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Brad is joined by author Brian Merchant to discuss his book, 'Blood in the Machine.' They explore how the historical Luddite movement in 19th century England provides critical insights into the current AI revolution and its impact on labor and society. Merchant draws parallels between past and present technological upheavals, examining how AI is being used today to automate labor, displace workers, and erode job quality. They also reflect on cultural works like Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein,' highlighting its relevance to modern concerns about technology. Through their conversation, they examine the role of technology in shaping human life and society, and what it means to resist dehumanizing technological developments.
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That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash RC. Today we are living through the AI revolution.
It seems that very soon AI will dominate our lives.
it will make it impossible to distinguish between what is real and what is not.
This in addition to living in a technocracy where Amazon and social media are pervasive.
My guest today asks, what can we do about that, and how are these things going to change how we live?
In order to answer those questions, he looks backward to the Luddite Revolution of 19th century England.
Brian Merchant is the author of Blood and the Machine, a book that addresses some of our most contemporary concerns by examining the historical movement of the first machine breakers and those We'll oppose the dehumanization wrought by technological revolution.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus on this podcast.
Great Monday.
It's wonderful to be with you.
I am Brad Onishi and joined today by a first-time guest, someone who's going to be familiar to many of you.
Just a book that I think is overwhelmingly timely for this moment.
So I want to welcome Brian Merchant to the show.
Thanks for being here, Brian.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
I'm going to hold up this book, Blood in the Machine, The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.
We are recording this.
In the middle of a moment when one of the most formidable figures of big tech, Elon Musk, has seemingly overtaken the U.S. Treasury Department.
So we'll probably find our way back to him in some shape or form today.
But this is an incredible book because, yes, it's about the origins of the fight against big tech, but it really is a book that takes us through some of the original...
Machine breakers, as they are known, and as they call themselves.
You take us to 19th century England.
You take us to the people who became known as Luddites.
Now, I think everyone listening has heard this term.
A Luddite.
Somebody who doesn't like tech.
Somebody who's not progressive.
Somebody who's not, you know, doesn't understand how to use all the apps and their phone very well and is just kind of not only not technological, but somehow like just against technology.
We're living in this AI revolution.
We're living in a time when algorithms dictate our work lives, our personal lives.
It feels like we are becoming nothing but kind of submissives to the algorithm.
What did you hope to accomplish by writing a book about a labor uprising from the 19th century in England that has seemingly a lot of ramifications for our current moment?
Yeah, well, I mean, that's exactly why.
Because when I first kind of stumbled onto the Luddites and the true history of their movement, it became pretty clear that they had a lot of concerns that have never really gone away.
Over the last 200 years of technological development, over 200 years of industrialization, and of that development proceeding in a very similar way time and time again.
That is, it's spearheaded an entrepreneur or an owner or a founder these days, somebody who has access to a lot of capital, sometimes a lot of power, who is able to use a technology to sort of dictate.
The terms and shape of work and how that's going to influence culture and society and the economy.
And so the Luddites were in many ways kind of the first.
A group of workers.
They were cloth workers before they became Luddites in 18th and 19th century England.
They were, you know, the largest industrial base of worker in the country at the time.
Skilled workers, what today we would call middle class workers, working from home, decent lives.
And so they were among the first to see industrial automation.
What we understand today is industrial automation, sort of.
And so, of course, they would not be the last.
But as I, you know, started researching the Luddites, oh, 10 years ago at this point, I just was just struck, you know, first by what a raw deal they've gotten by the history books, right?
By popular culture.
As you mentioned, if you hear the word Luddite, it's in a derogatory context almost always.
And we hear it a lot now because...
Anybody who has a problem with AI or the way that it's being used in the workplace or being used to squeeze creative labor, for example, someone says, hey, this is maybe not great, then they get called a Luddite.
So we've had a renaissance of this term being used in its improper derogatory term.
So it was really interesting to learn as I was researching this book that that was not the case, very much emphatically so.
In the beginning.
So the Luddites, while they were, you know, in the midst of their movement, they were hugely popular.
They were powerful.
It was good, and it was fearsome, and it was, you know, it was a benefit to be a Luddite.
The state sort of was afraid of the Luddites.
