Well, Pynchon seems to have

Tue Jun 4 15:42:44 CDT 2013

I did notice the ironic "Oboy," Alice. I also noticed what you seem to be
ignoring in your haste to prove that Pynchon is as bien-pensant as you:

"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."

".because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool
any of the people any of the time."

"It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us
devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed."

Nope, no ambiguity there, no complexity, no loose ends. Only what you knew
all along would be there: safe, familiar, comfortable anti-technology in a
compact, Alice's-mind-sized package.

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of alice wellintown
Sent: Tuesday, June 04, 2013 4:06 PM
To: pynchon -l
Subject: Re: Well, Pynchon seems to have

A good reading of that good Luddite phrase. It's irony seems to have flown
right over Monte's head. 

On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 3:40 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

Well said as usual...but I have always read the line about " artificial
intelligence, molecular biology and robotics ( as) something for all good
Luddites to look forward to"...as a statement  that THOSE things will be
more things Luddites will be resisting ( if they have the will)...

My best differing perspective resides in my short post about the whole (
possible) scientific age of modernity which Pynchon savages a lot......and
he goes deep enough to indict (with Empsonian ambiguity and a complex view
of we human beings' role) ways even the scientific method contributed to
that modern world view, in my opinion. 

Sent from my iPad

On Jun 4, 2013, at 11:49 AM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

No, we don't disagree. Of course Pynchon does ask very uncomfortable
questions about what we make of our technologies and vice versa. He does
show us people who impose on others, and embrace for themselves, a variety
of dehumanizations. But I don't see him reifying or ascribing agency to
science and technology; in fact,  when he seems to do so, it's almost always
a parodic setup to prove that in fact the agency remains with us:

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre,
all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated
instead by the needs of technology. I need my night's blood, my funding,
funding, ahh more, more.

            .Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument has
been iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the
younger Schwarzkommando especially), "All very well to talk about having a
monster by the tail, but do you think we'd've had the Rocket if someone,
some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't wanted to chuck a ton
of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead,
capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it'll make you feel less
responsible-but it puts you in with the neutered, brother."

As for the Luddite essay: NB that the title is a question, not an
exhortation ("Join me at the barricades, my fellow Luddites!") -- a hint,
perhaps, that he doesn't have a pat answer? NB how he emphasizes  that the
historical incidents labeled "Luddite" were  in fact good old "open-eyed
class war," directed *not* at a new technology but at machinery that had
been around for 200 years. NB that he's very explicitly ambivalent about
whether information technology, the dominant or at least highest-profile
technology of our own time, favors the Firm or the Counterforce (it yields
Wikileaks and Twitter flash mobs as well as Total Information Awareness). NB
that his projected convergence of "the curves of research and development in
artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics" is - surprise! --
not a coming Dark Age of techno-horror, but instead "certainly something for
all good Luddites to look forward to."

If people want to namecheck Pynchon as validator for a simplistic and
ill-informed anxiety about Science and Technology as cosmic forces somehow
independent of people with genitals, neuroses, politics, and ideologies, I
can't stop 'em: a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
Me, I like him for his complex and well-informed anxiety - *and* fascinated
attraction, *and* wonder, and all his other responses to science and
technology. 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Markekohut
Sent: Monday, June 03, 2013 6:15 PM
To: Monte Davis
Cc: pynchon -l
Subject: Re: Well, Pynchon seems to have

We don't disagree, I think.....complex he is fer sure....one reason I do
read and reread...

But I did write " some anti-technology and anti-science stuff".......key
qualifier for me here

Is " some"......part of that complexity.

Once again, few of his contemporary writers of fiction, near peers, alluded
to Ludditism

Favorably in a non-fiction piece, his own opinion,and I have pointed to some
perspectives

On math and science in Against the Day this last still-unfinished read.....

You're one of the best defenders of science on this list and really illumine
Parts where P

Shows his aware-love......

But the other side exists too, I aver.  

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