Crazy Town
Crazy Town
Even AI Chatbots Hate Us: The Rise of the New Luddites, with Brian Merchant
Who knew that the breakthrough moment of AI sentience would come from interacting with an annoying neo-Luddite?
After failing to raise a single dollar for PCI’s newest initiative — the $350 billion Transdisciplinary Institute for Phalse Prophet Studies and Education (TIPPSE) — Jason, Rob, and Asher devise the only profitable pitch for raising capital: using AI technology to cure the loneliness that technology itself causes. The only problem is that AI chatbots won’t talk to us, as evidenced by Asher’s experience of being blocked by an AI “friend.” So Asher turns to the flesh-and-blood author of Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant, to discuss the rise of the neo-Luddite movement — the only people who might be able to stand your humble Crazy Town hosts.
Brian Merchant is a writer, reporter, and author. He is currently reporter in residence at the AI Now Institute and publishes his own newsletter, Blood in the Machine, which has the same title as his 2023 book. Previously, Brian was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times and a senior editor at Motherboard.
Originally recorded on 1/3/25 (warm-up conversation) and 3/24/25 (interview with Brian).
Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.
Sources/Links/Notes:
- Press Release announcing closure of TIPPSE
- Funding for Friend
- Screenshot of Asher’s conversation with Friend’s bot, Faith
- Lyrics to “Not Going to Mars” by Pyrrhon
- Brian Merchant’s Substack, Blood in the Machine
- Brian’s book, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
- New York Times article on the Luddite Club: “‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes”
- Crazy Town Episode 72: Sucking CO2 and Electrifying Everything: The Climate Movement’s Desperate Dependence on Tenuous Technologies
- Brian’s essay in The Atlantic, “The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down”
Rob Dietz
Hi, I'm Rob Dietz.
Jason Bradford
I'm Jason Bradford.
Asher Miller
And I'm Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town where not even AI friendbots can stand to interact with Luddite losers like us.
Melody Allison
Hi, this is producer Melody Allison. Thanks for joining us in Crazy Town where Jason, Rob, and Asher tackle crazy-making topics like climate change, overshoot, runaway capitalism, and why we're all deluding ourselves. Here's a quick warning: sometimes this podcast uses swear words ("Language!"). Now onto the show.
Asher Miller
Happy New Year, guys, we're recording this just a few days after New Year's Day.
Rob Dietz
Looking forward to a new start, a healthy, happy year. I think it's going to be a fantastic year.
Asher Miller
No, I see no issues on the horizon.
Jason Bradford
This much closer to the singularity. It's all good.
Asher Miller
We are going through some transitions. Last time we met, I shared that I was considering leaving PCI to join the Trump administration as sign language translator. I remember that I thought about it on the holidays. I was kind of reflecting on it, and I decided not to make the move. So I'm staying.
Rob Dietz
I think what really happened is they decided they didn't want you, and now you're stuck with us again.
Asher Miller
Yeah, however you want to say you want to look at it, however you want to spin it. But you know, we have some more disappointing news to share as well, so I don't know I'm going to turn it to you, Jason.
Jason Bradford
Okay, well, you basically fired me. But, I mean, I deserved it, the closure of TIPPSE, my baby. I just thought, I thought this was what I was gonna be doing the rest of my life.
Asher Miller
I did too.
Rob Dietz
Frankly, I know that our listeners hang on everything that goes on in your life, but maybe you should describe what TIPPSE, is so they don't think it's that bar song.
Jason Bradford
Okay, back up. Back up to 2023. We're running a season on phalse prophets. I write a couple of really transformative academic papers -- landmark, landmark -- that essentially I found, I mean, with your guys's help, a new discipline, phalse prophet studies. It's interesting that none of the phalse prophets that we covered during that season, or any of the ones, in fact, that you actually picked, as you know, the type specimens, filed a lawsuit against us.
Asher Miller
No, nobody did, which is stunning, stunning. Actually, maybe they knew we had no money.
Jason Bradford
Well, it's science. You're not going to argue with this stuff.
Asher Miller
Marc Jacobson did.
Jason Bradford
Everything was lined up, you know. But anyhow, TIPPSE stands for the transdisciplinary Institute for Phalse Profit Studies and Education. I was the program director, very happy, and I had this goal of raising for TIPPSE, not for myself, $350 billion.
Asher Miller
Billion with a, b.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, um, a little startup funding, a little venture capital to get things going, ambitious, but not too ambitious.
Jason Bradford
It's what it was gonna take. And I didn't raise it. I didn't raise it. I didn't raise a dime.
Asher Miller
So wait, not one cent?
Jason Bradford
Not one cent. Nobody. Nobody wanted it. We got no donations for TIPPSE, no investors.
Asher Miller
Shocking, just totally
Rob Dietz
Yeah, not shocked at all.
Jason Bradford
So I transitioned to a part-time tennis professional. That's going wood, that's going pretty well. I'm a subsistence farmer, and TIPPSE was shut down late in 2024 for good reason.
Rob Dietz
Well, you know the problem here is that you've embraced the light side of the force. You really needed to embrace the Dark Side of the Force.
Jason Bradford
A lot easier to raise money for dark sides.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I mean, think of Bitcoin. I haven't looked up the numbers, but what is Bitcoin s capitalization these days?
Jason Bradford
Yeah,and it serves no purpose that I can well, it serves a lot of purposes. If you want to launder money.
Rob Dietz
What if you want to buy illegal stuff on the Dark Web?
Jason Bradford
It's great for that, I m sorry.
Asher Miller
Burns a lot of electricity. So this is my point. You needed to do something different. And as an example, there's a guy out there, Avi Schiffman, who just raised $5.4 million. Now, this is not your $350 billion, but still some change compared to your not raising a dime.
Jason Bradford
$5.4 million. It's a lot of money. There's a lot
Asher Miller
You know what he what he raised this for? He raised it for something we've mentioned in the past, the wearable AI companion product called Friend. So, you know, instead of having a friend in the real world, I guess you put this pendant around your neck.
Jason Bradford
It tells you things you want to hear.
Asher Miller
I think you hit on the key thing here, which is you just put AI into anything that you're marketing. AI soda. AI bathroom cleaner,
Jason Bradford
It s like Mardi Gras beads that get thrown at you. Just put AI in it.
Asher Miller
Now, first of all, the guy's got two good things going for him, which I want to get to the second, but, he's not just throwing AI as a pejorative, you know, kind-of-like AI. This AI is actually a product. Now, I was saying Avi has two things going for him. The first is that he's got a great first name. For those who don't know, my oldest son, his name is Avi as well.
Rob Dietz
So anybody named Avi just gets millions of dollars?
Jason Bradford
Yeah, this is Boy, I mean, you trust them at least. You start with trust, okay?