People wrote folk songs about the Luddites, and we can talk about all the reasons why that is, but so it was like, okay, so that was, you know...
That was sort of a complete inversion of the way we understand Luddites, so there's got to be a reason for that.
And the more that I researched, and when I was writing the book, I was looking at AI and the rise of AI a little bit, but primarily the disruptive force at the time was gig work, was Uber and Lyft.
And I think it's useful to underline that too, and there's a lot of similarities between that and what's going on now.
But when you see what was happening to Uber drivers...
And cab drivers who are being displaced by Uber and Uber drivers.
And then you can, you know, look back 50 years at, you know, at modern industrialization and computerization and then factorization and just wave after wave of workers being displaced by people who own these machines, people who have the power and the capital to do so.
And so researching the Luddites and telling the story of the Luddites really turned out to be, I think, a way for me as a...
Someone who'd been, you know, writing on the technology beat for about 10 years at the time to sort of understand this cyclical, this omnipresent sort of force that when technology is deployed this way that you see time and time again.
And it's really just kind of come to a head.
I didn't mean for the timing of the book to be so, some would say ominous, but it really, like, I think we have the best example of technology being used to displace labor that we have had in 20 years or so that is unignorable, is easily understandable, easily parsable, and everybody can feel that anxiety, right? is easily understandable, easily parsable, and everybody can feel that It's there.
I know you've lived on the West Coast for quite a while.
I live about 20 minutes from Silicon Valley, so I feel like it's in my ether all the time.
And there's billboards about the AI revolution and so on and so forth.
Let's talk about the term Luddite, though, because again, I think everyone listening is going to know that term.
They're going to feel like they know what it means, but they're going to have no idea about the origins.
So where does this term come from?
Give us just a little primer on that.
Yeah, sure.
So the basic primer is when it became clear that the...
That the machines that were emerging in the Industrial Revolution, a lot of the ones that we now sort of associate as being sort of primary drivers of the Industrial Revolution, you know, the power loom probably most famously, but there were a number of others.
There's the gig mill and there was the shearing frame and all these other machines that were being used to automate labor.
When the artisans and the cloth workers realized that they were being used in this particular way.
By extant and prospective factory owners to build for the first time what we now recognize as factories.
This is the emergence of the factory system in the early 1800s.
Really clearly to them looks like a grim and crushing future of work where, again, as I mentioned, they used to live in their houses.
They would work at home.
The family would all get in on it.
They would sing songs.
It was tough work sometimes, but they would work 30-hour weeks.
And they could take walks when they needed a break and so on and so forth.
It was a pretty good system, you know, although far from perfect.
But when machinery sort of enabled...
The use of the factory as a sort of like a primary driver of industrialization as these factory owners and bosses started to get capital and build more and more of them and organize work in this way that everybody hated, right?
I mean, first they did it because the machines also allowed them to de-skill the workers.
So children could run a lot of the new automating machinery.
A lot of times you'd still need a more skilled weaver to oversee the output.
Again, the parallels are just going to pile up between now and then.
But the long and short of it is the workers saw this coming.
They hated it.
First, they protested.
First, they organized petitions.
First, they went to parliament.
They recognized that the factory owners and entrepreneurs were actually behaving illegally, right?
The machines tore up a lot of the social contract, a lot of the laws governing the trade.
You had to have an apprentice for this many years.
You had to produce cloth that met this quality count.
You couldn't produce...
Quote, fraudulent goods.
All of these things that the factory owners were using machinery to do with the argument that, well, the times are changing.
The old rules don't apply.
And so, in short, the machinery, just like we've seen with Uber, just as we're seeing now with generative AI, is allowing sort of the bosses to make the case that, you know...
We can pay you less.
We can produce lower quality stuff for cheaper.
We can tear up the social contract.
It's an excuse to do so.
It's an excuse to disrupt.
And so the artisans fought peacefully first.
Petitions, going to Parliament, thrown out, laughing, laughed out of Congress, laughed out of Parliament, rather.
And you couldn't unionize at the time.
It was against the law.
So they couldn't collectively bargain.
Finally, you know, after about 10 years of really trying to do things, quote, the right way.
They hit a wall.
There's a series of crop failures, economic conditions get bad, and just the social conditions are combustible.
