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

[Mark Kohut]

Technology doesn’t dehumanize us; it’s the knowledge behind it that
does. Fighting the machine, then, is fighting a vision of the future
in which the human is the machine.

On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 7:01 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Auerbach makes judicious use of Pynchon's historical definition of Luddism,
> but his essay is not focused on the history, or Pynchon definition, but on
> what Pynchon, in his Sloth essay, speculates about:
>
> Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems
> increasingly to define us -- technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow,
> despite technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our heads in
> virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable
> fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth's good old
> days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains
> of the Acedia Squad.
>
>
> 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/
>>
>> 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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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l