it's not so sudden they get rebuffed there. Two thousand workers I'm trying to stay ahead of this trend towards automation like they're, trying to push back but they're, just not having much success. Yeah and finally, at the end of the decade, around eighteen, o nine out eighteen ten, we have this sort of crisis point when the entrepreneur class recognizes that they have

an advantage and they can sweep in and they begin introducing this automated machinery- and that is the final spark- the lights, this big flame, louis. but the name luddite. It comes from this character named ned Lud, who is he ned land was a mythic and probably apocryphal figure it's unclear here where the name sort of came from first, although there has been a lot of speculation, if you say ned Lud, robin hood, ned led robin hood it's kind of in the same vein and ned Lud, originates in nottingham right next to sherwood forest, so there's a spirit of rebellion but the first time ned led appears, as in newspaper article, that serve details this this back story of an apprentice named ned Lud. Who was a boy Forced to work on a machine he didn't want to do is work because he's a boy, but the magistrate demands that he be whipped because he's not being productive and

So the factory owner whose overseeing him whips him ned Lud, revolts, mashes the machine with a hammer and fleas into the forest. This is the legend of ned Lud and it's either created or adopted by the cloth workers who, in eighteen eleven finally decide that they ve had enough and they organise rebellion it's the factory honours. So this marks the beginning of the letter movement and their homework becomes that they destroy machines in the same way, the mythical ned Lud did exactly their campaign is very organised, very pointed very specific. First, what these Followers of Lud would do. Is they would send a letter? threatening letter to a local entrepreneur or factory owner, and they would say if you don't down these machines that you are using in this way, you're gonna get a visit from ned lads army

would be signed by ned land or general lud or king Lud, and sure enough if the entrepreneur and take down the machines, they would be targeted. By a nighttime raid. They would either slip through the windows and and smell the machines that were doing the automation and its important point. They would only smash those machines there were. number of machines. It had been used for a long time. Those machine would not be broken and limbs not not broken. They smashed the wide frames. There was smashed the gig mills in the shearing frames, not those that had been used for four words of years, and then they would file out under the darkness of night, they were famous for brandishing the great blacksmiths hammer and they would call it Enoch. The hammers themselves were made by james and Enoch taylor, who were blacksmith. Were also building automating machinery, so they had seen

and that saying would go. You knock made them. You knock shall break them and it was this great giant hammer. So this first luddite raid happens in nottingham in eighteen, eleven Does the movement spread from their yeah? I think one of the most things about the letter movement is that it is a truly decentralized movement. It's an early sort of innovation, really in this mode of sort of cell based or rising? There was a well organised sort of network of luddite, in and around nottingham that came first and they he met with fairly, starting success, so they would sneak into the fact. he's break the machines and people cheer at once. They saw the public reaction was so good. They would do it again and they got increasingly brazen,

soon there were there were raids in broad daylight, as the crowds of the city would come out and cheer, so its clear pre early on that there is a lot of popular sentiment in favour of of let ism, and so you see, luddite cells start to crop in various places, even where it's not clear that they were, you know in touch in the begin it really was truly a decentralized movement, something like occupy wall street or black lives matter when it might be an analogy to that today, who are some of the most important. What I leaders her emerged during this time of what what drove them to the moment so the interesting thing about luddites is that they left very little trace we know about. Luddites is largely through the lead they sent the complaints and descriptions passed down through the magistrates that fought them. The newspaper writers of the day- and you know through what was passed out- oral tradition? We do know a handful.

Of the luddite leadership in the most famous is george miller. George Miller had recently finished his apprenticeship as a cloth finisher or a cropper. at the time that the entrepreneurs were starting to use automated machinery. So you can kind of imagine a young man going. I finished my apprenticeship now I can sort of embark on the world and then seeing effect, We spring up outside town and say actually we're going to we're going to do that. Work for you and you're not going to get paid anything anymore, so he He is particularly incensed by all of this, so he agitates for this. Organised rebellion after nottingham, so nottingham comes first, it's an inspiration to claw. Workers everywhere and joy miller is reading these accounts in the newspaper and saying we to do this here and so what was the government's reaction to the one? I said there gain this popularity, their becoming heroes and people during the mind, even in broad daylight, what happens and in terms of parliament. So the government

is not pleased. Their response is swift and it is increasingly punitive increasingly brutal. First, they just send troops after there outbreak in nottingham the first letter uprising, they just sentry. To occupy the any of the villages towns. Where, with these, durban says are going on, and the funny thing is that it doesn't matter the luddites. Continue their campaigns and they slip right past these true Nobody is informing on the lights, the state puts huge rewards out there,

