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

[Mark Thibodeau]

You're a big man, Monte.

Jerky

On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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