I just finished reading Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine. I'd received many glowing recommendations of it from other workers in tech, and frankly, my opinion of those recommenders has fallen a bit. But I do think it's worth reading, despite its flaws.

Merchant starts by retelling the Luddites' history, with the explicit aim of dispelling the common myth that they were opponents of progress who categorically rejected technology solely from ignorant fear of the new. He shows, instead, rage against capitalist entrepreneurs using technology to degrade and impoverish the working class, and against the unresponsive political elites who allowed it to happen. The Luddites were technologists themselves; their opposition was to the economics of the factories, not the machines inside them. Smashing the machines was a means to a greater end.

This content is great; I'm glad I learned it. But Merchant's delivery is clunky. He's not a historian himself, and his history draws from other secondary sources, but he doesn't marry them together very well. His narrative follows multiple different people in parallel, but this narrative device is more distracting than illuminating. There are several themes that feel underdeveloped; I think they either should have been dropped from the book entirely or fleshed out into first-class explorations of their own. (One example is Lord Byron's involvment with the Luddite cause, which, due to the fragmented narrative, is only revealed two thirds of the way through the book to have been a dalliance of Byron's that never had a chance of consequence. Another is the connection between the Luddites and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which seems profound enough to deserve more than a handful of pages.)

The biggest problem I have with the historical retelling is that Merchant either has no respect for his audience's intelligence, his own ability to analogize, or both. Over and over and over again, readers are explicitly reminded that nineteenth century factory owners are the equivalents of modern tech titans; sometimes, bordering on parody, Merchant even explicitly names the tech titans he has in mind, as though a reader's understanding could be stymied solely by a failure to remember Jeff Bezos's name. I found the ham-fistedness distracting; I think Merchant made his point without it.

In the back third of the book, the narrative moves into the modern day, and instead of reading about hammer-toting cloth workers, we read about things like unionization at an Amazon warehouse and the protest suicide of a New York taxi driver. Merchant is a technology columnist, and telling stories about the present - not the past - is his wheelhouse. It shows here. I can see very well why he wanted a solid historical foundation upon which to build his analysis of how modern technology is shaping modern society; the overall shape, zoomed out, is very compelling.

Ultimately, I'm glad that the two-century slander of the Luddites as reactionary and ignorant has found a popular refutation, and that someone has tied their struggle to that of the modern gig worker. I just think Merchant could have executed better.