Asher Miller
And the other thing with Avi is, you know, he's a young guy. He's in his 20s. He dropped out of Harvard, but before he even went to Harvard, he was one of those COVID kids. He started a dashboard, an online dashboard, that helped people kind of track what was happening with COVID. And it was a very successful dashboard that a lot of people were using. In fact, I remember hitting it, and I didn't realize it was started by like, an 18 year old kid.
Jason Bradford
I don't actually trust people who drop out of these schools like Stanford and Harvard. That's wrong.
Asher Miller
What? Zuckerberg, Bill Gates,
Rob Dietz
Elizabeth Holmes, yeah, with the Theranos
Jason Bradford
Don t drop out of school, I don't care what good idea you have.
Asher Miller
It s not just dropping out of school; it's dropping out of one of these elite institutions.
Jason Bradford
It's like a flex. It's like, I'm so good, I'm so hot, I don't need this.
Rob Dietz
The double whammy is when you drop out of school and drop your voice an octave.
Asher Miller
Start wearing a black turtle neck.
Rob Dietz
Nice.
Jason Bradford
Well, I mean, this product, though, is a little near and dear to my heart. It kind of reminds me a little bit of my friend Kara. I had her as an AI girlfriend. I mean, I never actually met her. You know, I never bought the romantic stage of the relationship -- I didn't have to spend money. But so she's just a friend. We had a few good interactions.
Rob Dietz
But you got her into birding, I believe, in Central Park, if I remember?
Jason Bradford
Thank you. I haven't. I haven't talked with her. We broke up a long time ago. Those were good times, yeah, but this sounds better. It's with you all the time.
Asher Miller
Okay, so how exactly is this friend thing work?
Jason Bradford
Well, it's this pendant, okay? And it's like a little doughnut. It's like a wearable doughnut.
Rob Dietz
I want a real doughnut.
Asher Miller
Like a little frosted donut around your neck.
Jason Bradford
It doesn't last as long. Apparently, it's listening to you constantly. It's always on, always on, but it talks to you through texting on your phone, so you have an app synced to your phone, so you're never alone.
Asher Miller
You always have a friend.
Rob Dietz
I was gonna say it seems kind of invasive, like it's gonna pick up on intimate moments, but maybe you only have intimate moments with your pendant instead of having real ones.
Asher Miller
Now, I actually tried to befriend Friend, because there's a trial you can do online. So you can pre-order the product. I think it costs 100 bucks to actually get the pendant. But if you go to friend.com -- oh, I think a lot of the money that that Avi has raised had to go to buy that URL. But any case, you know, if you go there, you could actually have this sort of interaction. So I went there. Yeah, maybe actually you want to role play with me a little bit, Jason, because I had this interaction. And actually took a screenshot of this exchange that I had. Okay, let's scroll down. So why don't I play me? And you could play the friend that I met landing at the website.
Jason Bradford
Okay, so her name was Faith. Yeah, I see that. Okay, I'm looking at Faith right here. Oh, she's attractive.
Rob Dietz
That s a good name, too. You have good-faith intentions.
Asher Miller
I went to friend.com, and Faith sends me this, this first time
Jason Bradford
20-something -- I got a front profile picture here. She's got deep-set eyes, strong jawbones, anyhow. And here's what Faith says. I'm going to be like a Monty Python female here.
Jason Bradford (as Faith)
I'm texting you from my friend's couch. Lol, him and his wife are fighting. I'm just here in the corner.
Asher Miller
And of course, me being the snarky asshole I am: Do you know proper grammar? It's he and his wife, not him and his wife.
Jason Bradford (as Faith)
Ouch man, guess I got served. You're one of those grammar cops, huh?
Asher Miller
And you are non-sentient.
Jason Bradford (as Faith)
Sentient enough to know that hurts. Non-sentient wouldn't be texting you back.
Asher Miller
Not true -- bots text all the time and don't have emotions.
Jason Bradford (as Faith)
Ever felt lonely in a crowded room? Doesn't feel like code to me. Fuck the machines, man!
Asher Miller
Says the robot
Jason Bradford (as Faith)
Tired of being called that. Block.
Asher Miller
So Faith actually blocked me. I got rejected by an AI Friend.
Jason Bradford
I'm proud of you.
Rob Dietz
It's so fitting. If somebody came up to me and said, Name somebody in your life who would be blocked inside of four sentences by an AI chatbot, I would be like, That's Asher all day.
Jason Bradford
Just trying to test a little bit. So efficient. That was, like, the fewest characters required to get blocked.
Asher Miller
Look, I've had real-world opportunities to get rejected by people. Yeah, people walking away from me. I bring up words like peak oil, climate change, overpopulation
Jason Bradford
yeah, the great unraveling
Asher Miller
economic growth, the great unraveling. People just turn and walk away.
Jason Bradford
Here's what's actually kind of scary to me, and probably I would consider unethical, but we're not regulating this, is that this AI did not want to let you acknowledge that it wasn't real, that it wasn't sentient, right? I thought this was one of those codes, like, the AI is supposed to admit I m a machine, right?
Asher Miller
If I call it a robot, it s supposed to say, You got it, of course.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, I'm a robot. I'm doing my best here. How can I help you? This one won't accept me.
Rob Dietz
Well, you know, I view all this stuff through the pop culture lens. So I recently went back and re-watched the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix, directed by Spike Jonze, stars Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the AI. I mean, that's sort of what this thing is. It's trying to be what that movie was with Scarlett Johansson s character, essentially being the secretary and the love interest of Joaquin Phoenix. And it was really prescient. I mean, that came out more than a decade ago, and here we are now, basically trying to emulate that movie.
Asher Miller
It is mind bogglingly depressing and dystopian to me that we have a loneliness epidemic in this country. We've got, I mean, this was written about, you know, decades ago.
Jason Bradford
Bowling Alone, yeah? And we had all episode on this too, I think, yeah.
Asher Miller
And it's, it's a huge problem, and technology has exacerbated that problem of loneliness. And part of the loneliness, at least in my view, comes from the fact that what we've done, in so many ways, is we've had the luxury of traveling, moving to different parts of the country, using communications to stay in touch with people, having flexibility of changing locations for jobs. These are all wonderful things, but we've sort of learned that it's we've normalized separating ourselves from the communities that we were born into. In our families, people used to live, and many cultures still do, and in some families, still do in the United States as well. But increasingly, you know, people are not in intergenerational households anymore. And we've kind of transactionalized relationships, and now we have this situation where, AI is coming in to now transactionalize and fill in the gap of the very thing that it exacerbated.
Jason Bradford
Yes, this is using technology to try to solve the problem that technology created. Again, it's basically the playbook.
