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. 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 labor run high. Intertwined with a lucid examination of our current age, the story of the Luddites, the working-class insurgency that took up arms against automation, this book eaches through time and space to tell a story about how technology changed our world—and how it's already changing our future.