If anyone will come forward and inform on them in nobody does something when that doesnt work, they take the final step, and that is making it a crime punishable by death to break a machine. So so gets the point or breaking loom could have you put to death so so things are really escalating, which, with the lights and the government, when does it all come to have so the luddites had been rising up for months, and they had become very good at striking small to medium sized operations and factories. There was a period where, There were machine raids, almost every day and hundreds, and

thousands of machines were smashed just a huge sums in that day of damage being done to the industrial state, but they felt, and specifically george Miller felt that it was time to strike a bigger blow so this is probably the most famous battle in luddite lore, but he gathers wars of manners over a hundred and they attack. What is that one of the biggest factories in the west writing stone, giant, monolithic, building and kind of unbeknownst to them. It has been built up like a fortress inside it turns To this huge malay, where the luddites or taking turns matching this hammer and trying to shoot through the windows to try to gain entry, so they can break the machines, but there are soldiers, and mercenaries inside all, shooting back at them in the end believed for, but to for sure

luddites are shot and killed, and they have to retrieve the attack it rough smell was really the luddites first major defeat, and it was a huge turning point. It showed the factory owners that the luddites could be turned back by force that they could be crushed in this way, and that may be the answer: wasn't you know, bounties or trying to ratchet up the penal code but to simply encourage factory owners to defend their their businesses with guns, if necessary? So could you tell us how the luddite movement eventually and at the what what led to their defeat. So after the defeat at raffles George miller, can it goes off the deep and one of his close friends who he is?

personally convinced to become a luddite, John booth was among the dead and he becomes deeply unwell and he quickly resolves. He needs to take more direct action, so he enlists a few of his colleagues and they set out to attack the other major agri owner in town, a man named horse fall, and they ambush him. on his ride, home and assassinate him in in cold blood. So it becomes clear both by the body count sort of by the way the winds are blowing that the letter, its are losing and after george and the other croppers assassinate horse fall. They also begin to lose public sentiment. So all of this leads this most sort of explosive outburst of letters em to peter out really,

the core luddite uprising that we think about when we think about luddites happen from eighteen. Eleven to eighteen thirteen and dies out by the end of the decade and ultimately, George miller, the luddite leader and his friends, were put to death for their role and the assassination right yeah yeah. It was a big, dramatic I'll courtroom was packed, it was written about in the papers and vienna never admitted to the assassin but they were convicted pretty quickly. They were hung outside Europe castle and then just days later, there was a trial for all of those who had been participating in the movement, otherwise just fur machine. It is not for us ass in aiding, worse fall and they were all put to death as well. It was a public affair. It was meant to send it signal to workers everywhere, because again, luddites had become quite

popular. Their movement was joined not just by cloth workers, but by shoemakers by cole workers by people of every stripe. Working people understood the structures that we're taking shape and that this mode of factory work especially in having to attend to the machines owned by somebody else, was so onerous that it was worth fighting to preserve their way of life to preserve their freedom. Basically, so how did the defeat of the luddites represent like a new template for labour relations? so just the way we make him build things going for the deaf of the luddites meant that the factory owners one and that this mode of production gets replica everywhere we get the industrial revolution and its largely a factory revolution. So when the lot its lost. On the one hand, this particular mode of work became ascendant

and on the other hand, it became taboo to question how technology was used and how it was used in your workplace, how it was used against you if it was going to be used against you knowledge, he became synonymous with progress in to say otherwise, good get you label the backwards thinking or just sort of ignorance and was also very intentional, and we see that when in the prosecutor is prosecuting george or in the luddites he's using. these terms he's dead, crying that men, like George miller, have led other men. under this delusion that machinery is not progress, that we see this equation early on begin to be formulated by those who stands to benefit going up after the break, we'll talk more with Brian merchant, about the ways the luddite movement still goes today and whether we might

