Rastin Mehr

Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine is the story of the Luddite movement in 19th-century England. Luddites were groups of English textile workers displaced by automation technologies and struggled to protect their livelihoods.

In contemporary English, we refer to people who oppose new technologies as Luddites, but Luddites were neither against new technologies nor technological automation. They wanted income, food, and housing security; they wanted a share of the fruits of their labour that helped textile entrepreneurs maximize the performance of their technologies and minimize their reliance on human labour to the point that industrialists were hiring children as machine operators.

In some gruesome accounts, many of these children ended up crushed to death inside these factory machines. Sometimes, their employers wouldn’t stop the machines to save a child caught in the machine because stopping the machines could hurt productivity. Workers had to continue to work while their co-worker’s bodies were being crushed and mangled in the gears of industrial machines. A common form of punishment was to force unproductive children to stand near dangerous areas of industrial machines for hours, where a slight movement could result in severe injuries and amputations. The Tory governments heavily supported textile industrialists and entrepreneurs at the time, which eventually crushed the Luddite movement by arresting and publicly “un-aliving” the Luddite leaders and members.

Throughout the book, the author frequently connects modern-day AI and cloud automation technologies that could or will make jobs vanish faster than we can recreate them in new domains. The book has many interesting historical references and facts to keep you curious.

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” by Dr. Shoshana Zuboff is perhaps the most quoted book on surveillance capitalism. It is about big tech companies that give us free apps and online tools while mining and collecting behavioural surplus data about our demographics, locations, and behaviours and selling it for insane profits or even manipulating public opinions and rigging our democratic establishments.

It took me half a year to finish reading this book. It’s over 500 pages long, and the pages are wordy and dense. It’s a commitment, but this book has valuable historical information and stories about how well-known search engines, social media, Smart devices and IoT platform companies stayed ahead of the legal system while mining our data, made us believe that opting out of their idea of “Future” wasn’t an option, and how they hid their unethical practices behind the barriers of intellectual properties protections.

Do you want to know how the tech elites are trying to use their wealth and technologies to escape the consequences of their actions and leave the rest of humanity behind? Then it would be best to read Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Riches: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which I think was the best book I read back in 2022.

In this book, he also challenges the fantasies of tech utopianism, such as building AI and colonizing Mars. Instead, he argues that these are all distractions to avoid the real problems of our reality, such as inequality, environmental degradation, and social disconnection. Rushkoff calls for a radical shift from individualism and competition to building communities and cooperation, from extraction and consumption to regeneration.