🚀 go-pugleaf

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. 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."

   The above quote is from _Progress without People: In Defense of 
   Luddism_ by David F. Noble (Charles H. Kerr, 1993). The book is 
   mostly essays questioning what "progress" means and motives behind 
   the drive to automate. A key element of the book is a recasting of 
   the machine-wrecking actions at the beginning of the 19th century, 
   perpetrated in the name of mythical characters General (Ned) Ludd 
   and Captain Swing. The Luddites were not against machines or 
   "technology." They were against starving. The term "Luddite" as it 
   survives into the late 20th century allied with a simplistic total 
   anti-technology stance does those who originally bore the moniker 
   a misservice.

   _Progress without People_ also includes a summary of Noble's 
   important study of the development of numerical control machinery 
   under the aegis of the Air Force.

   Its a great book, even unto the appendices: Byron in the house of 
   lords against the death penalty for "machine-breaking," and 
   Norbert Weiner's late '40s warning to the UAW of the pending 
   problems for labor with the coming automation (and the terse 
   response). Write: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, P.O. Box 
   914, Chicago, Illinois 60690.

-- paul
-- 
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