Well, Pynchon seems to have

[Joseph Tracy]

Started to read Eddins's Gnostic Pynchon and came across this passage in the introduction:

> … Finally, in Gravity's Rainbow, this conspiracy draws a substantial portion of its strength from scientism. In effect the worship of scientific method and its attendant axia of control( or Control) through technology. Pynchon makes it clear that scientism is descended from Puritanism, which postulated a divine mandate for the exploitation of earth; and that both find a desirable antithesis in religions such as that of the African Hereros, who consecrated the natural order and the symbiotic notion of cyclical return.     It is from this consecration, augmented ironically by scientific sophistication, that  Pynchon draws the normative construct I call Orphic Naturalism a counterreligion to the worship of mechanism, power and -ultimately-death.
> 						pg. 5 Introduction The Gnostic Pynchon, Dwight Eddins




> He( TRP) writes better than anyone else about the intersections of science and technology with our lowest *and* highest inclinations. ( Monte D)

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.   Monte D

These are not really stand alone arguments but an ad hominem straw dog of loaded words - simplistic, ill-informed, anxious - and far more reliant on insult than reason. The idea that Pynchon does not concern himself throughout his writing with forces out of control and that the presumptions of colonialism, Calvinism, progress, science, and technology will be a surprise to many Pynchon writers and critics. As for anxiety about such forces, considering the long history of ravages such forces have unleashed, anxiety is not necessarily a debilitating response but may be quite logical as a warning. 

As for agency in regard to collective enterprises, that is a difficult question. I think most of the posts have acknowledged that and show a clear sense of the complexity of the issue. To be honest it seems no more helplful to deny agency to forces like science or religious literalism than to oversimplify that agency and deny human responsibility for killing folks or helping them  in the name of God or scientific progress. 
         Here Monte chose a good quote to illustrate that notion:
“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…”  GR

But in my own posts or in reading what Alice is writing I don't see a desire to evade responsibility at all, and this is not a definitive and final Pynchon statement on the topic but a character engaged in the same argument we are having.

What the novels argue is that humans are scientific beings, technological beings, engineers by nature. Our scientific nature, like our spiritual nature, like our aesthetic nature .... is part of everything we do. Science  flows from us in all we do, defining the world, transforming it. Pynchon was born into what has been called the golden age of engineer, a dynamic period that advanced a dynamic view of nature. Nature knows transformation, not extinction, and nature is our experience, science, our application. We can not, to quote one of those big men of letters, distinguish the science from our application of it. A tool, such as a hammer, to quote another big man of letters, has our human purpose in it.  A dynamic world, not a fixed world, is malleable, is not absolute, is our experience of it, thus all mystery retreats. Unless we experience what we can't explain, cannot analyze. Unless we experience Grace.  ( Alice W)

In several ways this  thought from Alice brings us back to the first quote above by Monte which seems to want to make a separation between science and technology on one side and human inclinations, high or low on the other. The thing is that not only is science an extension of human nature, but we also  tend to see it as an extension of the universe( its rules, properties, interactions)  into our consciousness, and we can easily ascribe to our scientific perceptions a Godlike unfolding of ultimate truth even when those perceptions  reach the limits of experimental knowledge and begin, via some authority( math, physics equations), to be  couched in the same kind of tautological pattern as religious truths.  I think that danger was a large part of what inspired the original news article that sparked the discussion. The truth is that scientific orthodoxy is as elusive as theological agreement and the points of disagreement tend to release cats and worms enough to reconfigure the known universe.

Parmenides vs.Hawking  and the return of the aether( The beginning meets the end in the final showdown-part 1) The (scientific/scientism/mechanistic) proposition about the nature of reality of all coming  from nothing and returning to nothing( Hawking) vs. Parmenides insight that there is no nothing. No absolute vacuum, no time. Seems like a choice between a meaningless temporal illusion and a meaningful temporal illusion which theoretically points to a state of enlightened integration. 

 My own sense is that in GR Pynchon leaned toward Hawking with a rainbow escape clause and in ATD  he leans toward Parmenides with a history of hell escape clause. 

As far as whether the Luddite essay could be seen as a call to all Luddites to man the barricades. May not be as silly as it sounds. The real question here is the quality and human consequences of technological transitions. Without resistance they can be cruel to the point of self destructive madness ( GR).  Right now there is a huge effort to induce passivity regarding the effects of carbon use and nuclear technology by promising  scientific , capitalist and technological solutions to problems generated by science, capitalism and technology. So far these solutions are entirely symbolic and have not in any measurable way slowed the devastations. The thing is there will be no particular satisfaction to be derived from having been correct as to whether the damage came from human nature, collective power structures, ideologies, or DR. Science. Remember he knows more than you do. He has a master's degree, in Science.