And so finally, they rise up.
And they take the name of the Luddites after Ned Ludd, who's this apocryphal figure who was said to have years before sort of picked up a hammer and smashed his master's machinery after his master had him whipped for not working fast enough.
And then he flees into Sherwood Forest, of course.
This is, I should mention, in Nottinghamshire.
This is in Nottingham, where there's this tradition of dissent.
So, Ned Ludd, Robin Hood, Ned Ludd, he's made up figure to sort of channel the frustrations and solidarity of the people, and he does.
And they rally around his banner, and they organize guerrilla raids to smash machinery, and only the machinery that's automating their jobs.
They do it to make a point, and to protest, and to perform basically a capital strike.
They're not attacking people for the most part.
They're really targeting the machines.
This is not full-scale violence for violence's sake.
It's tactical.
It's strategic.
I will say, if you're going to have an apocryphal figure, you could have a different name.
Ned Ludd.
It doesn't roll off the tongue.
Robin Hood is such a sexy name.
Ned Ludd.
One does wonder about that, but that's okay.
You had to consult their branding committee before letting down the list.
Yeah.
The social media manager, the Gen Z or something.
I think today we live under this unspoken imperative that as technology progresses, we just simply have to accept that.
That, hey, that's how it goes, pal.
There's new machines, there's new algorithms, there's AI. You're just going to have to accept it, whether you're a cab driver, whether you are a professor, whether you are anybody.
But what comes through for me in this story as you write it is that the artisans and the workers This felt dehumanizing.
It felt like you might be gaining more efficiency, but you're going to lose a lot.
I can't get that out of my mind.
The singing, the guild, the way of life, the training into a profession that is in some way, and this is going to sound very Pollyannish, kind of virtuous.
How did they feel as if they were being dehumanized as the factory and industrial mindset set in?
Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing was that they weren't given any say in the matter, right?
And it did not look like progress to them.
You're absolutely right.
It looked like theft.
So imagine this for a second.
So you have a small town where you basically have one major industry.
It's a cloth producing industry.
And yeah, you have other shops and stuff organized around that.
But that's sort of like where the jobs are.
And for 200 years, people have been working in either small shops or at home making garments.
And then along comes somebody with a big sack full of money and says, I'm going to set up shop over by that.
Big river as a water source, as a power source, and build a big factory on the hill.
And I'm going to make the same stuff that you were making.
I'm going to cut it.
You know, buy 50% off for prices because I'm going to organize machinery to do it faster.
I have a bunch of money that I can do this.
I'm in with the magistrate so I can get preferential treatment.
And I, you know, I'm going to hire children to do this.
Now I'm going to sell to the same people you were selling it for before, but now you're not going to be able to feed your families.
You can either try to compete with me on price.
You can come work for me.
Or I can put you out of business.
So it didn't when you have these stark examples of, again, capitalism is not yet fully formed.
Right.
This is sort of like the like the the the forging fires of capitalism are taking shape as we.
So there was there was not like an established set of sort of precedent here where they're like, oh, well, that's that's just the way things go.
We better, you know, get in line.
No, it was, as the historian David Noble put it, maybe the last time that workers affected by it saw technology in the present tense.
They could see its impacts.
They could see what was happening.
It was being used as a justification to undercut them on price, to undercut their wages, to pay them less, to erode conditions.
So for what?
So that the owner of the factory can benefit.
At the expense of almost everybody else.
Like, this was just nakedly a bad deal.
Like, there was very, very few people who were like, you know, this looks good.
Obviously, the people with money, some of the, you know, aristocrats and the lords who saw, you know, their tax rates go up because now there's this industry on their lands.
But the common people were like, you know, what is this?
The stuff that's coming out of it is worse.
It's giving our trade a bad reputation.
It's starting to pollute because these factories are awful.
Labor conditions are atrocious.
And it's going to like suddenly more and more people have to work in them like this.
This looks like a horrible future, right?
So they saw all of these trend lines that I think are useful to keep in mind now that we have these winding supply chains and sort of global economies where it's a little bit harder to discern sometimes what's actually happening in the labor market, what a proposition of a technology is.
This is like the use case because at its core.