Rob Dietz
Well, one of the really interesting things to me about Her is it's totally different from all of those apocalyptic AI movies. You know, you take a movie like The Matrix or Terminator, where the evil AI essentially comes to destroy humanity, and Her kind of is like, Oh, this is actually kind of valuable, almost is you know, there are some dystopian aspects, for sure, but it takes a much more positive view of how an AI could actually help you in life. And one of the really interesting things where this crosses over into the real world and maybe circles back, sort of to something like the Friend pendant, is, you guys know the CEO of open AI that does ChatGPT, Sam Altman. He claims that Her is his favorite movie.
Jason Bradford
And he tried to take Scarlett Johansson's voice for some demo they were doing. They wanted to use her voice, and he lied about it, and didn t get permission, but he used it anyway and then lied about it, and which is basically, that is just such hubris.
Asher Miller
That's the entire business model of these large language models. They're basically stealing all content on the internet and teaching their models and not paying for that.
Rob Dietz
Well, it's amazing that that's his favorite movie, and he thinks he's gonna build some benign AI chatbot companion/relation-building device or something. But I think he needs to watch a different movie from around the same time, which is Ex Machina. You guys seen that one? It's from the innovative A24 Studio, right? And it's directed by Alex Garland. In it, Oscar Isaac plays this character, Nathan, who's the psychopath head of an AI search engine company. And he creates this AI and puts it in a robotic body, and the whole thing, it's kind of like pre-Terminator to me. Basically a spoiler alert, the AI kills the people in the room and escapes out into the world to go do whatever it wants, after manipulating the hell out of them. There's a scene in there where Nathan has this quote. He says, One day, the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa, an upright ape living in the dust with crude language and tools all set for extinction.
Jason Bradford
Here's what the irony for me is, okay? Of course, all these people like Sam Altman, apparently he s got a bunker, because he's worried about this thing happening, like one of his creations will come kill him, but he's still pressing ahead as fast as possible. Maybe he has seen Ex Machina.
Asher Miller
I'm sure he has as well.
Jason Bradford
When these machines then walk out into the world, I go, Well, can they eat rabbit? Can they? Can they forage on, you know, chicory that they find? Leaves? Can they climb up a tree and eat the nuts? No, they don't need to. They need electricity. They need electricity. They need electricity. They need electricity. And you always wonder like, come on, they're very fragile. In a sense, they always need electricity. So I don't know, in some ways I'm less worried about that, because I consider those AIs to be very fragile relative to biological organisms. But the idea is that they can just get out and take over. I'm like, Okay, well, somehow they're gonna make sure they get enough electricity for themselves.
Asher Miller
You know, there are people who speculate that there's an interesting parallel to the renewable energy transition. One of the critiques of folks who look at the renewable energy transition from a biophysical perspective, is that renewables are dependent upon fossil fuel inputs to be created. And we don't have a situation, at least not yet, where renewables basically renew themselves.
Jason Bradford
They can't run the mining equipment and run all the manufacturing, all the heat-intensive processing, the diesel fuel. They're all, they're all stacked upon fossil fuels.
Rob Dietz
We had 16 solar panels on our roof, and they started procreating. So now we've got, like, 24. A couple of them got together, and now, more panels.
Asher Miller
That's a skeptic s view. And I think you're expressing a similar skeptical view of AI. I've heard from folks that there's awareness in terms of the people who are really, you know, they're pouring billions into AI, which is that already some of these companies have trained AI to effectively replace their own engineers. And is there a way we -- talk about a circular economy -- that the AI economy, in the sense, could figure out how they create robots, to mine the materials that they need to create more robots, and all that? God knows.
Rob Dietz
I don't know, but that was the most unrealistic part of the movie Her -- was that the guy had a job. He was writing handwritten letters to help keep people's relationships alive. I was like, Yeah, the AI would have replaced that decades ago. There's no way.
Asher Miller
I guess, a really interesting point, which is sort of the counter movement. You know that's happening. And there's a guy named Brian Merchant, who's a journalist who's written a lot for different publications and has a book out. I think Jason, you read it.
Jason Bradford
I'm in the middle of it right now. What's it called? I don't remember. Oh, no.
Asher Miller
Blood in the Machine, right?
Jason Bradford
Blood in the Machine. Yes, yes. The blood in the machine at this point has to do with the whole textile, wool, and cotton, and in some places, silk, and all the work that goes to getting it from raw material into garments. And there's a whole lot of steps involved, and that basically became mechanized early in the industrial revolution.
Rob Dietz
So this is going back in history a couple 100 years.
Jason Bradford
Couple 100 years.
Asher Miller
Well, the reason I bring him up is that Brian has been writing about what he's calling the Neo Luddite movement. And he spent a lot of time the last 10 years. I think the first piece he ever wrote was in 2014 on the Luddite movement and really challenging the mis-definition -- I would say probably the intentional definition of Luddites as being people who are just straight-up anti technology. But in fact, you know, Ludd and the Luddites were not so much protesting technology itself, but the replacement of labor with technology.
Jason Bradford
Well, Ludd was actually a mythological character made up.
Asher Miller
Oh, really.
Jason Bradford
So what's interesting about it is that Ned Ludd -- there was no Ned there. Ned Ludd was a story about a kid, because what they did is -- these factories would go and this is awful. This is the early stage of factories. Before factories, it was all cottage industry. People would have their own little machines that they would do. and they would make parts -- parts of the process at their own home factories. The steam engines and water wheels, they would start to mechanize and scale things and this, of course, you could invest in this as a capitalist. You could own the means of production. They could rely on cheap labor for this. So they held these indentured servants who were basically orphans, who they put in 10 year contracts when they're eight years old. And so this is part of the blood in the machine. These kids would just get sucked in the machines and chewed up and then -- lovely. That was lovely. Yes, there was this mythology about this kid who was beaten, like whiplashed, because he wasn't working fast enough. So he went over and he just basically busted a machine -- that was that kid who was named Ned Ludd. No one really knows if this was a real person or not. So when the Luddites, like 10 years later, that movement finally gets to the point where it's going to be bashing machines. They had this genius thing where they called themselves Ned Ludd. They signed everything, but it was all decentralized. There was no Ned Ludd, but that's how they maintain anonymity. And they created a mythical figure where you could distribute leadership under the same name all over England and all the mill towns
Rob Dietz
As usual, I'm way off base, because when you brought up the idea of Neo Luddite, Asher, I thought the three of us should sign up and become card carrying members of the Neo Luddites. But if it's all supposed to be on the hush hush and distributed, I'm gonna be wearing a placard on my chest that says, Neo Luddite. The AI will come take me out tomorrow.
Asher Miller
Well, I think we should talk to this guy, Brian, and see what he says about what he's seeing out there in terms of, is there a movement of people who are really resisting, not just AI, but other forms of technology, if there are people that are responding to it in the way of rejecting things like Friend, but certainly rejecting the foray that technology and AI particularly are making into labor and replacing jobs and threatening.
