Oddbean

#Taylorism and other efficiency cults ended up scripting the motions of workers to the fingertips, and workers were and are subject to increasing surveillance and discipline from bosses if they deviate. Take too many pee breaks at the Amazon warehouse and you will be marked down for "time off-task." Steampunk is a dream of craft production at factory scale: in steampunk, the worker is a solitary genius who can produce high-tech finished goods in their own laboratory. 26/

Steampunk has no "dark, satanic mills," no blood in the factory. It's no coincidence that steampunk gained popularity at the same time as the #maker movement, in which individual workers use form digital communities. Makers networked together to provide advice and support in craft projects that turn out the kind of technologically sophisticated goods that we associate with vast, heavily-capitalized assembly lines. 27/

But workers are *losing* autonomy, not gaining it. The steampunk dream is of a world where we get the benefits of factory production with the life of a craft producer. The #GigEconomy has delivered its opposite: craft workers - Uber drivers, casualized doctors and dog-walkers - who are as surveilled and controlled as factory workers. 28/

Gig workers are dispatched by apps, their faces closely studied by cameras for unauthorized eye-movements, their pay changed from moment to moment by an algorithm that docks them for any infraction. They are #ReverseCentaurs: workers fused to machines where the machine provides the intelligence and the human does its bidding: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur 29/

Craft workers in home workshops are told that they're their own bosses, but in reality they are constantly monitored by #bossware that watches out of their computers' cameras and listens through its mic. They have to pay for the privilege of working for their bosses, and pay to quit. If their children make so much as a peep, they can lose their jobs. They don't work from home - they live at work: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless 39/

Merchant is a master storyteller and a dedicated researcher. The story he weaves in *Blood In the Machine* is as gripping as any @d4cc8164 deep-dive into the miserable working conditions of today's gig economy. Drawing on primary sources and scholarship, *Blood* is a kind of *Nomadland* for Luddites. Today, Merchant is the technology critic for the *LA Times*. 31/

The final chapters of *Blood* brings the Luddites into the present day, finding parallels in the labor organizing of the Amazon warehouse workers led by Chris Smalls. The liberal reformers who offered patronizing support to the Luddites - but didn't imagine that they could be masters of their own destiny - are echoed in the rhetoric of #AndrewYang. And of course, the factory owners' rhetoric is easily transposed to the modern tech baron. 32/

Then, as now, we're told that all automation is "progress," that regulatory evasion (Uber's unlicensed taxis, Airbnb's unlicensed hotel rooms, Ring's unregulated surveillance, Tesla's unregulated autopilot) is "innovation." Most of all, we're told that every one of these innovations *must* exist, that there is no way to stop it, because technology is an autonomous force that is independent of human agency. 33/

"There is no alternative" - the rallying cry of Margaret Thatcher - has become our inevitablist catechism. Squeezing the workers' wages conditions and weakening workers' bargaining power isn't "innovation." It's an old, old story, as old as the factory owners who replaced skilled workers with terrified orphans, sending out for more when a child fell into a machine. Then, as now, this was called "job creation." 34/

Then, as now, there was no way to progress as a worker: no matter how skilled and diligent an Uber driver is, they can't buy their medallion and truly become their own boss, getting a say in their working conditions. They certainly can't hope to rise from a blue-collar job on the streets to a white-collar job in the Uber offices. 35/

Then, as now, a worker was hired by the day, not by the year, and might find themselves with no work the next day, depending on the whim of a factory owner or an algorithm. As Merchant writes: robots aren't coming for your job; *bosses* are. The dream of a "dark factory," a "fully automated" Tesla production line, is the dream of a boss who doesn't have to answer to workers, who can press a button and manifest their will, without negotiating with mere workers. 36/

The point isn't just to reduce the wage-bill for a finished good - it's to reduce the "friction" of having to care about others and take their needs into account. Luddites are not - and have never been - anti-technology. Rather, they are pro-human, and see production as a means to an end: broadly shared prosperity. The automation project says it's about replacing humans with machines, but over and over again - in machine learning, 37/

in "contactless" delivery, in on-demand workforces - the goal is to turn humans *into* machines. There is blood in the machine, Merchant tells us, whether its humans being torn apart *by* a machine, or humans being transformed into machines. Brian and I are having a joint book-launch tomorrow night (Sept 27) at #ChevaliersBooks in #LosAngeles for my new book *The Internet Con* and his new book, *Blood in the Machine*: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417 eof/

@b92dcc07 Thank you for this. It’s good to bang the drum that Luddites were never anti technology only pro autonomy. We know they were actually early adopters of new tech. I appreciate the way in which you tie it in with current big tech invading our lives.