This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Brian Merchant is a tech reporter and he'd been covering the industry for years

when he started to notice this term that kept coming up.

Especially when we would report something critical about technology,

we would get charges of being Luddites.

Like most people Brian knew, at least vaguely, what this term Luddite meant.

If we know them at all, we usually know them by this derogatory light.

We usually understand the Luddites to be technophobes or people who hate technology or and it had always been this kind of term that had just sort of lodged itself into the general consciousness.

But as time went on and as Brian watched tech grow into the disruptive behemoth it is today, he started to get more

curious about the actual Luddites.

Who were these people whose name gets thrown around so often today in 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 dolts 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 was exploiting them. The story is so much more complex, so much

more nuanced, and if anything we should be sympathetic to the Luddites, especially given all the

lessons that we can learn about them and how they sort of

illuminate a lot of the crises still ongoing today. Brian has a new book out about

the Luddites with a very metal title it's called Blood in the Machine, and it explores how English

textile workers in the 19th century rose up against the growing trend of

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