And again, it was not the technology.

It was the way that it was being used.

It was the use to which it was being put, and it was the exploitation that it enabled.

That's what the Luddites were railing against.

They saw it that it came as a package, and that's what they were fighting.

Thank you. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Power Smarks, and this week I have a fantastic conversation for you with a very

familiar guest. Brian Merchant is a technology columnist at the LA Times and the author of

Blood in the Machine, the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Brian has been on the show multiple

times in the past, but this conversation is particularly special because Bryant's new book is a very detailed

history of the Luddites that goes into, you know, so much of what was happening back in the early

1800s when they were smashing the machines, but also the other aspects of their life, how their

livelihoods were getting more difficult, how they tried to appeal to political authorities,

how they tried to get the industrialists, the entrepreneurs, as Brian puts it, of the time,

to not roll out these technologies in such a way that was really going to affect their standard

of living and basically make them worse off. And of course, as we know, they were not successful in that, right?

Like, the capitalists won out, but they still set a very important example that we still look back to today,

even when it is kind of miscast and demonized by the tech elite who just want to use them as an offhand

example of kind of people who think backwardly

about technology and just oppose technology without thought. But in reality, that is not who

they were, right? They recognized how technology was being implemented by capitalists to make

their lives worse off while these capitalists were gaining immense wealth,

getting wealthier all the time, gaining increasing control over workers, including child workers

...