What Would Luddites Say About Waymo Cars?
An interview with technology critic and author of Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant
I’ve been getting a ton of calls lately from media outlets, covering a recent highly circulated set of videos in which a few skateboarders and other San Francisco locals attack and torch a driverless cab - an autonomous vehicle owned by Waymo, which is Google’s robot car company. They wanted to speak with me, as author of the book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, about the fact that people are now throwing skateboards at the Google Car.
Of course, when I wrote Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, I wasn’t arguing that we should attack technologies or the people who use them; I was lamenting at the way these potentially liberating technologies had been turned against people and places — and the fact that people felt compelled to take up arms against them in return.
At first, Google was just two college students taking down big bad corporate Yahoo with a bottom-up algorithm. And because a few billion dollars a year of profit wasn’t enough for its investors, they pivoted to become one of the extractive and super-profitable mega-companies that made San Francisco too expensive for the people who already lived there.
Automation could be making our lives easier, but in the hands of anti-social tech billionaires, they instead render us powerless. We can feel how these technologies are simply automating existing systems of oppression and disenfranchisement. Once they don’t need human workers anymore, we don’t even have a means of resistance. What’s a “general strike” in a world run by robots?
That Waymo car feels like the precursor to a Waymo cop or robot replacement (only for now it’s defenseless). It’s really another version of replacement theory — which is why Bannon and Alex Jones are quoting my work these days. Even they get that there’s something anti-human about all this.
I can’t condone violence — even against stuff. I don’t buy the How to Blow Up a Pipeline justification for attacks on infrastructure, because they are precursors to violence against other people. But there’s something, still…something like an expression of human agency in an attack like this. It went viral, because it’s expressing a repressed agenda in popular culture. The attackers are not exactly acting on our behalf, but they are expressing a widely felt anxiety. These technologies are not our friends, at least not as currently deployed.
Helping us think through all this on the new episode of Team Human, and maybe helping us feel a bit less guilty about that sense of glee mixed in with the horror of watching a perfectly innocent robot car go up in flames, it’s my pleasure to welcome the writer who until last week was tech columnist at the LA Times - laid off along with much of their in-house writing staff - and also the author of some of my favorite accounts of the impact of technology on society including The One Device - about the secret history of the now ubiquitous iPhone, and his new book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Brian Merchant.
Douglas Rushkoff:
I'm one of those few people who don’t mind being called a Luddite I say, “thank you,” not “fuck you,” because Luddite doesn't mean anti-tech. Luddite refers to a labor movement of the 1800s against technologies that were bad for humans. And your brilliant book Blood in the Machine is not just about the way big tech exploits humanity, but the way big tech — dovetailed with capitalism — exploits humanity.
Brian Merchant:
Yeah, some people have taken issue with the fact that I call it “big tech” back then, but I hope it's read as a somewhat sly mechanism that allows us to keep these two things loosely in mind.
Because a lot of the very same in instincts and trajectories were established in those early days by people using technology: to concentrate power and capital ultimately by doing things that are not associated primarily with innovation necessarily, but more with exploitation and being willing to break down traditional structures, break down norms, cause some immiseration, cause some suffering, and being willing to do all those things.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Well, the chartered monopoly is really what made that possible because once you had chartered monopolies, you don't have to innovate anymore. You have a monopoly. So your focus, the way you're going to make more money, is no longer by competing effectively with competitors. It's going to be by asking, “how do I extract value more effectively and efficiently from the humans and resources?”
Brian Merchant:
Yep, it's a drive towards monopolization. As a quick backdrop, the cloth-making industry in England in the 1700s and early-1800s was by far the largest industry. It was a non-agricultural source of work. There were hundreds and thousands of workers. It was responsible for Britain's burgeoning economic might. So within this industry you start to see the early stages of capitalism, and a capitalist reorganization, because we've got domestic economies, mostly domestic labor, where people are working in what are the cottage industries.