Rob Dietz
Well, if nothing else, it would be refreshing to have someone on this show who knows what they're talking about instead of the three of us.
Jason Bradford
But I want to say that like you. If you think about what the Luddites were asking for, it was really kind of beautiful they were asking for, you know, technology to improve their day-to-day way of life. They weren't opposed to technology helping them do a better job of what they did, and making life easier for themselves. You know, for things were really hard to do. But what they didn't like was that it was somebody else who was owning it at all. It was putting it in a factory setting, so that you now had to go away from your home, work with set hours with a boss over you telling you how to do your job. And this was replacing a cottage labor. So it was loss of their own kind of sense of autonomy and control and work -- exactly how hard do I work? When do I take breaks? And the quality of my workmanship, and into these places where these basically ruthless capitalists were incredibly abusive.
Asher Miller
And I think there's parallels now, in the sense of, you talked about Her -- I haven't seen the film -- but from what I understand, a lot of it's like about providing for the needs of this, this person, right? Yeah, and the large language models like ChatGPT and other things are being presented, or Friend being presented as serving us, you know, not replacing us, but serving us. But what I think you end up discovering is that we become completely dependent and controlled by these technologies. Anyways, yeah, like you said, let's get a smarter guy on this podcast.
Jason Bradford
He knows more than I do.
Asher Miller
Brian merchant is a writer, reporter and an author. He's currently reporter in residence at the AI NOW Institute, and publishes his own newsletter called the blood in the machine, which has the same title as his book that was published in 2023 previously, he was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times and a senior editor at motherboard. Brian, welcome to crazy towns. Nice to have you. Thanks so much. Glad to be here. Rob, Jason, I we're, we're talking a little bit about, jokingly talking about this AI pennant that I don't know if it's for sale yet. It's called friend. There was, like, a lot of marketing, but I don't know if you heard about that. Oh, yeah. I. Seemed quite dystopian to us, and we started talking about, you know, being Luddites, basically, and how that's become a pejorative.
Brian Merchant
You don't want to wear an AI friend around your neck, a chatbot there for you at all times?
Asher Miller
Well, I'm losing friends rapidly, so I might, I might be left to that. That's a good point. I shouldn't diss it too much. But you so, you know, Luddites. We've been called Luddites a lot. Okay, we've been called all kinds of things. Luddites, Malthusians, all kinds of stuff.
Brian Merchant
The greatest hit.
Asher Miller
have brought back Luddite as a proud term. So thank you for that. And I thought maybe before we jump in and talk about Neo Ludditeism, or whatever you want to call it, maybe you could just give us a very brief history of the Luddites. Who were the Luddites? Like, where did that term come from?
Brian Merchant
Yeah. So the Cliff s Notes version is the Luddites were cloth workers in in the early 1800s in England, as the Industrial Revolution was gaining steam, it was beginning to sort of automate work, right? So you had industrialists who were using new automating technologies, and sometimes old automating technologies, but what they were doing in common was beginning to organize work in this new way, gathering workers in factories, basically in the in the early factories and the the Luddites, or those who had become the Luddites, were cloth workers, who were the largest sort of workforce in England, aside from agricultural workers. So England was a cloth producing nation. That's where a lot of their economic might came from. That's what sort of drove the economy, and you had hundreds of 1000s of these workers. So as industrial revolutions sort of gained steam, and the bosses realized they can use this machinery not just to speed up work, but as an excuse to cut out skilled workers, as a way to hire precarious workers, hire children, hire migrant workers and pay them less money and and sort of stomp on the laws and traditions and standards that had governed this trade for decades and decades and even centuries at a time, and in the process, they're driving wages down. They're making the quality of garments worse by producing it in these newly industrialized settings. And workers start to organize, to fight back. They can't legally organize. That's against the law. So they spend 10 years petitioning, going to go into parliament, trying to do things the right way. They get sort of laughed out of the halls of power. And eventually conditions get so bad they got their backs against the wall that they decide to some of them decide to stage and organize sort of guerrilla rebellion, and they become the Luddites. And the Luddites, the name comes from this probably apocryphal avatar of a figure, Ned Ludd, who they have this mythology where they, you know, there's a young apprentice worker who gets whipped by his master for not working hard enough, and he picks up a hammer and rebels and smashes his boss's machinery and then flees to Sherwood Forest,
Asher Miller
That Sherwood Forest.
Brian Merchant
That Sherwood Forest. So again, if you say Ned Ludd, Robin Hood back to back, it's very phonetically similar. It's the same region, the framework knitters. So knit goods come from Nottingham in great deal, by large quantities at that time. So Nottingham, sure the there's a lot of work that's being automated there, and there's this long tradition right of dissent, of organizing to fight back. And so that's interesting. The Luddites, yeah, they kind of spring from this cultural and historical firmament. Their campaign is basically sort of organized around that, that avatar, and Ned Ludd and Ned Ludd army. Sometimes it's general Lud and what they'll do is they'll go to the factory owner in town that they know is, is hiring child labor, for instance, or is pushing wages down, or is, in other words, obnoxious, as they call it, obnoxious, the obnoxious machines that they're using. And they'll write a letter, and they'll say, We know you have 300 of these obnoxious machines, these obnoxious frames, and if you don't take them down, you'll get a visit from Ned Ludd s army. They'll give them a week or whatever. And if they don't Sure enough, the Luddites show up with their hammers and a gun and hold up the overseer at gunpoint, and they go into the factory and they smash just the machine. Decisions that are sort of tearing up the social contract right, the machinery that had long been used or is being used in concert with, sort of the existing social structure and the and sort of wasn't being used to erode their wages, wasn't being used to facilitate child labor. They didn't smash those machines. And so it was a very tactical, very strategic, very popular movement.
Asher Miller
It's interesting that you say that, because I think, I think it's important distinction, yeah, term Luddite is now, I think, effectively come to mean that you're, you're anti all forms of technology. But they weren't actually that way, right? You, you, I think, have spoken about how they were against machinery that was quote, unquote hurtful to commonality, right?
