Luddites

[Paul Mackin]

> 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".



Putting it dialectically, the Internet creates both progress and
deterioration. The data revolution makes information and knowledge
available on a previously unheard of scale to virtually anyone who wants
it. Knowledge is power, which has the potential to be put into the
service of any lingering pockets of resistance to the Market that  might
still exist in our society. Some progressive social change might be
expected to result. On the other hand, the Internet greatly increases
the pleasures of the Consumer Society. We can now shop to our hearts
content in the comfort of our homes. We avoid maddening traffic jams,
tedious checkout lines, and myriad other annoyances. We are more content
than ever. Why change a thing?