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. It’s about the Luddites’ deeply misunderstood uprising against the early tech titans, and why, in the age of Silicon Valley monopolies, gig apps, tech oligarchs and AI, we should 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 intro essay.
In my past life, I was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a senior editor at Motherboard and a freelance tech and environment reporter before that. I’m also a reporter in residence at the AI Now Institute, where I write occasional reports, like this one on AI-generated business models.
So! Join the community of coders, critics, and machine breakers here, and subscribe for original essays, reporting, and rundowns of the latest news about big tech, automation, and AI, their impacts on society. Not to mention dispatches on the growing human resistance to Silicon Valley.
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I also write about film, books, and other cultural arenas in which we imagine tensions, conflicts, and uprisings against our machinic overlords. And I’m still figuring this
I hope you’ll join me — and hope to hear from you, too. If you, like most of us, have been caught up in big tech’s machine — whether that’s clocking shifts at an Amazon fulfillment center under a robotic work regime, hustling for UberEats’ always-changing algorithm, or losing creative jobs to ChatGPT — I want to hear your story. Drop me a line anytime. The Luddites are back.
