Luddites

[Joseph Tracy]

Paul Nightingale writes:
Referring to Eisenhower's speech about the military-industrial complex
(surely part of the context for "Togetherness"), the essay suggests
that, "because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less
possible to fool any of the people any of the time". Given the
discussion of computer technology elsewhere (eg the Stone Junction
Intro, the 1984 Foreword) we might pay a little attention to the way
Pynchon's writing deals with such problems at different times, rather
than assuming he has one set of ideas that are recycled time and again:
there is a degree of ambivalence (as with his comments, passim, on TV;
here, "the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery") that
is central to resistance theory. There is, for example, no contradiction
whatsoever between the comment cited above ("because of the data
revolution" etc) and the Foreword's reference, twenty years on, to the
Internet "promis[ing] social control on a scale those quaint old
twentieth-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream
about".

I agree that there is no meaningful contradiction here, and P kinda spoofs the overenthusiastic sales pitch of the internet common in the 80s  extending it to the mystical reconciliation of the Luddites and technocrats.

If this is so, Luddites may at last have come to stand on common ground with their Snovian adversaries, the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed to have the "future in their bones." It may be only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer's ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk -- realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.

P balances this a few lines later in the slightly ominous tone of his prophecy of a  an  actualized modern Prometeus
"If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come -- you heard it here first -- when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long"

What is scary is the inherent dual aspet of the internet and digital communication. What is a forum for the fast and free dispersal of infomation is open for abuse to the prying eye of the Industrial military Police. Witness the shutdown of  Indymedia news servers with no answer as to who seized their hard drives. Witness how the neocons tested the Total Information Awareness  plan soon after 911. 

 These creeps know how to go exactly as far as the American public allows and then some.  What the resistance to empire cannot  seem at present  to cope with  is the seemingly complete reliability of the 3 day attention span of the average american voter. Wounds like  911, Enron, Americans beheaded, OJ have a longer shelf life but can be managed to advantage.

Still P is enough of a realist to know,  as we all know , that technology and some form of Capitalism is here for a while. I am next  going to post an exerpt of a Wendell Berry essay which touches on Luddites and is couched in arguments for alternative economic models.
Joseph Tracy
brook7 at earthlink.net
Why Wait? Move to EarthLink.
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