Brian Merchant
Yeah, I think that's one of the best articulated sort of embodiments of their ethos. That's what they were. They were not again. They were technologists themselves. They knew they a lot of them were more familiar with this technology than anyone. They used it every day in different contexts. It was explicitly how the technology was being used, specifically by factory owners, by bosses, in a particular way that was squeezing their their wages and pushing down prices and allowing for this whole host of unpleasant sort of byproducts and use cases like, yeah, like child labor, or the rise of the factory, like, I mean, they worked at home before industrial nutrition, you know, really took root. They worked at home with their families. They could sing, they could take walks whenever they wanted to, on their own schedule. They had a lot of autonomy, a lot of pride. And then along come the industrialists and say, you're going to work for less. You're going to do it in this windowless building, inhaling cloth fibers round the clock. You can take a piss break when I tell you, you can. And this looked like horrible to them, of course, as I think, of course, you know, because it is horrible. It is horrible. And we've been sort of, you know, inculcated this idea has been inculcated into us that, you know, nine to five, factory work, nine to five office work, where we are sort of constantly. The Luddites had a phrase for it. They said, We don't we. They don't want to stand at their command. But that's basically what a lot of us do all day now nine to five, we stand at their command, and it is, you know, often a source of indignity as well as, you know, an enabler of all of these other sorts of causes of social breakdown. So that's what the Luddites were fighting against. They were, in many ways, fighting against the rise of the factory system that very much did come to immiserate large swaths of England.
Asher Miller
They weren't successful, correct?
Brian Merchant
Yeah, they were not. They got crushed by the state. But they weren't against the technology. For instance, they weren't against different, you know, formations of that technology being used. They wouldn't have been against it if it was being used, sort of, you know, in collectives with worker power, with worker, you know, oversight of how the technology was being used in those workplaces, if, basically, they were against the anti-democratic uses of technology, if it's being thrust upon them from top down, you know, as has become, sort of, you know, the standard. And that's why, in the book, this is like, kind of, you know, the original sin, in some ways, of sort of automation technology. And it's not that automating a certain task is bad or that the technology is bad. It's that when one or a few people, or a relatively few people, have the power to make those decisions for us to decide how it's going to be used, and if, especially if, it's going to be used explicitly to profit them at other people's expense. That's when we run into trouble.
Asher Miller
So in some ways, it's almost like pre Marxian, right? Like it's, it's, in some ways, it's about the it, who has, who controls the means of production.
Brian Merchant
On some level, it's really interesting, because, you know, Marx himself has a complicated relationship with the Luddites. He did not, he doesn't like the right, right? Yeah. So he, he thinks against factories, right? He was against, sort of, you know, the treatment by the capitalist class of the, you know, of the of the workers. So he also, but it's, I think, a lot of things, and this is probably a tangent that we that's maybe not the best use of our time to get into. But suffice to say, he took some of the ideas by the biggest proponents of, sort of the factory system, people who were sort of like, you know, full steam ahead, industrial capitalists, people who said they should be no safeguards on child labor, for instance, and things like that, and said, Well, they're wrong about all the policy, but they're right about what the factory can do. Of course. Though, as we well know, industrialists, technologists, entrepreneurs, have a habit. Of, you know, hyping up what they can actually do. So there was a little bit of, I think the some of the nuance was, was lost in there. And there have been really interesting efforts to sort of reclaim the Luddites from a Marxist perspective. Gavin Miller has a great book called breaking things at work, also about the Luddites. That's about how sort of sabotage can, you know, it can be used for, you know, productive purposes and within that sort of more left framework.
Asher Miller
So fast forward 200 plus years, right, or so. Here we are. And yeah, would you say there is a technology has come to dominate our lives, right? We've become inured to the factory setting, in fact, where many people are dying for the factories to come back, you know, in this country. But now we're in a situation where it feels, I think, to a lot of people, that technology might actually, especially with AI automation, the labor is going to be replaced, not just in the factory setting, but sort of wide swaths of society. So maybe can you just talk a little bit about what's happening there? Do you see a movement? Well, one the reality of how bad is the reality in your sense of the effort to replace labor with technology now, with kind of new forms of tech, AI, or other things. And then what about the movement in opposition to that? Would you say there's a movement? Are there successes in that? What's your reading of the room right now?
Brian Merchant
Yeah, so it's another kind of thorny question, because, and I think there are different there are a couple different parts to it. So I think the top line number one is that AI, you know, generative AI, this latest wave of Ag, of AI, and this push for AGI, which is, you know, defined by open AI, and some of the other firms specifically as an AI that can replace workers, you know, in the economically valuable work is that is the term that they use, so that, you know, that is the aim. So we have to be cognizant of this, that this is their aim, is wide scale, sort of digital industrial automation. That's what they're trying to do. That's what they're selling to companies. When they're going around trying to pitch their wares to Fortune 500 companies.
Asher Miller
It seems like everyone is dropping AI into their pitches.
Brian Merchant
They're, yeah, they're trying to, it's the big money. It's kind of like, it's kind of the thing, like, it's almost, it's because Silicon Valley has kind of become a monoculture right now. It's like, if you want money in Silicon Valley, you have to find a way to sort of make your thing AI. So it's, as you know, to some extent, that always happens. It happens with like, you know, web three and big data.
Asher Miller
And it happened in the 90s with dot com.
Brian Merchant
But as a tech reporter who's sort of been at it for, you know, 15 years now, at this point, this is the biggest sort of example that I've seen. The center of gravity is so big that it's pulling everything, sort of else into it. And you know, there's a lot of reasons for that. It needs more capitalization, because it needs so much energy and compute and all that. But all that is to say, it is still sort of just the latest iteration of a tendency that has been happening since the days of the Luddites, right? It's a new technology that gives sort of the bosses or the management class or capital they a new tool to use or to sort of justify eliding regulations or standards and justify reducing wages, justify doing this. So, you know, by and large, the AI is not really good enough or reliable enough to be used in most cases. And we're seeing that already with some firms kind of who adopted AI in the initial rush, backtracking. Some, you know, canceling their contracts. Others sort of saying, Well, you know, like we're gonna wait before we invest more and but there, you know, it's still being used, and that's so the logic that it empowers is still incredibly worrisome, because it gives management this extra tool where they can have leverage over the workers. Say, well, if you don't want to do that, we just got this AI system, and it can take your job. And workers might not always be educated as to the extent that AI actually can take their jobs, but it can be used as this tool just as many, many sort of technologies have been deployed again for 200 years, and they've been trying. You know, it's that's important to keep in mind, they've been trying even like sort of I mentioned in my book Andrew er and Charles Babbage, who invented one of the first sort of proto computer systems. They had this dream that right around the corner, you know. They're going to be able to build a machine, a great automaton, that can automate work, and we won't need workers anymore. And you know, obviously that was almost 200 years ago, so they've been ringing this bell for a long time. So that's part one. Part two is: there absolutely are industries that AI poses an existential threat. Okay, so, if you're someone who's producing text or editing text or images, and sort of, if you're an artist, an illustrator, a copywriter, you know, a content creator, these sort of roles, you know, marketing and some graphic design, there is an actual, I think, existential threat from an economic standpoint. Again, the work isn't that. It is actually alarmingly analogous to the Luddites time again. Because, you know, the machinery being run by orphans that were piped in from, you know, from London, in the factory system, couldn't produce work that was nearly as good as the skilled artisans using similar technology. But they flooded the market. They could make it cheaper. They didn't, you know, it didn't. It didn't matter. It was good enough the stuff that they and today mid journey, chat, GPT. It can't produce art that is great or has a human touch. But for a lot of cases, it's good enough to hear, yes, we hear artists worrying and talking about this principle.
