Blood in the Machine Quotes

“If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“Social bonds were not easily broken; it was not easy to stare into the eyes of a friend and say, I am taking your job. (One benefit of machinery was that it could be used as a rhetorical tool as well, to muddy the moral clarity of the situation—a use it’s been put to by owners ever since. It’s the robots, not your boss, that’s coming to take away your job.)”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“It’s the same story, time and again: a new technology that promises to alleviate work degrades it instead.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“The history of the Luddites—the real ones, not the pejorative figment of the entrepreneurial imagination—gives us a framework to evaluate the utility of technologies and their social impacts. Erasing that history collapses our thinking about how tech and automation affect our working lives—and the choices we have to address the disruption they bring.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“[The year] 1812 opens with a gloom altogether so frigid and cheerless, that hope itself is almost lost and frozen in the prospect. —The Manchester Gazette, January 1, 1812”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“Uber’s chief innovation is not that its app summons a car to your location with a smartphone and a GPS signal. It is that it used this moderately novel configuration of technology to argue that the old rules did not apply whenever it brought its taxi business to a market that already had a regulated taxi code.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“The biggest reason that the last two hundred years have seen a series of conflicts between the employers who deploy technology and workers forced to navigate that technology is that we are still subject to what is, ultimately, a profoundly undemocratic means of developing, introducing, and integrating technology into society.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“The Luddites knew exactly who owned the machinery they destroyed. They saw that automation is not a faceless phenomenon that we must submit to. And they were right: Automation is, quite often and quite simply, a matter of the executive classes locating new ways to enrich themselves.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“According to a report in the New York Times, “the richest 0.1 percent of American households own 19.6 percent of the nation’s total wealth, up from 15.9 percent in 2005 and 7.4 percent in 1980. The richest 0.1 percent now have the same combined net worth as the bottom 85 percent.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“In 2022, seven of the ten richest people in the world were tech billionaires.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“It’s difficult to definitively gauge the size of the gig or contract labor economy, but a 2018 Marist/NPR survey found that some 1 in 5 US workers participate in it.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“The word automaton first appears in Western literature in Homer’s Iliad, where it’s used to describe the “self-moving and intelligent machines fabricated by Hephaestus,” the blacksmith god of technology, according to the Stanford folklorist and historian of ancient science Adrienne Mayor. Around 700 BCE, Homer wrote about Hephaestus’s various automated inventions, which included “a fleet of driverless three-wheeled carts that delivered nectar and ambrosia to the god’s banquets,” automatic gates, bellows that self-adjusted their trumpet blasts as needed, and a crew of artificially intelligent golden female androids that could anticipate the blacksmith god’s every need. And the Greeks were drawing on even older oral traditions.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech