How liberty thrives

The tragedy and possibility of the Luddites

Peterloo, 1819

FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC, I reviewed Brian Merchant’s new book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, an attempt to compare the Luddite campaign of machinebreaking to modern movements rebelling against the rise of new technologies:

The artist J.M.W. Turner saw it too, this passing, in his innumerable sketches of h…