You know, workplace technologies, time and again, this is ultimately what it boils down to.
And we're seeing it with generative AI. You know, the number one thing that they're trying to sell with generative AI is enterprise AI. That's where they think the money is, to sell basically job automation.
And in a lot of cases, obviously, it's not always going to be as grim as in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution or child labor, but...
A lot of the same principles, you know, adhere quite neatly, right?
When you're talking about automating creative labor or an artist's work, we'll probably get to that in a sec.
But yeah, it really, really was stark and very clear.
It was a moral outrage at the time.
And it was not particularly complicated to most people.
This really did look like, you know, a dark future.
And so that's why we get, you know, poets like, you know, Yates talking about the dark satanic mills.
It was a pretty widely shared kind of assumption that these factories were going to be bad for workers and that industry was plowing ahead anyways.
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It's...
One of the things I appreciate about this story is that you're starting out at the beginning of a system, and thus, as you're saying, the assumptions and the structures of that system are laid bare.
That all of a sudden, one guy shows up in town, he's got money to open up a factory, and here's the thing that you're going to get out of that.
You're going to get the efficient creation of a thing, of a good.
What are all the things that are going to go badly because of it?
People are going to lose their way of life in terms of their profession and their guild.
But also, things you mentioned in passing there, these were highly pollutive.
And you're going to end up with factories that...
I mean, we could tell this story through the environment if we wanted to, from 1805 to 2025, and what this has done to the environment worldwide.
You're talking about what feels like theft.
Hey, this is blatantly unfair.
Just from a human society-building perspective, this is blatantly unfair that one person is able to control all of the other people just because they have this capital.
And when we think about it now, it's, again, just a kind of, this is the water we swim in as fish.
But to those who are living it in the kinds of times you're talking about, it did not feel that way.
I think a question that a lot of people are going to wonder is, like, well, this is great, but, like, you can't fight technology and you can't fight progress, so what's the point?
What kind of successes did they have?
What were they able to win?
Yeah.
Well, so, they're not the best use case for, like, if you want to make the case that, like, they actually had tangible victories.
I mean, so they did win some things, right?
They did.
So, again, I'll just reiterate the fact that, like, They had the entire deck and more.
They had the house, right?
Like stacked against them.
It was, they had the, the might of the military, which the state eventually called in.
They made it a crime to the parliament, made it a crime to break machines punishable by death.
You had the Prince Regent, you know, sponsoring sort of like propaganda against them.
And then you had like factory owners who were sort of authorized to, you know, hire mercenaries to kind of gun them down.
So like you, like you, the odds are, are almost unimaginable.
And they still managed to put up a pretty, pretty heroic fight.
So their victories were kind of on two levels, I think.
So at first, when leadism first broke out in early 1811, it was actually at first quite successful because the factory owners...
Many of which it's worth sort of sort of noting were uncomfortable, you know, with the system as well.
It was not all just sort of, you know, cigar chomping, you know, fat cats who, in fact, a lot of the automation and like sort of the regime for automation was filled with people who kind of felt like they had to keep up with the biggest owners.
So you would have like the sort of the tech titans, which is this kind of come back.
To sort of like the biggest tech or the owners and big tech sort of setting the standards and the pace that everybody else has to.
So when the Luddites first sort of organized their first sort of round of strikes against factories that had poor conditions, they would always pick the factories who had the most obnoxious owners at first.
It was, as you said, very strategic.
Well, the factory owners sort of responded initially by resetting wages to what they had been before they started using automating machinery to justify lowering them.
So they said, we'll restore the old prices, as they put it.
Okay, we'll waive the white...
We'll restore some of these protections.
We'll go back to this and that.
And that held for the better part of a year.
But again, you have the most bullheaded, determined entrepreneurs and factory owners who were determined to see it through and to keep prices low and willing to gun people down to corner markets.
When that starts to happen and they start to amass momentum and the machine owners win the support of the state, the Luddites are a little more helpless to ink those material victories.
But what they do do is they bring this entire issue called the machinery question at the time to the public stage.
They win some very famous supporters.
Lord Byron, who is probably the most famous...
Luddite supporter.
He, you know, would defend the Luddites.
He gave his actual, his very first speech in the House of Lords.
He was a lord.
