“The engines he will have invented will
be beyond his strength to control…”
- Henry Adams, writing in 1862
Our responses to Gizmos evolution are all over the place.
They range from blind acceptance to healthy skepticism to outright rage at the machine. Most folks become whine connoisseurs, always aggravated. But for a smaller group, the world is going right to hell on a microchip. Like writers who think that Twitter ruined storytelling, teachers who say video games wreck knowledge, and daters who say the Web killed love.
I understand these modern Luddites very well; they are really preservationists. Their concern is that in our rush to the new, we will lose something essential to our human nature. Become less than what we are. It is a story heard from Eden to the Matrix.
The name Luddite, as everyone knows by now, was originally given to a group of textile workers in England in the 19th century. Led by a mysterious King Ludd, they were opposed to the mechanization of the textile industry and destroyed some of the new automated looms. A few of them were even executed as terrorists.
Their modern descendants have the luxury of a different time and place. The textile workers were desperately fighting for the economic survival of their families; the arguments against technology nowadays are more about mood than food. Perhaps we should distinguish modern silicon-bashers from their forebears by calling the current cranks neo-Luddites.
Or simply Neoluds.
One of the main concerns among the Luddites of the 1800s was that the new machinery was going to destroy the key industry of hand-crafted hosiery; the first of the new gizmos were automatic sock stitchers. Besides jobs, they felt that this kind of mechanization marked the end of diligence and personal responsibility. And the subsequent demise of humanity.
Of course, they were right in some ways.
Fine hosiery did become extinct and so tube socks came to rule the earth. But the gadgets did not kill off the socks, new lifestyles did. The world changed and priorities shifted. Goods became products, mass production changed fashions, and fine craft found new places to root. Did we lose something in the bargain? Perhaps. But not so much our humanity as a fancy pair of hand-made socks.
This kind of fretting is common among Neoluds. Like a crabby friend of mine who complains that ”word processing” makes writing too easy. The computer, he feels, makes it a matter of simply piling up ideas rather than weaving them together into a beautiful tapestry. Rewriting on a typewriter took sweat, which is the great lubricant of deliberation, he says. He also thinks of insert and delete keys as some sort of swindle. Scrolling through text is not reading, he claims, it is skimming.
But if that is true then why stop at computers?
Typewriters themselves surely ruined the resolution that went into handwritten manuscripts. Pencils encouraged ambivalence by making statements erasable. And writing itself must have destroyed the need for the keen memory that oral storytelling required. Come to think of it, why not turn the clock back to the grand old days of cuneiform and press wedges into clay blocks. Every word had to really mean something then.
Did computers change the literary craft? Of course they did. Writing in the age of the keyboard is punchier, more heated, less ruminative and distant. More personal and immediate but also more disposable. But is this the end of the great art of writing or simply another change of socks?
What really separates the Neoluds from the cautiously fascinated like me is their assumption that the familiar is necessarily better. Like most curmudgeons, they want to return the world to the way it was before they felt out of place in it. But not before that. The true danger of the new technology is not that it kills anything off but that it shakes things up. It threatens to turn old fogies into new learners and puts expertise at risk. It turns style on its head. This is all very unsettling to those of us who have comfortably settled in.
On the other hand, this contrary sensibility performs a vital service. We do not, after all, want to discard everything that works just to be modern. Every new diddlewitz ain’t progress. Neoluds remind us to think in human terms, to keep our human needs at the center of our concerns. That attitude forces us to ask not just how something works but how it works on us. Not just what is the software but what is the emotional wear…and tear. Not only what the thingy does but what it does for us as people. And those are good questions to keep in mind.
In the film The Right Stuff, the astronauts find out that the space capsule they will be orbiting in does not have a window. The engineers insist that they do not need one; it costs more to put one in, there is nothing much to see, and the astronauts are only passengers anyway. What the engineers fail to understand is that the astronauts do need a window and for a very simple reason...they are people and people need windows. Caught up in the technology, it is possible to lose sight.
The basic Neolud complaint is not that machines are windowless but that they are soulless. That computers are chipping away at our humanity, turning us into a race of isolated automatons. Cyberzombies and screen geeks. Visions of jacked-in crackpots run through their fantasies.
It is good to guard against this future but good not to get too nuts about it either. Once the dust settles on each new upheaval, we come out pretty much the way we always do. A complex species, ambitious and fearful, inventive and dumb-founded, hopelessly lost but always peering out the window in expectation.
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