Brian Merchant

Brian Merchant is an American technology journalist and author, formerly the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times. His first book, The One Device (2017), chronicled the secret history of the iPhone; his second, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (2023), recovered the true story of the Luddites — the English textile workers of the 1810s who smashed the machines being used to destroy their livelihoods — and became one of the most-cited books of the generative-AI backlash.

Rehabilitating the Luddites for the AI age

Merchant’s core argument is that the Luddites were never technophobes — they were skilled workers making, in his words to Time in 2023, “a powerful complaint” about who controls technology and who profits from it. He draws a straight line from the factory owners of 1812 to the AI companies of today, arguing that when new technologies erode wages and deepen inequality, it is a political choice made by the owners of the technology, not an inevitable march of progress. He now writes the Blood in the Machine newsletter full-time, documenting — in an ongoing series called “AI Killed My Job” — how employers use AI to degrade creative and white-collar work.

His framing — that the fight is with bosses, not robots — has been embraced by striking writers, artists suing AI companies, and a new generation of self-described Luddites, including the teenage Luddite Club. Critics counter that the original Luddites lost, and that the productivity gains they resisted ultimately raised living standards; Merchant’s rejoinder is that those gains took generations to reach workers, and only after bitter struggle.