Was in defense of the act that was aiming to make breaking machines punishable by death.
So he defended that as barbarism and tyranny and gave this booming speech that was reprinted in newspapers and became sort of folkloric.
They're imprinting, like, sort of the culture with this sort of, with this sense that That machinery can be resisted, that there are ways to fight back, that it is virtuous to fight back.
That you shouldn't just sort of lie down and let the factory bosses steamroll you.
And they sort of initiated a series of actions and sort of political organizing that would then carry on years later.
So a lot of the people involved in Lettism went on to be involved in the reform movement to finally sort of establish the right to organize or to combine, as it was called in the time.
And then, yeah, we get this big cultural imprint.
Frankenstein, for instance.
So Mary Shelley, who was married to Percy Shelley, or was about to be, she, you know, is around Percy and Byron, just as the last Luddites are being hung.
And Percy was even more of a Luddite, diehard, pro-Luddite supporter than Byron, just wasn't as famous at the time.
So she's absorbing these ideas, and then she writes Frankenstein, kind of the all-time, you know.
Critical tech science fiction novel, the first science fiction novel that contains the basic ideas of Luddism, that you gotta push back against sort of reckless tech titan types, that if we allow these people to have free sway over the world, then it'll end in ruin.
And that sort of...
Powerful, you know, idea that's captured in that text and has been sort of, you know, replayed and readopted and rebooted time and time again.
It's still with us today.
So they left quite a powerful mark.
And finally, they sort of left a set of tactics for future more militant movements to emulate.
So right after them, there's a movement called Captain Swing, where agrarian workers invoked Captain Swing instead of Nedla or Robin Hood.
And they were actually much more successful.
So they smashed the threshing machines that were automating farming jobs and they actually won some real lasting victories.
I, you know, again, I think the story of the Luddites opens us up to so many of the spider webs that that extend throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st century.
I talked about environmentalism before, but the way that you just spoke really does turn on the lights of...
Thinking about things like organized labor, thinking about 40-hour work weeks, thinking about unions and the ways they represent those who actually do the work of making factories or any other organization or guild run.
You think about protections for workers.
You think about just workers' compensation.
Things that I think go unnoticed by a lot of people these days, I've made the case on this show for the last couple of months that one of the things that the likes of Marc Andreessen...
And other tech magnates would like to do is to repeal the 20th century.
And if they repeal the 20th century, they repeal many of the victories that in some ways were inspired by the very first resistance of big tech in the form of the Luddites.
And so any kinds of regulations we have, any things that we have that protect those workers.
I mean, we haven't even talked about child labor laws.
The idea that, you know.
A century ago, you might have had a 12-year-old working 14-hour days in a coal mine or somewhere else.
These are all issues that continue to stay with us.
You mentioned Frankenstein, and I just want to talk about that for one more moment, if you don't mind.
Frankenstein has that unfortunate literary life where everyone seems to think they know what Frankenstein is.
Nobody's read it.
Nobody thinks, I mean, not nobody, but very few people think critically about Frankenstein in the ways that they should.
But there is a tie in here.
And I'm just wondering, you know, in clear terms and direct terms, what does Frankenstein tell us about this uprising?
And what might it tell us about the times we're living in now?
Yeah.
The biggest, I think, misconception that people have about Frankenstein is that, like, Frankenstein in the original is like the dumb oaf monster as sort of portrayed on TV, right?
So in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which, again, was an instant bestseller, massively influential, Frankenstein was incredibly intelligent.
He's, you know, yearning and searching, and he's abandoned, right?
So after he's given life by the You know, Victor Frankenstein, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the resident tech bro of the time.
He sort of recoils in horror, says, oh my God, what have I done?
And he, you know, of course, famously leaves Frankenstein to his own devices.
Frank, you know, Frankenstein has all these long monologues.
He's, he's very thoughtful.
He's, you know, wandering the countryside, trying to come to grips with his existence.
And then yes, he, you know, he becomes, he becomes dangerous and bent.
Mostly, above all, on extracting revenge on his creator.
But the parable there that Mary Shelley, who it should be noted, was not particularly radical in the same way that Byron or Percy was regarding the Luddites.
