Is it OK to be anachronistic?

[Eric Rosenbloom]

jbor wrote:
> 
> "Edward Ludd was framed":
> 
> http://www.fastlink.com.au/subscrib/hit/smash.htm
> 
>     It is important to remember that the target even of Ned's original
>     assault of l779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was
>     not a new piece of technology.

Quite right. It was the shift of control of the technology from the
small workshops to the centralized factory, the shift of work from
home-based artisans to wage slaves.

>     This new band of deconstructivists is being primed and pushed in part by
>     radical historians, authors, and journalists who dislike a particular
>     view of technology. One such critic, Kirkpatrick Sale, has written such
>     books as _Rebels Against the Future_ and demonstrates his hatred for the
>     current technology by doing public demonstration of computer smashing.
>     His views are not like the old Luddites at all, other than the fact that
>     they both broke machines. Sale argues that the machines are "destructive
>     and evil". Much of that point of view is just wrong.

Kirkpatrick Sale's book makes it quite clear that it was not the
technology but the social and economic changes that the Luddites rose up
against. They smashed the machines when they were no longer theirs.
Sale's antics represent an application of what he has taken from his
study of the Luddites, but his book is not colored by it (except in the
cover hype). In the book, he takes a balanced view, concluding that to
follow the example of the Luddites is to question new technology as to
its effects on our lives: Is it taking away as much (or more, or
something more valuable) than what it gives?

>     The stocking-frame had been around since 1589. The knitting machines
>     which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people
>     out of work for well over two centuries.

The industrial revolution in England is generally considered to have
occurred from 1780 to 1830. Its concentration of economic power and
commitment to ever-increasing productivity brought much more disruptive
change to the Midlands. To eat (and barely yet) now meant leaving the
village for the company town.

Yep,
Eric R



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