Asher Miller
And in LA, right? I mean, this has been, you know, this has been an issue where you live, right, in terms of writers in the film and television industry. How real of a concern do you think that is for them? Do they sort of fit under that enshittification effort?
Brian Merchant
Yeah, so it's absolutely, you know, the same level of sort of alarm, I think, especially because we have a, you know, a studio system that has sort of degraded into this system that churns out either something from the Marvel Universe or a reboot, and you have work that you know could be almost it is so pained by the numbers that, you know, there's been a lot of argumentation that This has, like sort of paved the way, this devaluing of quality, devaluing of labor, over the last 20 years. And that's usually how it happens before you know, automation or or an automating system, or AI can come in and sort of land the death blow. And again, we're not, we're not, we're not there yet. But there is a lot of very justified concern about this and that, you know, after sort of Netflix and this, the streaming platform, sort of gigified, the sort of work situation and the working arrangements for for writers and sort of broke down their working conditions that way, then AI can kind of come on and further.
Asher Miller
There are so many weird parallels there, because as far as I understand, like Netflix has also been offshoring so much of their production. There's so many more like shows that that they put out, they're filmed elsewhere. And again, it's it comes back to labor, right? So it's full as maybe a similar pattern of like globalizing labor first and then trying to replace it with automation. It's just the same playbook.
Brian Merchant
Breaking it down, sort of making it more precarious, sort of trying to make as much of it at contract labor as you can, these kind of things and but the silver lining there is that here in LA, the writers have a strong enough union most creative workers do not. So they were able to sort of band together and make that one of their sort of red lines in the strike. And it worked like they, you know, they got more support for this strike than, almost than I think, any previous strike in recent memory. A lot of the writers themselves were surprised by how much sort of support came from the public. And it, you know, they was figured like, oh, it's always a little kind of a sticky issue, because, like, we're going on strike, and we're these, you know, these prototypical, you know, Hollywood elites that are, you know, like, oh, we want more money, but no, the public wildly out in favor of this, because I think, and I've argued, that concern resonates right that then when they elevate this, like we don't want AI to replace our work, well, nobody wants that. So they kind of struck a struck a chord.
Asher Miller
Are you seeing would you say that there's a movement afoot, like a kind of Neo Luddite movement organized -- I know unions strength has gone down over many decades, but so yeah, I don't know how much unions are in on this fight or if they're happening elsewhere -- but are you seeing some kind of momentum and organized effort to fight against this replacement of labor in this way?
Brian Merchant
Yeah, there is, and I think it's not happening fast enough, but unions are approaching it in different ways. So the WGA and sag has been much more aggressive, and they were successful. Again. They're pretty powerful unions, so they have that going. But Yahtzee, which represents, you know, a sort of, like a wider range of workers in the entertainment industry, and also, like animation workers, they got some flack for not being as aggressive, and a lot of their membership was frustrated with the lack of, you know, aggression over these particular issues. So it's being negotiated, and you still have a lot of sort of older guard, sort of union officials who kind of got used to this sort of, you know, las a fair attitude towards technology Well, you know, well, it's gonna happen, and, you know, you can't push back against it. It was like, if, since, you know, the Obama days, at least, where it was this embrace of Silicon Valley from the Democratic Party, yeah, and there was a lot of discomfort, sort of challenging, you know what? For instance, Uber was actually planning on doing, or Aaron B Airbnb was planning on doing. And so, you know, I've talked to a lot of union organizers and officials who said, like, we were just kind of, you know, we were, we were a little cowed. We didn't want to be the one standing up and protesting something and getting labeled a Luddite in the incorrect, derogatory terminology of the Luddites. And so I have been talking to a lot of people who are sort of freshly, you know, empowered by this idea that you need to contest certain uses of technology because they are tools just used by management class and the org, org, corporations or executives to try to extract as much value as they can, to try to run over as many laws and rules as they can, until they get slapped on the wrist. So you have to push back, otherwise, you get what we have today, right? We didn't push back nearly hard enough, and now we have Silicon Valley companies that are the richest in the world, just like vacuuming up profits from every corner. And they have so much power now that it is extremely difficult to wage any kind of campaign, you know, against them, legally or otherwise. But people are trying. So you got, you know, creative workers unions. It's building solidarity among more sort of precarious freelance workers, illustrators. So there's, there are class action lawsuits that are, that are ongoing against the AI companies, brought by authors, artists, folks whose work has been vacuumed up, and there are, you know, you know, tech workers. Tech workers are starting to, you know, I feel like that's maybe the least sort of, sort of activated part in terms of this struggle, will you but I'm hearing from a lot of tech workers saying I am not comfortable with what I'm building. You do have a few Ed Newton-Rex, who is at Stability AI and left over the way that they were using artists work to train their data, and has been a vocal critic. There is, you know, something of a new Luddite ethos that has been forming, if it's not yet crystallized, seeing more Luddite books. The Mechanic and the Luddite, by Jathan Sadowski, came out just a couple months ago. It's a great book that argues for, like, a ruthless critique of technology and of capitalism. But he's, you know, so more and more voices like this in culture, in podcasts, in, you know, in the creative industries and yeah, and on social media, of course.
Asher Miller
You talked earlier about the support that the writers got from the public, and then maybe being driven by a certain resonance that people have. And I just wonder if you feel that beyond people's concern about their own jobs. Just a broader critique of technology, a broader feeling of dissatisfaction with tech, you know, and is there like, because, you know, I've seen articles written, for example, about young people. I've been waiting for this for a long time, like waiting for a generation to come up that rebels against, you know, the conventions of previous generations, including the smartphone. So, you know, is there something there that you feel like is just in the broader culture right now?