But she still saw, and I think what we can take away from the influence of Luddism on Frankenstein, is that when you have somebody with great power to create or sort of thrust.
They then have like a responsibility to that technology and to ensure that it doesn't...
Just wreak havoc and destroy people's lives.
And so a lot of scholars have read that, you know, that the sort of the Frankenstein's monster that's being unleashed is sort of the working class at the whims of the Industrial Revolution and its masters who sort of abdicate all responsibility over doing things like, you know, having sensible, you know, work days and working protections and not using child labor and things like that.
And by sort of turning this blind eye.
You know, it's a little bit of a paternalistic view, but by turning this blind eye, it allows, you know, Frankensteins are sort of run amok and do violence.
But there really is sort of, you know, a specifically technological critique sort of lodged in there, too, and who gets to create a technology and what our responsibilities are after, you know, we unleash a technology or...
You know, somebody who has the power to do so.
And I think that's what's been so resonant, you know, over the years.
And the formula, you know, doesn't really change all that much.
You know, you look at our most modern sort of Frankenstein adaptations.
You could even, you know, Terminators, maybe a Frankenstein adaptation.
We create this insane AI technology, Skynet.
Turn it over to the military industrial complex and it wreaks havoc and we have to kind of stand up and find ways to fight back.
But that wouldn't have been the case if there was a thoughtful head of that corporation or somebody who's exercising due care, due control at the crucial stages of a technology's development and deployment.
So it really is kind of a Luddite work.
And I think it's really interesting that it remains to this day sort of our key touchstone.
I spent a lot of my career teaching at liberal arts colleges.
And one of the things you have at a liberal arts college often is like a freshman seminar.
And it's supposed to be this really cool interdisciplinary semester or year.
And oftentimes, honestly, it's really disappointing.
But I think what I'm thinking now is like, if I had the chance to create my freshman seminar, I think today I would start with Gilgamesh and the quest for just...
Immortality that ends in such tragedy and disappointment.
And then Prometheus.
And, you know, we'd maybe get some Achilles in there, but then go to Frankenstein and then end with, like, as you just said, Terminator and several other kind of, like, films.
And just, like, that's a good semester of, like, hubris, technology, progress, and devastation.
And what happens when humans think, I want to embarrass you and read just a little bit from page 344 because I found this passage to be a link between Frankenstein as a Luddite work and the new Luddites, those who are fighting this fight today.
Frankenstein's monster, today a stitched-together mass of precarious gig workers, service sector employees on the brink of automation, overworked manufacturing laborers, and a citizenry increasingly angered by the apparent unimpeachability and unperturbability and a citizenry increasingly angered by the apparent unimpeachability and unperturbability of the big tech companies, is showing new signs of And who can blame the monster?
It sets in context, I think, Frankenstein as a literary work.
But it also brings us today, who are the Neoluddites?
What do they want?
What are they doing?
Yeah.
So it's funny.
It kind of works on a number of levels.
There's been...
Some struggling with what term to use.
I kind of like to say new Luddites because there was also a neo-Luddite movement in the 90s, you know, 30 years ago with folks like Kirkpatrick Sale and sort of, you know, a group of people.
They were maybe more tuned into the environmental aspect, which is interesting too.
And it was sort of, they kind of had a...
Different response where, you know, today we might say the Luddites did not hate technology.
They hated the way it was being used against them.
The Neo-Luddites of the 90s said, yeah, you know.
The Luddites, you know, hated technology in one sense, and we should just follow that example and hate it in all senses.
So it was really much more of kind of just kind of accepting the misuse of Luddites and turning that on its head.
So that was kind of, there was a Neoluddite moment then.
And now there are a lot of...
Artists, creative workers, writers, journalists, students, activists, people who are sort of becoming more friendly to the Luddite term again.
So today's Luddites, the new Luddites, you can call them, are artists, creators, writers, coders, students, activists, you name it, who recognize the way that generative AI is being used.
To sort of threaten or undermine their industry or their livelihoods, just as the old Luddites did with cloth work and the many hundreds of thousands of jobs that were involved in creating and producing cloth.
Today, we're seeing companies start to use mid-journey to produce images instead of hiring illustrators.
We all remember probably the big strike that the WGA had when it became clear that the studios wanted to use AI to generate scripts.
