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The most pressing story in modern tech begins not in Silicon
Valley, Seattle, or even Shenzhen. It begins two hundred years ago
in rural England, when working men and women rose up en masse
rather than starve at the hands of the factory owners who were
using machines to erase and degrade their livelihoods. They
organized guerilla raids, smashed those machines, and embarked on
full-scale assaults against the wealthy machine owners. They won
the support of Lord Byron, inspired Mary Shelley, and enraged the
Prince Regent and his bloodthirsty government. Before it was over,
much blood would be spilled-of rich and poor, of the invisible and
of the powerful. This all-but-forgotten and deeply misunderstood
class struggle nearly brought 19th century England to its knees. We
live now in the second machine age, when similar fears that big
tech is dominating our lives and machines replacing human labour
run high. We worry that technology imperils millions of jobs,
robots are ousting workers from factories, and artificial
intelligence will soon remove drivers from cars. How will this all
reshape our economy and the way we live? And what can we do about
it? The answers lie in the story of our first machine age, when
mechanization first came to British factories at the beginning of
the industrial revolution. Intertwined with a lucid examination of
our current age, the story of the Luddites, the working-class
insurgency that took up arms against automation (at a time when it
was punishable by death to break a machine), Blood in the Machine
reaches through time and space to tell a story about how technology
changed our world-and how it's already changing our future.
The secret history of the invention that changed everything and
became the most profitable product in the world. Odds are that as
you read this, an iPhone is within reach. But before Steve Jobs
introduced us to 'the one device', as he called it, a mobile phone
was merely what you used to make calls on the go. How did the
iPhone transform our world and turn Apple into the most valuable
company ever? Veteran technology journalist Brian Merchant reveals
the inside story you won't hear from Cupertino - based on his
exclusive interviews with the engineers, inventors and developers
who guided every stage of the iPhone's creation. This deep dive
takes you from inside 1 Infinite Loop to nineteenth-century France
to WWII America, from the driest place on earth to a Kenyan pit of
toxic e-waste, and even deep inside Shenzhen's notorious 'suicide
factories'. It's a first-hand look at how the cutting-edge tech
that makes the world work - touch screens, motion trackers and even
AI - made its way into our pockets. The One Device is a road map
for design and engineering genius, an anthropology of the modern
age and an unprecedented view into one of the most secretive
companies in history. This is the untold account, ten years in the
making, of the device that changed everything.
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