🚀 go-pugleaf

On 07 Jun 1994 11:25:05 PST, pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis) said:

> In article <RLM.94Jun5223150@helen.surfcty.com> rlm@helen.surfcty.com (Robert L. McMillin) writes:
>> On 04 Jun 1994 03:12:19 PST, jpietras@netcom.com (Joseph C. Pietras) said:
>>> 2) I do not want my original idea to be lost in a debate
>>> over whether I am a Luddite. (Thou I must confess I
>>> don't know what a Luddite is - really I don't, I assume
>>> someone with passionate believes about the environment). 
>> 
>> A Luddite is a person who wants to destroy technology out of massive
>> paranoia.  Their brethren read and believe such periodicals as the
>> {UFO Journal} and even the {Weekly World News}.

> Oh, such ignorance.

... as you are about to display is shocking.

> Here's a better explanation. Perhaps you could read a new book, or
> two:

>    "'Everyone believes the United States is in the midst of an 
>    economic transformation on the order of the Industrial 
>    Revolution,' _Business Week_ noted recently. But this fashionable 
>    analogy between today's second and yesterday's first Industrial 
>    Revolution is only half complete: the catastrophe has been left 
>    out. The prospect of another epoch-making historical leap thus 
>    generates simple-minded delight among those managers who seek to 
>    enlarge their authority at the expense of workers; among those 
>    equipment vendors whose high-tech hype enchants the unsuspecting; 
>    among those manchild technical enthusiasts who are encouraged to 
>    indulge their socially irresponsible fantasies at public expense; 
>    among those system-building militarists who imagine security 
>    through strength through silicon; among those trade unionists who 
>    remain handicapped by the hallucinogenic homilies of technological 
>    progress; and among those ambitiously neoprogressive politicians 
>    whose rosy rhetoric belies their ignorance of that first 'great 
>    transformation' -- 'a world turned upside down,' contemporaries 
>    soberly described it -- and the mass insurrection that flowed in 
>    its wake. For a more complete analogy would shake the spirit not 
>    stir it, and give thoughtful people pause. It has been forgotten 
>    in the present paeans to progress that the earlier episode was 
>    stained in blood as well as grease and that it engendered not only 
>    passive immiseration but active rebellion."

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.

> 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.
-- 
Robert L. McMillin  | rlm@helen.surfcty.com | Netcom: rlm@netcom.com
Surf City Software  | Purveying superior SCSI backup/utilities for the Mac
	      Contact chris@surfcty.com for sales info.
      I don't speak for Surf City, and they don't speak for me.