They have their machines. They're good at using technology. They're technologists because they work their machines, repair them, mod them to their liking, make them a little bit more efficient, all within the confines of their house. But you have just thousands and thousands of people doing this, working in the actual cottage industry.
And the shift starts to come when people realize you can start to do what we would call automation today and automate some of these machines. And even more so when people say, “Hey, well, if you get a lot of those machines that are doing some automating and you stack them on six stories of a building and hook it up to water power then you're cooking. Then you can really lean into the division of labor, then you can really undercut on price.” Then nobody's thinking about all the great improvements to mankind or technology. It's just, you could produce more stuff cheaper. And the people that were doing that didn't care about communities that had grown up with this other mode of economic organization for decades and decades.
We're talking like 200 years, an economy and a mode of life had been formed around this [cottage industry textiles]. So the people who are willing to disrupt all that, and disrupt really I do think is the operative term, become what I call the first tech titans. People like Richard Arkwright, who is remembered as the father of the factory and the patenter of the water frame that allows mass volumes of yarn to be spun.
But, two important caveats that apply today, too. He didn't actually invent the thing. He stole the ideas and patented it before somebody else could. He ripped off his inventor, a la Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and took the lion's share of the profits. His chief innovation a la someone like Jeff Bezos today, was not that machine, but the fact that he's willing to put it into use, willing to create punishing conditions and willing to have factories that are two-thirds child labor.
That's ultimately what moves the needle and allows him to become one of the first mega rich commoners. He's not aristocracy, he grew up as a barbershop owner, but the reason he was able to do it wasn't because he had this brilliant spark. He was willing to corrode norms and standards. The cloth workers who fought against that, which I'm sure we'll be talking about more, became the Luddites.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Now these cloth workers weren't the original saboteurs, right? They didn't throw their shoes in the machine.
Brian Merchant:
No. So the first cloth workers tried for decades, really. Especially the first decade of the 1800s, once they realized where all this was going and that more and more shop owners were having to become factory owners and were having to compete at scale if they wanted to stay in business. They realized that these automating machinery were allowing those factory owners to reduce prices and undercut their wages. They tried a bunch of stuff first. They fought. Machine-breaking was a tactic that always hung around in the background long before the Luddites came around. So if something was grievous enough it would happen.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah, probably like the slaves in ancient Egypt were sticking pebbles in the pulleys or whatever, right?
Brian Merchant:
Yeah, you'd have a visceral outbreak. The spinning jenny, which was one of the first machines that sent the whole trajectory in motion when the inventor of that machine unveiled it, people just ran in and smashed all those machines.
They knew what use it would be put to. They knew he was doing it not to sort of bestow unto the community and say, “Hey, how about we ratchet up efficiency together? We can all sell more stuff. We'll figure out a way make this benefit everyone.” No, he was hoarding them. He was keeping his design secret in his house.And he knew that he was going to try to commercialize this thing to profit personally. That's what folks found so offensive.
Douglas Rushkoff:
And none of these guys back then were thinking about anything like UBI or leisure? I guess not, but you know what I mean? It's such an easy sell, the same sell to the housewife of America. Instead of washing clothes on this board, here's this machine and you'll push a button and throw your kid’s stuff in there. I mean, that looked good.
Shouldn't it have been the same? Hey workers, look how much easier your life is going to be when you don't have to do this stuff.
Brian Merchant:
Yeah, it was really interesting in terms of sort of the ideology that was attached to these different pursuits. Capitalism wasn't fully formulated, much less understood, but Adam Smith's teachings about the division of labor, about the virtues of pursuing profit in an aboveboard way was really taking flight with the elites of the time.
The people that supported this most ardently could at least justify what they were doing by this sort of economic dogma. That was Smithian, that his opponents would call them the disciples of, of Dr. A. Smith. You see that in the Luddite letters, people opposing them because they're appealing to the early ideological strains of capitalism as a justification for just running roughshod. It's decades until you really see pitches made like that, [to the workers].