Greetings. I’m Brian Merchant, a tech journalist, columnist, critic, and the author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, the book this newsletter is named after. That book is about a legendary but misunderstood worker uprising—the Luddite rebellion—against the early tech titans. Drawing from historical themes, this newsletter posits that, in the age of Silicon Valley monopolies, gig apps, tech oligarchs, and AI, we should all be thinking a lot harder about who tech serves, and who it squeezes.
For a longer look at this newsletter’s mission, see this short introduction.
In my past life I was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times. Before that, I was the senior editor at Motherboard, the co-founder and editor of TERRAFORM, Vice’s speculative fiction site, and a freelance tech and environment reporter. I’ve written about tech and its discontents for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, WIRED, Harper’s, and too many more to count. My first book was nationally best-selling The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. I’m a reporter in residence at the AI Now Institute, where I write reports like this one on AI-generated business models.
Join the growing community of critics, coders and machine breakers and subscribe for original essays, reporting, and rundowns of the latest news about big tech, automation, and AI. I also run interviews, film, TV, and book reviews, a series called AI Killed My Job, the occasional speculative fiction short, and regular dispatches on the growing resistance to Silicon Valley and our oligarchic overlords.
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I hope you’ll join me—and I hope to hear from you, too. If you, like most of us, have been caught up in big tech’s machine, whether clocking shifts at an Amazon fulfillment center under a grueling robotic work regime, hustling for UberEats’ always-changing algorithm, or losing clients to managers who’ve gone all-in on ChatGPT, I want to hear your story. Drop me a line anytime. The Luddites are back. Hammers up.
