Brian Merchant

The Rehab of an Insult

The word "Luddite" took two hundred years of abuse to become meaningless. It started as a battle cry. Ned Ludd - possibly fictional, certainly mythologized - was the English worker who put a hammer through a stocking frame sometime around 1779. By 1811, his name was being signed to letters threatening machine-owning factory bosses in the Midlands. Luddism was a coordinated, disciplined, politically sophisticated movement. It was also, eventually, crushed. The British government made frame-breaking a capital offense, sent in more troops to northern England than it had deployed against Napoleon in the Iberian Peninsula, and hanged the ringleaders.

What survived was not the movement but the slur. "Luddite" became the word you called someone who couldn't figure out the VCR. Silicon Valley loved it, because it allowed any criticism of technology adoption to be dismissed without engagement. Brian Merchant wrote 496 pages to explain why that was not an accident but a project.

The iPhone Book That Asked the Uncomfortable Questions

Before the Luddites, there was the iPhone. Merchant spent years interviewing the people behind the most profitable product in human history - not the ones who got famous doing it, but the ones who didn't. The geophysicist who helped figure out multi-touch. The materials scientists. The people who mined the minerals. The workers in Shenzhen. The One Device (2017) was structured like a detective story but read like an indictment - not of Apple specifically but of the way the technology industry transforms collective achievement into individual mythology.

The Financial Times shortlisted it for Business Book of the Year. It got translated into twelve languages. Echo Lake Entertainment optioned it for a television series. Merchant spent the next six years quietly working on something that would make the iPhone book look like a warm-up.

What the Automaton Project Got Right

In 2019, while at Gizmodo, Merchant launched a project called "Automaton" - a dedicated investigative beat covering AI's impact on workers and the workforce. At a moment when most tech coverage was still writing breathless profiles of AI startups, Automaton was tracking layoffs, wage suppression, and the gap between what companies claimed AI would do and what it was actually being used for: lowering labor costs. He was early.

His newsletter's "AI Killed My Job" series, launched years later, collects first-person accounts from translators, interpreters, therapists, video game localizers, and tech workers who watched AI absorb their work. Not the abstract worry about AI taking jobs - the specific, documented moment when a specific human being lost theirs to a specific executive decision.

The LA Times Chapter

The Los Angeles Times brought him in as Technology Columnist in January 2023. He wrote about automation, AI governance, labor, and power for their Business section. He was also laid off in January 2024, part of a wave of cuts that hit the paper hard. He said publicly that the experience had "broken him down." He also said his readers, friends, and colleagues had helped put him back together.

That honesty - about the economics of journalism, about his own emotional state - is part of what makes the newsletter work. He is not performing objectivity. He has a position. He argues it with evidence. His subscribers, most of whom have watched media companies do to journalists exactly what factory owners did to Luddites, find it clarifying.

The AI Now Reports

As Journalist in Residence at the AI Now Institute, Merchant has produced some of the most rigorous critical AI analysis published anywhere. His December 2024 report investigated AGI - artificial general intelligence - as a narrative tool, documenting how "a story of a rising AI that will replace humans replaced the need for an actual business model" at OpenAI. His 2025 Artificial Power landscape report argued that today's AI is "entrenching power for big tech and the oligarch class, speeding deregulation, dislodging human expertise and threatening workers."

The line he keeps returning to: "Today's AI isn't just being used by us, it's being used on us." He has a gift for compression that most policy researchers don't.

Going Independent

In February 2025, Brian Merchant went fully independent. The newsletter became his primary operation. He has been candid about the financial anxiety of that move - "pretty anxious about the economics and the future of the platform in general" - while also being clear that independence has not limited his reach or the regard for his work. If anything, freed from a masthead, the writing has gotten sharper.

He covers AI policy, labor fights, worker testimonies, and the occasional historical deep dive that makes you realize the fight over who controls powerful technology is older than the internet, older than the industrial revolution, and likely to outlast whatever comes next. He is, in the best sense, a Luddite. He knows exactly what the machines do. He just refuses to pretend the people running them are neutral.

The Claire Evans Detail

In 2014, Merchant co-founded TERRAFORM, a speculative fiction outlet at Motherboard, with Claire L. Evans. Evans is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT. The two later co-edited Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn (2022), published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The list of contributors - Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Jeff VanderMeer, Ellen Ullman, Omar El Akkad - reads like a who's who of people thinking seriously about technology and its discontents. This is the piece of Merchant's biography that most surprises people who know him only from his hard-nosed tech journalism. He is also, quietly, a literary person with a wide range.

What He Thinks You Should Understand

The Luddites lost. Merchant is clear about that. The workers who smashed the frames were hanged or transported to Australia. The factory owners won. The consolidation of wealth and power that followed the Industrial Revolution is part of the documented historical record. What he argues is that this outcome was not inevitable - it was chosen, by powerful people with identifiable interests. He argues the same is true of the AI moment we are currently inside.

"We urgently need to reclaim public power over the future trajectory of AI," he wrote in 2025. He means this practically, not rhetorically. Policy, regulation, labor organizing, journalism that tells workers their experiences are real and their anger is legitimate. The newsletter is part of that project. So are the books. So, in his telling, are you.