Brian Merchant > Quotes

“If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“Social bonds were not easily broken; it was not easy to stare into the eyes of a friend and say, I am taking your job. (One benefit of machinery was that it could be used as a rhetorical tool as well, to muddy the moral clarity of the situation—a use it’s been put to by owners ever since. It’s the robots, not your boss, that’s coming to take away your job.)”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“The history of the Luddites—the real ones, not the pejorative figment of the entrepreneurial imagination—gives us a framework to evaluate the utility of technologies and their social impacts. Erasing that history collapses our thinking about how tech and automation affect our working lives—and the choices we have to address the disruption they bring.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“Those smarts would be crucial. “People thought that the keyboard we delivered wasn’t sophisticated, but in reality it was super-sophisticated,” Williamson says. “Because the touch region of each key was smaller than the minimum hit size. We had to write a bunch of predictive algorithms technology to think about the words you could possibly be typing, artificially increase the hit area of the next few keys that would correspond to”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“It’s the same story, time and again: a new technology that promises to alleviate work degrades it instead.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“[The year] 1812 opens with a gloom altogether so frigid and cheerless, that hope itself is almost lost and frozen in the prospect. —The Manchester Gazette, January 1, 1812”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“Uber’s chief innovation is not that its app summons a car to your location with a smartphone and a GPS signal. It is that it used this moderately novel configuration of technology to argue that the old rules did not apply whenever it brought its taxi business to a market that already had a regulated taxi code.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“According to a report in the New York Times, “the richest 0.1 percent of American households own 19.6 percent of the nation’s total wealth, up from 15.9 percent in 2005 and 7.4 percent in 1980. The richest 0.1 percent now have the same combined net worth as the bottom 85 percent.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“make that list, it has to be desirable almost universally.” Meanwhile,”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“Wireless technology remained the province of the state through most the 1950s, with one emerging exception: wealthy business folk. Top-tier mobile devices might seem expensive now, but they’re not even in the same league as the first private radio-communications systems, which literally cost as much as a house. The rich didn’t use radio to fight crime, of course. They used them to network their chauffeurs, allowing them to coordinate with their personal drivers, and for business.”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“Twitter, and Facebook—platforms that reorganized how we communicate,”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“In 2022, seven of the ten richest people in the world were tech billionaires.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“A team was sent over to Jobs’s house because the CEO had found that his Wi-Fi reception was nonexistent. The culprit? “It was this brick house with two-foot-thick walls,” Evan Doll recalls.”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“There was a problem, however: his battery kept catching fire. “There were some flammability issues,” Whittingham says. “We had several fires, mostly”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“The word automaton first appears in Western literature in Homer’s Iliad, where it’s used to describe the “self-moving and intelligent machines fabricated by Hephaestus,” the blacksmith god of technology, according to the Stanford folklorist and historian of ancient science Adrienne Mayor. Around 700 BCE, Homer wrote about Hephaestus’s various automated inventions, which included “a fleet of driverless three-wheeled carts that delivered nectar and ambrosia to the god’s banquets,” automatic gates, bellows that self-adjusted their trumpet blasts as needed, and a crew of artificially intelligent golden female androids that could anticipate the blacksmith god’s every need. And the Greeks were drawing on even older oral traditions.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“If we made the iPhone a millimeter thicker,” says Tony Fadell, the head of hardware for the first iPhone, “we could make it last twice as long.”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“No. Not Shang hi. Hang zoo.” Smog”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“Originally, Siri was more colorful—it dropped f-bombs, teased users more aggressively, had more of a bombastic personality.”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“Steve Jobs strode onstage at Macworld wearing his trademark black turtleneck, blue jeans, and white”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“The Luddites knew exactly who owned the machinery they destroyed. They saw that automation is not a faceless phenomenon that we must submit to. And they were right: Automation is, quite often and quite simply, a matter of the executive classes locating new ways to enrich themselves.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

“How did it become the one device we need above all? I”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“There wasn’t really time to kick your feet back on the desk and say, ‘This is going to be really fucking awesome one day.’ It was like, ‘Holy fuck, we’re fucked.’ Every time you turned around there was some just imminent demise of the program just lurking around the corner.” Making”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“The iPhone is not only the bestselling mobile phone but also the bestselling music player, the bestselling camera, the bestselling video screen and the bestselling computer of all time,”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“Jobs would soon pit the iPod team against a Mac software team to refine and produce a product that was more specifically phone-like. The herculean task of squeezing Apple’s acclaimed operating system into a handheld phone would take another two years to complete. Executives would clash; some would quit. Programmers would spend years of their lives coding around the clock to get the iPhone ready to launch, scrambling their social lives, their marriages, and sometimes their health in the process.”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“Where are. You from?” “California.”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“When I asked the iPhone’s architects what they thought its first must-use function was, Google Maps was probably the most frequent answer. And it was a fairly last-minute adoption; it took two iPhone software engineers, who had access to Google’s data as part of that long-forgotten early partnership, about three weeks to create the app that would forever change people’s relationship to navigating the world. Magnetometer”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“The first calls from an Apple phone were not, it turns out, made on the sleek touchscreen interface of the future but on a steampunk rotary dial.”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“So, according to Michaud’s calculations, producing a single iPhone requires mining 34 kilos of ore, 100 liters of water, and 20.5 grams of cyanide, per industry average. “That’s what’s shocking!” he”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“Most of these phones are likely headed to Taogao, the Chinese eBay, or eBay, the American eBay.”
― Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

“It’s difficult to definitively gauge the size of the gig or contract labor economy, but a 2018 Marist/NPR survey found that some 1 in 5 US workers participate in it.”
― Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech