Workers’ movements or tantrums against technology?

•  GAVIN MUELLER

NEW YORK: Revolutions inevitably birth counter-revolutions. The Industrial Revolution was no exception. In the early 19th century, textile workers in the north of England, set on a course toward obsolescence by new machines, struck back. Under the banner of a mythical apprentice named “Ned Ludd,” they staged nightly factory raids, using massive hammers to smash machines and forcing Britain to place the entire region under military occupation. Ever since, the Luddite movement has spawned mythologies of its own, drawing in writers attracted to its doomed Romantic broadsides against modernity, and its status as a militant workers’ movement erupting at the dawn of industrial capitalism.

Brian Merchant is something of an oddity in this pantheon of writers, which includes the eminent historians Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson and the firebrand activist Kirkpatrick Sale. Merchant is the tech columnist at The Los Angeles Times and the author of a history of the iPhone; and though the bulk of his new book, “Blood in the Machine,” is derived from an immense trove of archival materials and secondary historical sources, he brings a journalist’s touch to the Luddites’ travails, drawing connections between the conflicts and indignities of their epoch and our own.

The book is structured around the stories of the individuals, famous and otherwise, whose lives were violently unsettled by technological change in this auspicious time: the Prince Regent (the future King George IV), whose decadent revelries provided a foil to the weavers’ escalating privation; Lord Byron, the infamous Lothario whose populist defenses of the working class helped bring about his celebrity; Robert Blincoe, the orphan whose brutal experiences in a cotton factory from the age of 7 likely inspired Charles Dickens’s character Oliver Twist. Most central is the story of George Mellor, a brawny and charismatic cropper who leads Luddite cadres into increasingly daring actions, which culminate in the vengeful assassination of a notoriously cruel mill-owner and the subsequent unravelling of the movement.

Merchant capably situates the Luddite story within its historical context, but, like his forebears, he uses the past as a lens onto the present. Thompson’s Luddites entered debates on political consciousness in the 1960s; Sale deployed them to lend urgency to environmental politics in the de-radicalised 1990s. Today’s Luddish writers (myself included) invoke Luddites to tarnish the shiny facades of Silicon Valley apps as they remake our world — as they reconfigure decent jobs into hyper-surveilled and algorithmically managed gigs. Merchant describes the typical platform (Amazon, Uber, Instacart) as a “psychic factory” that “cyborgizes its workers for maximum productivity.”

To make the book’s political stakes even plainer, Merchant renders the early 19th century in current-day language. Factory owners are “entrepreneurs,” “the one percent,” even “tech titans” who are “disrupting” the textile industry — moving fast and breaking things, to borrow Facebook’s old slogan. Factory technologies spread “virally” and represent a form of “automation” (a term, as Merchant notes, that was not coined until the 1940s). The Luddites themselves are likened to decentralized movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.