One year of Blood in the Machine (the book)

On a year of rehabilitating the luddites, resisting AI, and beginning to build a better future

Hello friends,

I know there is a lot going on right now, but I wanted to take a minute to note that it has officially been a full year since Blood in the Machine (the book) was published, and share a quick update on what’s happened since then. First, a giant, Enoch-sized thanks is to everyone who has read, discussed, bought, requested, shared, reviewed, or otherwise cheered on the book. To all the friends, luddites, critics, and comrades I’ve met along the way, who’ve hosted me on a podcast or a radio show, at a book fest, union hall, or bookstore, at a Luddite tribunal or a university, or who stuck around afterwards any of the above to raise a glass—I am very grateful. I salute you all, you’ve made this a year to remember.

Another nice thing is that even a year later, the book continues to sell. Not, like, at a blistering pace, but word is still getting out, it’s finding new readers, and that’s great. It’s slated to be translated into at least six languages—Mandarin, Italian, Turkish, Thai, Ukrainian, and Polish. And it’s garnered some nice nods: last spring, BBC chose it as a Book of the Week, and produced an abridged audiobook version. WIRED, the New Yorker, and the Financial Times named it as one of the best books of the year. It was longlisted for the FT and Schroeders Best Business Book of 2023. It’s now in its 5th printing.

More importantly than any of that, though, the true story of the Luddites—not the derisive myth of technophobic rubes—has made its way into the mainstream, where it, hopefully, can offer a critical lens for thinking about things like AI and gig work. As such, the best part of publishing the book has been getting the opportunity to talk about the Luddites, about labor and technology, with hundreds, probably thousands, of students and workers. With folks in just about every line of work who are thinking about AI, automation, and how or whether to challenge them.

To wit: I vouched for Luddism at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Debates in AI, made a short video about the machine breakers for the MOMA’s No More Likes series, and have shared a critical perspective on AI at many a conference. I got to talk Luddites on MSNBC at primetime, with Planet Money on NPR, and shows like 99 Percent Invisible. I’ve spoken with workers and organizers at the California Labor Federation, the Musician’s Alliance, IATSE, and the Teamsters. I have spoken to the Federal Trade Commission, and to business schools. I even, in an event I still want to write more about at some point, traveled to Seattle to discuss the book with members of Microsoft management, who had been assigned to read it.

I am always happy to do this stuff, to meet with students and workers. Especially those worried about AI or automation in the workplace, or thinking about organizing; please drop a line. I am more than happy to talk, to you or your whole workplace or class or union or peers. I’ve been getting a good deal of such requests—and incriminating leaks and office horror stories and tales of corporate mismanagement re AI (more coming on that soon)—and I try to answer every one. Keep them coming. I’m seeing more of a support network come together; I’ve met lots of organizers and tech workers and thinkers who are doing great work here, building information resources and solidarity. It’s been great in fact to see folks broadening the horizon of what Luddism means in this particular moment; the scholar Charles Logan, for instance, is, with his colleagues, developing a luddite praxis for addressing AI in education. University professors are adding Luddism to their curricula, and I just heard from a high school history teacher who has started teaching a lesson on the Luddites.

It’s pretty obvious why, I think. When I was researching and writing the book, there were plenty of examples of how corporations were using novel technologies to squeeze workers—since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there have been no shortage to choose from—but generative AI was just a murmur in Silicon Valley. I was looking at Amazon, at Uber, at automation and the ways gig app companies sought to automate and deskill labor. That was plenty brutal, with taxi drivers, warehouse laborers, and delivery workers all suffering in myriad ways as a result—and generative AI has only expanded the frontiers of the sorts of work Silicon Valley is aiming to ‘disrupt.’

But networks of resistance, both formal and informal, are growing. It’s clear now that generative AI is being used to undermine and eliminate creative jobs, that AI slop is enshittifying the internet, that a new regime of software automation—that next to no workers asked for—stands to profit power at workers’ expense. With strikes, walkouts, protests, and class action lawsuits, workers are fighting back. The New Luddites, as I wrote earlier this year, aren’t backing down. And many have reclaimed the term Luddite itself, wearing it as a badge in social media bios and beyond, as a signal that there are technologies, and uses for technology, that are worth resisting outright, that we should be unafraid to do so.

Sometimes I worry that I might be willing that spirit of resistance into more arenas than are really there—but then I go to an Animation Guild rally and see hundreds of people fired up to take on AI that studios want to use to replace their work, following SAG and WGA where thousands did the same. I see video game workers beginning to organize an industry that has for decades resisted unionization, with AI front and center. I see artists speaking out, taking class action lawsuits predicated on protecting artists’ rights to the discovery phase, taking the fight to the tech companies doorstep. I see NO AI symbols and pledges populating the websites of artists and businesses. I see former tech execs mobilizing to fight the AI companies that train their models on creators’ work without compensation or consent.

And I saw it firsthand in those Luddite tribunals I mentioned, where the aim was to put tech on trial—we considered generative AI, Amazon ring cams, self-driving cars, and so on—and where turnout packed the event spaces to the gills. Thumbs down from our panel of Luddites meant the tech literally got the hammer. Academics, activists, tech workers, gig workers, writers, and who knows who else, all turned out and made those tribunals some of the most gratifying events I’ve ever been a part of; just about everyone seemed eager for catharsis.

The sheer generosity, the luddite solidarity, if you will, present not just in the tribunals but all of the above, showed that this book—and now this newsletter—was just one small part of a growing idea, or movement, or community. Everyone out there who I met on the road last year, or who DMs me in the middle of the night about their anxieties over AI, or who are organizing for a seat at the table in deciding how algorithms will be deployed in their workplaces, who emails or comments here with ideas about building better ecosystems for tech—you all give me real hope that there are alternatives to a future dominated utterly by Silicon Valley monopolies, AI slop, and exploitative algorithms. And that the will is growing to realize them.

So thank you again, and keep those hammers up.

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