🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <RLM.94Jun8062500@helen.surfcty.com> rlm@helen.surfcty.com (Robert L. McMillin) writes:
>On 07 Jun 1994 11:25:05 PST, pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis) said:

(quote about luddism and the industrial revolution from a book by Noble)

>Ah, yes, let's turn in our computers because using them has social
>implications.  Nothing doing.  From medicine to automobiles to banking
>to manufacturing, computers have taken the drudgery out of lots of
>operations and made possible things *impossible* before.  Bankers'
>hours were *necessary* once upon a time: how else would you record the
>day's transactions but by staying closed part of the day?  Now, of
>course, we can get money 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  Computers
>make this Net possible (an ironic fact you hardly mention).  E-mail
>itself is an empowering idea that flattens the militaristic
>heirarchies inside companies, gutting redundant middle management
>layers, and giving employees the ability to take charge of their roles
>within a company.  It is hardly the tool of the oppressor.

Did you bother to notice where I was posting from ? cs.washington.edu
is hardly a denizen of rampant luddism. I've been hacking systems
software since I was in college, and I continue to earn my living
doing playing with leading edge parallel computer systems. 

As usual with technological optimists, however, you're all too eager
to cite the benefits of computers (which for the most part are
undeniable), and all too eager to forget the rather harder task of
assessing the downside as well. You overstate the positive impacts too
- all this egalitarian stuff about email empowering employees, when
for the vast majority of computer keyboard users, computers are used
for monitoring their work. You also appear keen to forgo any moral
analysis of the kind of society that bankers hours versus ATM's tend
to foster. Perhaps you've never travelled through a country in which
the afternoon siesta continues to dominate the pace of life, and thus
never had the chance to muse on how some of the benefits of some kinds
of lifestyles might not be like lego pieces - you can't mix and match,
only choose the whole kit-and-caboodle. Whatever. More on this will be
published in a long work I'm writing for the WWW right now.


>> hybrid rather than pure; compromising rather than clean;    | Militant Agnostic
>> distorted rather than straightforward; ambiguous rather than| I Don't Know
>> articulated; both-and rather than either-or; the difficult  |   and You Don't
>> unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. |   Know Either
>
>                                                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>The hallmark of the fascist is that he concludes the universe's
>unknowability, and therefore all actions are equally moral... ah, but
>the universe *is* knowable, and not all actions are moral.

The hallmark of the fascist is that he no sense of humor. If the Great
Randi's humourous button on agnosticism gets you this fired up, heaven
knows what a polemic from Wendell Berry or Gene Logsdon would do.

-- p
-- 
hybrid rather than pure; compromising rather than clean;    | Militant Agnostic
distorted rather than straightforward; ambiguous rather than| I Don't Know
articulated; both-and rather than either-or; the difficult  |   and You Don't
unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. |   Know Either