NP's "is it ok to be a luddite?"

[Monte Davis]

Who's the sloppy reader now? Mea maxima culpa. Second time through, I
notice that Auerbach *does* make the IMO crucial distinction, and links to
this excellent piece on the historical Luddites.

  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/>

On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Auerbach is usually very good, but here --yet again -- we have Pynchon
> dragged in as saying "the Luddites were all about machines and technology."
> As I noted here last winter:
>
> ***
> Re Christy Burns' "Postmodern Historiography" (and looking forward to
> Mason's recollections of weavers vs, clothiers in the Golden Valley, 207
> passim)
>
> Once again, in Burns' note 2, we see the Luddites' activities described
> as "the vehement workers' rebellion against the advance of machinery..."
> along with a reference to David Cowart, who (in TP and the Dark Passages of
> History) describes Pynchon's 1984 essay "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?" as
> "a meditation on distrust of technology."
>
> And once again I wonder why, if  that's really what the essay says the
> Luddites were about in 1811-1816, Pynchon would clutter its exposition
> with distractions such as
>
> "...much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had already long
> been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle
> Ages..."
>
> "whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged - this had been going on,
> sez the Encyclopedia Britannica, since about 1710..."
>
> ",,,the target even of the original assault [Ned Lud's] of 1779, like
> many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of
> technology. The stocking-frame had been around since 1589... [and] continued
> to be the only mechanical means of knitting for hundreds of years... And
> Ned Lud's anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly."
>
> "The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had
> been putting people out of work for well over two centuries."
>
> Golly, those Luddites must have been awfully stupid not to have noticed
> "the advance of machinery" for so long. Or maybe the Luddites' activities
> were not what Burns, Cowart, C.P. Snow, and so many others project upon
> them, but exactly what Pynchon calls them:
>
> "They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of
> men who did not work, only owned and hired... [they were] trade unionists
> ahead of their time... It was open-eyed class war."
>
> ***
>
> IOW,  the Luddite disturbances were actually about a concentration of
> capital arising from changing markets and business models: where previously
> a lot of small local clothiers had dealt with a few weavers each, now a few
> large clothiers -- not neighbors, but increasingly in far-off cities -- had
> much more concentrated power over (and systematically lowered the rates of)
> all the weavers in a district. The Luddites smashed machinery *not* because
> it was new, *not* because it was in and of itself putting them out of work,
> but because it was what they could reach of the bosses' assets.
>
> I recognize that it's much too late to change the consensus that "Luddite
> = anti-technology,", but given that TRP was at pains to show that he *did*
> understand what the Luddites were about, it annoys me to see him -- and
> sloppy readings of that essay -- enlisted in the general misunderstanding.
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 9:49 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/09/luddism_today_there_s_an_important_place_for_it_really.single.html
>>
>
>
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