Well, Pynchon seems to have

[alice wellintown]

You should read the essay again.
You missed the tone.
On Tuesday, June 4, 2013, Monte Davis wrote:

> 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 <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
> 'owner-pynchon-l at waste.org');> [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', '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
>
>
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