Technology: making humanist arguments almost irrelevant

[alice wellintown]

How, Monte, do you square this passage from Pynchon's Foreword to 1984,
published about 10 years ago, with the reading that you posted? In the
Luddite essay, published around 1984, P argues the same. But the irony
fooled you. But here, there is no irony. Re-read the Luddite essay. Pay
close attention to the tone. That is, Pynchon's attitude. He is not an
apologist for technology. He is not advocating balance. Cowart, one of the
best readers of Pynchon, is simply wrong about this. Isn't he?




On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 4:48 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:

> What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of course, making
> humanist arguments almost irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too
> distracted by the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in
> Winston Smith's era. In "our" 1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip
> was less than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the
> wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most notably the internet, a
> development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old
> 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about.
> from the Foreword to 1984
>
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