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they display posts from your social profiles and website or share your new blogs or videos on social media. Automatically push webs content, your favorite channels, so your body concern two plus you square spaces insights to grow your business, learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective, go to school dot com, slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use the offer code, invisible to save ten percent off your first purchase of a website or domain? So I'm back with brian merchant and Brian, I have to say I'm kind of flabbergasted by how thoroughly the luddites were defeated. Like not only was the movement defeated in it's time, but the word itself luddite was taken over by capitalist and industrialists, to mean anti progress and anti technology and kind of a blind ignorant way like that level of defeat. Like even at the level of language is kind of hard to fathom yet

is there, a scholar theatre rose who once said about the lights, and I love this. He said if the luddites didn't exist, then the tech industry would have to invent them Think it's been very intentional on some level I know the people who stand to benefit most from a lot of these technologies that we would do very well the question to have his question and its that bottom line. You know, if we're not asking questions about how ammo I'm gets us, sir products so cheaply and so quickly and that to say You know. Maybe it's not worth the cost. If understand? What's going on behind the scenes? If that is backwards, looking than amazon wins. If we say maybe there should be safeguards rule about how a eyes used or situations where should not, used at all in the workplace. If saying things like, that makes us look sort of foolish that sir,

gives companies like open, I that stand to make enormous profits from selling these tools to two other enterprises. So it does make a certain level of sense that the luddite term has been captured so thoroughly by. I guess you could say its opponents, do you think we might see a new kind of let I'd uprising in reaction to developments in information today, I do think will see some new threads of letters m being woven so to speak. I think we already are so again, the luddites did not have the tools that we have available to us. We do have the ability to organise our workplaces and to sort of confront a I or automation. If it's me used in ways that can causes harms and we are. Finally Seeing that- and I think that is leftism, and that is something that we haven't seen for decades now and I'm talking about the actor

in the screenwriters strike, which is predicated in large part over grievances about ai answer to the giga for cation of their work. It's very much explicit, both The screenwriters and the writers are drawing a red line in the way that we I imagine the luddites drawing that line and saying no, you cannot use, tat, bt or in a service to create an original script, because we know that what want to do is have the eye. Turn out an original script and then to pay us less money to edit it and that's exactly what was happening two hundred years ago. You know they couldn't get rid of the person altogether but they could make sort of a shoddy substitute that saying? No that just resonates, deeply, with what leftism is all about. A lot of what the luddites were fighting against is so timeless because the way that we develop technology and the way it's imposed

on our economy is so much the same. To the extent that if you look back Two hundred years- and you look at some- Their solutions luddites were proposing. They were proposing things that today look an awful lot like a robot tax. That we proposed by someone like andrew gang or or Michael Bloomberg, where, if you're using automated machinery, then some portion of that cloth that you were otherwise be able to produce. You should tax that and then use that to fund worker programmes. This is something that they suggested two hundred years ago and they saw the way that tech tightened entrepreneurs were using the idea of technology to get around regulations much the same way. the two hundred years later, uber and lyft, and the gig economy companies would be using to say: oh we're a technology company. We don't have to play by the municipal taxi code rules or anything like that. So this place

work has remained the same for for so long and it's going to be the same unless we really sort of take major strives to to address it. Would you like to see people like use the word letter today and in the proper way legs of the commission. It is a mission I have become very pro luddite? I will fight this bad, any day of the week. I think the time is ripe to reclaim the term, and I think we all benefit greatly. If we succeed a ninety nine percent invisible, was released this week by Delaney hall, sound mixed by dora Hirsch original music by swan. Real caddy too, is our executive producer kirk course. There is the digital director press. A team includes martin gonzales crisper, uber, jason de Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald,

sir Johnson Vivian lay latian madame Jacob Maldonado Medina kelly prime, Joe Rosenberg roman mars, Brien merchants book will be available for purchase on september, twenty sixth, its key blood in the machine, the origins of the rebellion against big tech. There is so much detail. We couldn't you into bloody detail, incredible characters. so much going on. If you want to learn more about the luddites, you definitely have to check it out. The ninety nine percent invisible logo was created by stephen lawrence. We are part of the stitcher and example, gas, family, no hypocrites, xbox north in the pandora building in beautiful uptown, oakland, california, You can find the show and join discussions about the show on facebook. You can tweet at me at roman mars and the show at nine p I at work or on instagram reddit and tiktok too. You can find links to other stutter shows I love as well as every

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