And importantly, in yet another connection, almost a direct connection to the time of the Luddites, the screenwriters knew that the real threat wasn't that the studio heads were going to press a button and get a perfect script out and, oh no, it's going to replace everything we love about our jobs.
No, they knew the studios were going to use AI to produce a crappy script, then hand it down to them and ask them to punch it up, in which case they get a rewrite fee, not ownership over the material, and not things like residuals.
So it was going to be used as a tool to degrade the labor contract.
And they recognized this, just like the Luddites did.
The Luddites were never worried that the new machines were going to "replace their jobs" or just, they weren't worried like, "Oh, this is just going to produce a perfect sweater and I'm never going to have a chance to make a great sweater again." It was like, "It's going to make a crappier sweater." It's going to undermine my economic security in the process.
So everybody's losing except for the person who owns the machinery and is making the profits.
So the writers...
You know, some of them, you know, invoked the Luddites directly, and they pushed back directly against, you know, the use of AI in their jobs, and they actually sort of won a protection from AI in their contract when they were on strike, so they finally, you know, it's a five-year contract, but it states that the studios cannot use AI to create scripts.
If anyone wants to use AI, it's got to be up to the writers and on their terms.
You know, there's a bunch of other sort of...
Complaints, most of them quite valid, that workers have.
That it's ingesting their work and then being used to produce content that is then set against them on the market to compete with.
There's new degrees of surveillance.
If you're using AI systems, for example, and you're typing keywords into an AI chatbot or an AI system, you are being monitored.
It's collecting your data.
You know, if you have stuff on the open web, the models that train on all that data have probably ingested your material into the stuff that's basically being used to train the AI systems.
So it is really, really a multifaceted concern.
And the new Luddites are saying, like, this is not worth it, right?
There are some very good uses for AI, perhaps.
It's doing interesting things with, you know, screening for cancer and detecting new protein models or, you know, it maybe has some use cases in material sciences and modeling for material sciences, you know, but by and large, the way that it is being sold and packaged and used and the way that these companies are hoping to make all of their money is through the dull automation of labor by taking a wrecking ball to creative industries.
By making more precarious the conditions that many of our workers today do their jobs.
And we can kind of come back to Elon Musk, who you mentioned at the top of the section.
So what came out, what was the news and wired just yesterday as we're recording this is that Musk's number one sort of henchman who's taking over at the GSA stood up to all the workers there and said, This is going to be an AI-first agency.
This is going to be our aim.
Brian Merchant, thank you for writing Blood in the Machine.
Where are places people can lingo with you?
You're writing, you're covering this tech beat, and other things you're up to.
Yeah.
So the best place to find me is just at bloodinthemachine.com.
I've been writing a newsletter.
I've been...
I don't know if enjoy is the right word, but it has felt useful to, you know, get...
Get the word out.
We're building a community, I think, of people who want to think critically about especially AI, but tech and labor and this concentration of power that we're talking about.
So yeah, Blend the Machine.
I'm also on bluesky at bcmerchant.bluesky.social or whatever.
You can find me there.
And yeah, and as I often say, if you, you know, have stories of...
I encourage you to get in touch.
I have collected so many stories.
It's always good to talk about them.
We want as full a picture as we can of what's actually happening right now, even as the tech industry tries to hit the gas.
So I'm grateful for every chance to talk about it.
So thanks so much for having me, Brad.
No, thank you.
And as all of us are expected to adjust to AI, anyone who writes anything is expected to have.
A newsletter.
That is how it goes.
I have no say in the matter.
It just appeared one day.
Yeah, you get a prompt, you open your computer, and there it is.
You have a newsletter now.
All right, friends, as always, catch us Wednesday with It's in the Code.
Catch us Friday with the Weekly Roundup.
Most importantly, Catch One Nation Indivisible by Andrew Seidel, which is premiering here at the end of February.
Andrew is going to be there weekly giving analysis, having great discussions about separation of church and state.
And all the legal and cultural issues of our time.
If you are thinking about becoming a premium member here, you will get bonus content to Andrew's pod as well.
So if you don't like me or Dan enough to sign up, maybe you will like Andrew enough to sign up and think about taking the plunge.