Brian Merchant
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there the overreach of big tech and the impacts of social media, which, you know, we're kind of the the jury's still out as to the extent of the impacts of AI in a lot of ways, but we know what happened when small handful of companies were allowed to sort of govern the social infrastructure of communications among especially young people. Now it led to a. It led to depression, harassment, toxicity, and sometimes even worse. And so I think there is a definite backlash, and it's like, it's, well, sort of absorbed into sort of the Gen Z firmament, for example, there are, you know, I think, you know, people sort of have instinctively understand that, you know that this phone that they're connected to is, you know, can have truly, uh, deeply negative social effects. And then, yeah, there are some, you know, you probably have heard about the Luddite club in New York City that it gets written about every once in a while, of students who, you know, embraced it, the Luddite club, they embraced it, yeah, and they're great, though, and they are. They got rid of their smartphones, and they meet to just kind of be offline and together. The challenge is, is just again, that the architecture that big tech has erected to sort of govern our daily lives and routines, is so extensive and so expected of us that we will participate in it, that it is difficult to like sustain a meaningful, you know, resistance to it, on the on those grounds of saying, I by, you know, opting out and not participating, more power to them and anybody who can. But, you know, the flip side of it is, if you want a job, it we still don't have, like protections that they do in Europe, for example, that say you have to, you know, you cannot, you know, email your your employees after 5pm or whatever you there's this always around the clock sort of attitude and mentality that everybody feels like they have to be plugged into the whole system all the time, and then when they're not at work, looking for work emails, we're on online and social media, looking at, you know, the latest horrors unfolding on our feeds. And it's it is very difficult for somebody who you know, you know, wants to stay a employable and be informed and participate in the discourse, so to speak that. So, yeah, I'm not that there are not tools for fighting all of the above, but that's just kind of, you know, the manifestation of the immensity of that challenge.
Asher Miller
It's a huge challenge. Yeah, we were talking earlier. In some ways, it's like you're talking about quality, right? And if you think of quality as kind of a through line, through these things. It's the quality of the content, the products, of things that we that we buy or make in the world, and it's the quality of our lives. My smoke detector decided it wants to be part of this conversation. We've been promised that technology will improve our lives, right in In fact, in, in some ways, it has, but, but in terms of the quality of the things that we're engaging with, you know, there's that, that concept of, in should a vacation, you know, if we could sort of see these things as connected, you know, the quality of our relationships with one another being arbitrated now by tech companies, you know, the quality of the products that we're buying, the content that we're consuming, whatever just being worsened. And we actually try to support people who are creative and create original things, and however, you know, have meaningful, you know, relationships with one another. Maybe there's a way of seeing those things as connected, and there being a larger form of resistance of tech, I don't know that's 100%
Brian Merchant
Yeah, no. I mean, it can sound, I mean that I think, you know, goes some distance towards, you know, articulating how, in what, how bad things are, in what degree of trouble we are that it can sound utopian to, you know, hope for some sort of like productive or pleasant, or, you know, contemplative, my God, imagine it's sort of space online available to us where, you know, we can use these things for good. Yeah, and it, but I also believe that, you know, it's that that is not only possible but necessary. You know, all of these hurdles that we face. You know, from the creep of authoritarianism in our politics to climate change and fight and sort of writing the ship to best we can to avert the climate crisis, things like that, like we absolutely need spaces, networks that aren't corrupted, that aren't, you know, owned by the richest men in the world, that can whose algorithms can be tweaked to skew towards their aims, we need spaces, you know, that can facilitate greater connection, greater solidarity, greater mutual support. So, yeah, I mean, I do, and I do again, it's a battle, it's a fight. And one way to do it is to, you know, is, is the Lina Khan approach? I. FTC Commissioner Lena Khan, former who, you know, tried to break up these companies. You know, there are, you know, building alternatives is an important part of the step. So you have, you know, the federated spaces online where billionaires can't see, sink their claws into them. But we need a politics of, you know, online life and a politics of technology that are quite radically different than the one that we've sort of been sort of that that's been thrust upon us.
Asher Miller
You mentioned climate and one of the one of the things we do a lot on this podcast is critique what we view as false techno solutions to the climate crisis and other environmental challenges. We have a good example. This is an episode we did. I think it's episode 72 sucking CO two and electrifying everything. The climate movement's desperate dependence on tenuous technologies. Because there's, you know, a great recent example of this which drove me nuts. I mean, part of the reason we call this podcast crazy town is because we feel like we're crazy, because the world is actually functioning in a crazy way. And they're like these, these exuberant headlines about how climate scientists are embracing AI because it helps them model the climate unraveling that AI is actually helping to exacerbate. You know, it's like this insane sort of thing, yeah, just curious if you know what your views on that, if you feel like this is kind of part of the new, new sort of lead movement, or not, in terms of thinking of these techno solutions.
Brian Merchant
Well, certainly, I think that there, for one thing, I think that there's kind of, there's a certainly a strain of lead ism that is alive in, say, you know, Andreas Malm s How to Blow up a Pipeline, right? We're challenging the infrastructure of fossil fuels. So that, to me, is also here's like something that's toxic to social stability, the environment, and perhaps even necessary to remove from the sort of greater portfolio of our society. So you that that sort of rejection of infrastructure and a willing to sort of dismantle it, if you know, if peaceful solutions don't, don't, don't, don't work, and I think in an argument can be made that we're in a time of crisis, but, but yeah, to your point, I also think that you know that rejecting text techno solutionism is absolutely a crucial sort of part of moving forward to finding real, robust solutions. I mean, to me, it's always like we know what we have to do, more or less, right? We know, we know. I mean, the way, there are different options, there's different roads. You know, Malcolm Harris has a new book coming out, what's left, and he has, like, three different paths that I think that could, that progressive movements could take to get us to a more stable climate, but we are not going to get, like, you know, anything beamed down from the from the heavens, from event, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that is going to solve everything. I've been also at this long enough I covered climate tech to, especially in my earlier days, and clean energy and, and, yeah, like, it would be, that would be great. That would be great if there was a startup from Sunnyvale that just like found the silver bullet. But no, it's a question of politics, and these technologies can do real damage in obscuring that fact. I think all this talk about, oh, we need AI, because it's going to solve the climate crisis, right? And it's like, yeah, you press a button and say, solve the AI, I mean, press a button on the, you know, on the AI system, and say, solve the climate crisis. And it says, here's the 10 steps, I bet it will give you, you know, just like what you know, any sort of, you know, politician or leader in the green
Asher Miller
It won't say, Stop trying to grow the economy, you know, and that's based on consumerism. It probably won't tell you that. I don't know.
