Greetings. I’m Brian Merchant, a journalist, 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, and AI, we should be thinking a lot harder about how technology is deployed—who it serves, and who it squeezes.
Subscribe for original essays, reporting, and rundowns of the latest news about big tech, automation, and AI, their impacts on society, culture, labor, and the environment, and the widening human resistance to Silicon Valley.
I also write about film, books, and other cultural arenas in which we imagine tensions, conflicts, and uprisings against our machinic overlords. In my past life, I was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a senior editor at Motherboard before that.
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.
This work is currently supported by the Omidyar Network, where I’m a reporter in residence.
