HT reviewer Syed Saad Ahmed picks his favourite read of 2025
Technology is not an inevitability. This book shows why we should all be Luddites to build a better world
I grew up thinking Luddite was a bad word — someone afraid of or resistant to new technologies. Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech helped dispel my ignorance.
As the Industrial Revolution gained hold, textile workers in England in the early 19th century broke looms in protest and threatened factory owners. However, their fight was not against technology. Rather, it was against the mill owners who used mechanisation to wrest a greater share of profits, leaving labourers with less pay even as their workload increased and working conditions worsened.
So, instead of the irrational, violent people they are made out to be, they were crusaders for a fairer world. They fought with whatever means they had, but the political and economic system was stacked against them. The government sided with factory owners, ruthlessly crushing dissent and punishing machine-breaking with death.
The Luddites might have ostensibly failed, but their legacy lives on. Subsequent labour movements have won us rights we take for granted today: two-day weekends, eight-hour workdays, and annual vacations. Yet, the misrepresentation of Luddites has endured for more than two centuries in popular culture. Scholars, such as Eric Hobsbawm, have done more justice to their legacy. Merchant goes a step further with his book by showing how workers today face the same threats the Luddites did in 19th-century England. Again, the problem is not technology, but how those with power and wealth are using it.
The tech world touts automation and artificial intelligence as miracle workers that will usher in a gleaming new world. They add that millions might lose jobs in the process, but that is the nature of progress — you win some, you lose some. However, this widespread unemployment was the utopia that the economist John Maynard Keynes once dreamt of. A century ago, he speculated that by 2030, people would only have to work 15 hours a week due to rapid technological advancements.
And yet, working hours have increased for most despite mechanisation and dramatic productivity gains. Billionaires champion 70-hour workweeks, even though research shows that four-day weeks could be equally, if not more, efficient.
So, the problem is not that an AI will take our jobs, but that the person who supposedly owns it will pocket our wages. I use the term supposedly because the artists whose works are fodder for generative AI, the data workers who train machines, and the communities whose water and electricity run data centres are its unacknowledged co-creators.
Technology is not an inevitability that unfolds independently of society. We can decide what to create and how to use it. Merchant’s book brilliantly shows why we should all be Luddites to build a better world.
Syed Saad Ahmed is a Boston Congress of Public Health Thought Leadership Fellow 2024. He speaks five languages and has taught English in France.