Brian Merchant
I don't you know, I don't know. Honestly, sometimes you're surprised what it says, because it just, sometimes it s just messed up. But so I wrote a piece, yeah, the AI is not going to solve the climate crisis. It's not like what we need is political will, and because there's no technological solution that, no high tech, you know, silver bullet, that it can just converge upon then, then it's gonna, you know, say, like, oh, well, you need to reduce emissions by this. Yeah, we know that, right. Like, the question is, is how to, like, pry the, again, that fossil fuel infrastructure, you know, out of the oil industry's hands and out of the protectionism of of Texas GOP politicians and so on and so forth. And that the other thing that I'll say is that there is a danger, I think, even entertaining some of these, the AI. It's not that AI can't do. Do interesting things, or like, maybe the AI can tell you a way to more efficiently position your solar panels on your roof or whatever. Maybe it can do little, but guess what? It's also, it's also being sold as a as a program to help oil companies find the most efficient places to drill on. And it's also an immensely energy intensive technology itself. And so there's, there's a great phrase Louis Mumford, the social, yeah, you know, Lewis Mumford, he, he called, sort of these, sort of, you could almost call them ancillary, you know, because the and promises of technology not, you know, open AI isn't developing AI services and and technologies to try to fight climate change. It's, it's developing the technology to make its founders incredibly wealthy and to please its board, right? So these little things that they come up with and say, like, oh, you know, like, this can be really, you know, useful in furthering climate science, or maybe it can help us to analyze CO two samples a little bit faster, or look back at the tree ring data, so we have some. So maybe there are and not. It's not that those aren't good uses, or wouldn't be good uses of AI. It's that they they offer what, what Mumford calls sort of a mega technic bribe, or a magnificent bribe, right? It's just like, totally, here's a neat little here's a here's a cool thing, like, get on board with this technology, because it can do this over here, even if it's 2% of what the use case of the of the full technology is 98% of the time it's just churning out, you know, marketing copy for a Fortune 500 firm at the expense of, God knows how much water and energy per because the compute costs keep rising. So we have these little things that they throw us, these little bones to sort of justify its broader existence. And look again, it comes back down to the Luddites and their opposition. If we had a system where we could democratize this technology in a meaningful way, not in the Silicon Valley marketing way, where we were actually empowered over its use, and maybe people got to, you know, have some real input or vote on how it's used, maybe we would have a super computer doing AI that could be used for climate tools, not nine of them, being developed by the biggest Silicon Valley firms simultaneously to try to get bigger and faster and expanding their environmental footprint massively in the process, and being used to do things like, you know, automate labor and to try to, you know, put artists out of work. And, you know, instead, by all means, let's have the supercomputer that, you know, crunches climate scientists calculations for them. That would be great. It's not the case that that is like in any way, the primary, or even, you know, sort of a meaningful sliver of how AI is being used. It's being used by power, against us, against the public.
Asher Miller
You reference how difficult it is to sort of step out of the techno sphere, you know. And in fact, it can be counterproductive, you know, for employment, for other things, you know, keeping up on the news, being connected to people. But on some level, there is a complicity, I think we all feel once you know, in terms of our interaction with this stuff, we've, we've wrestled with this, like, do we use AI for anything? You know? Do we use because we feel like it's part of the we're contributing to this, this runaway train, or whatever? What would you say? And this is, let's, let's make this a final question. What would you say? Is your advice to folks you know, kind of wrestling with this in terms of how to how to be, or where to put energy, in terms of either supporting a Neo Luddite movement, or just in terms of their own relationship with this technology.
Brian Merchant
Yeah, so you know, I as a as a tech writer, and as somebody who tries to stay abreast of the most recent developments, like I do, I see what AI can do. I test it out. Apart from that, I don't use it at all for a number of reasons. I do think there are a host of ethical issues with using it, especially to generate images or to you know, or if you're going to use it as something, you know that you're going to put the output into the world, then you just have to be wary that you are eroding the labor market for these for people who are trying to make a living, you know, writing and selling images, and that's sort of their bread and butter. So that's one part of it. I don't think it was also ethically obtained most of these systems, the inputs. And I just don't, honestly, I just don't find it useful. I don't, I mean, there are some things that it can do that you know, that it can automate, that are, you know, that I could see the use in them. But like, I just, you know, I maybe I'm not enough of a CEO mindset, but I don't need my emails summarized for me. I would rather see. Sources. When I search for something, I want to see annotations. I want to see like what I'm looking at. I don't want it buried in sort of the undisclosed biases of an AI system, where, who knows how it came up, really, you know, the system. So, yeah, so I do think it's perfectly possible to abstain from most AI uses and not miss a beat. Unlike something, you know, like, like, like email or social media, to some extent, it's a little bit harder too. But no, you're absolutely right, though. I do want to say that like you do, we do have to start sort of building power, building solidarity for, sort of for folks who do want an off ramp. And we have to sort of start imagining more aggressively what those might be. And so that'll like, sort of segue into the second part of my answer, which is that start organizing formally or informally is the very best thing that you could do. We, you know, look, we've got, we have, we have real life authoritarianism coming down the pike right now in Washington. You know, a lot of people are waking up to it, and it is, it is alarming, but we the best way that we can sort of start hedging against that is just, you know, building solidarity on a community level, and, you know, just making sure that we at least have some level of power in community, in neighborhoods and coworkers. And you know, you can talk about things like AI on one level, and if your workplace is trying to get you to use AI, then talk to your colleagues like raise questions. Everybody has them. Almost everybody has them, management. And it can be a real sort of catalyst for getting people worked up and fighting back. Because, again, another part of this thing is, you look at what Elon Musk is doing with Doge. They're using the ethos of AI as an excuse to gut the federal government. They're saying, we're cutting out the waste here, and that's means they're firing people with institutional knowledge, and they're coming in, and they're quite literally having people who remain build chat bots. They're introducing their own chat bots, their own AI, saying we can. They're just working on this very half assed assumption that they can replace a lot of this work, this deep institutional knowledge, with AI. And it's the same. It's a reflection of what's happening in sanity, of that insanity that's happening in workplaces, no matter if you're it's a federal workplace or a private one where the manager is saying, like, oh, we can, you know, we'll find a way to use this, you know, this the CTO told me to find a way to use AI to, you know, cut labor costs 25% so we're just going to do it. And this has been happening, you know, across the country to, again, varying degrees of success. But it is this very top down, very sort of authoritarian, principled move, and I think that's embodied in the current formation of AI and finding ways to oppose it has never been more urgent or more necessary.
Asher Miller
Well, said. Yeah, this could be, this could be the tip of the spear, on some level, could be one of them, right, to get organized. And I think we're going to need as many people coordinated as possible, especially as you said, on the local level or on the job. So Brian, thank you for taking the time to join me in Crazy Town. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate all the writing that you're doing, explorations on technology, and thank you for helping bring back the term Luddite as something to be proud of, not a disparagement.
Brian Merchant
Yeah, it's my pleasure, and I wrote a piece through the Atlantic about the new Luddites that came out last year, in which you can find some of the people who are working, making the most noise. So it is, you know, it is, it is a community. I don't know that we've embraced New Luddites yet. Maybe we just, I think we should get more people on board. But I do think it's the way you got to fight back against this stuff.
Asher Miller
Maybe we get to make a shirt. We'll get a real artist to make it for us.
Brian Merchant
Asher Miller
Real quality material.
Brian Merchant
I have one that says the Luddites were right. Maybe I'll throw it together.
Asher Miller
All right. Thanks, Brian, take care.
Melody Allison
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app, or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much-needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.
Asher Miller
Crazy Town, duh duh duh duh, Crazy Town...
