Against Technology

From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism

Steven E. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135522391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses the question of what it might mean today to be a Luddite--that is, to take a stand against technology. Steven Jones here explains the history of the Luddites, British textile works who, from around 1811, proclaimed themselves followers of "Ned Ludd" and smashed machinery they saw as threatening their trade. Against Technology is not a history of the Luddites, but a history of an idea: how the activities of a group of British workers in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire came to stand for a global anti-technology philosophy, and how an anonymous collective movement came to be identified with an individualistic personal conviction. Angry textile workers in the early nineteenth century became romantic symbols of a desire for a simple life--certainly not the original goal of the actions for which they became famous. Against Technology is, in other words, a book about representations, about the image and the myth of the Luddites and how that myth was transformed over time into modern neo-Luddism.

CHAPTER 1
THE BOOM, THE BUST, AND NEO-LUDDITES IN THE 1990S

It is universally acknowledged that we live in the most technological age in history — because, it is widely believed, technology has become universal. Embodied in the Internet and bound up with the system of global capital, technology is now everywhere from San Jose to Tokyo, Bangalore to Helsinki, London to New York. How is it possible in the face of such an unprecedented and ubiquitous force to be “against” technology? What does it mean even to imagine such a position, to call yourself a Luddite at this late date in the history of technological society?

For one thing, it means you’re a neo-Luddite, someone whose choice of philosophy or lifestyle is a deliberately symbolic act, a back-formation based on the received idea of a historical labor movement. This book is about that process — the making of modern neo-Luddism out of the historical legacy of the Luddites. It begins with the original British Luddites of 1811 to 1816, who created a myth (of Ned Ludd) and then became themselves mythologized, ultimately inspiring a very different modern phenomenon, the philosophy of neo-Luddism, an idea that has flourished in America in particular. The differences between the original Luddites and today’s neo-Luddism are greater than most neo-Luddites have acknowledged, and understanding those differences is crucial if we are to understand our complicated relationship to technology. My purpose is to trace the process of historical reception and distortion by which the Luddites — whose community-based actions targeted unfair labor practices — became neo-Luddism, a personal philosophy pitted against technology as an abstract force.

The book’s scope is basically transatlantic. Although forms of neo-Luddism may appear anywhere in the world that technology has taken hold, for practical reasons I examine only British and American culture. I am aware that a great deal more could be said about resistance to technology in other contexts (especially in Asian contexts, for example). But my focus is on the reception history of explicit neo-Luddism, as it were, on how the Luddite name was adopted and reinterpreted, from England in 1811 to America today. Along the way I gather evidence from a wide range of cultural phenomena — poetry, novels, movies, plays, and newspaper columns, but also historical events, protest demonstrations, speeches, and subcultural styles — in short, anything that reflects (or refracts) the image of the Luddites. That image is my focus. My aim is to understand where we are now by looking at how we got here.

The 1990s Moment of Neo-Luddism

So where are we now when it comes to technology? In many ways, we are still living in the aftermath of the great Internet bubble with which the twentieth century ended. It may seem like a relatively quiet aftermath. Technology IPOs may have lost their mystique, but in the years since the bust, the idea of technology has not ceased to dominate the culture; on the contrary, it has settled in as a primary fact of life. There is now less obsessive talk about the technological future, because in many ways that future is already here, more or less, and has become a matter of regular press releases from product development offices and laboratories about the latest version of whatever many of us are already using in our daily lives.

But back in the mid-1990s, during the run-up to the boom, futures (in more than one sense) fueled both the stock market and (thanks to the media) the public imagination. Expectations were inflated right up until the boom was revealed to be a bubble. Those heightened expectations affected more than the market; they altered the collective mood of the culture. When you think about it, the techno-optimism of the 1990s now seems very strange, as if it happened to some other culture, a long time ago. It may take a special effort to remember how almost any new technology was instantly marketed as a prophetic event. For a time, the ironic term “vaporware” carried almost exclusively positive connotations. It was exciting because it was immaterial, just talk or whiteboard sketches. The mere idea of new technology not yet realized — in fact, so much the better if it was not yet realized — attracted venture capital. Even speculative information about new technology, the information about information, was treated as an important form of social capital, and the Internet was understood as the ubiquitous arena where it all played out, and as a synecdoche for global technology.¹

Late in the decade things accelerated exponentially and even many former curmudgeons or skeptics felt compelled to “get online.” As everyone knows, that phrase meant something like “get with the program” or “get onboard.” In America it has always been easy to confuse the marketplace with the “marketplace of ideas,” and to believe that the capital of new technologies can be leveraged to reinvent the world. Being online in the 1990s involved buying stock in technology companies. Those truly in the know had (stock) options and actually referred to themselves as the “digerati” or “true believers.” Their techno-optimism as much as their technical skill set defined them as being among the truly cool. Full members of the club were said to have been “drinking the Koolaid,” an ironic reference either to the 1960s (LSD-laced punch) or to the 1970s (cyanide that killed deluded cult members), depending on your point of view.

In the midst of all this speculation and hype, just when it might have seemed that resistance was futile, a relatively small number of authors, activists, journalists, and pundits began perversely to identify themselves as Luddites or (often interchangeably) neo-Luddites. They published books and articles, held meetings, and formed into loosely overlapping coalitions that some called a movement. They claimed as their ancestors a number of earlier intellectuals who had promoted simplicity and ecology but also those textile workers in England in 1811 who first invented Ned Ludd as their mythical leader. The press treated them sometimes as a fascinating curiosity, sometimes as a movement worth watching, and more often merely as an amusing headline: “Luddites in the 1990s!”

A few years later, of course, the tech bubble burst and a kind of penitence spread among the formerly wired. By spring 2001, the idea of traditional manufacturing, “bricks and mortar,” again possessed an aura of respectability in investing circles, as if a return to rock-hard material reality could restore reason and balance to the culture. Never mind that technology companies — especially the large, established ones that had survived — continued to flourish and be taken as general economic indicators. Never mind that the downsizing that then took over was in most cases dependent on technological “solutions” to replace the redundant workers. The popular idea was that the great build-up was over for now. To many, technological skepticism in the new millennium seemed a necessary tonic, a karmic as well as economic compensation, like going to church the morning after a binge. Some degree of Luddism, mixed with equal doses of irony and schadenfreude, served — to use the language of the markets — as a “necessary correction.”

Within a few years, the correction corrected itself, to a degree. People began to buy new gadgets, if more modest ones (camera-phones or elegant iPods instead of flashy multimedia workstations), and even, cautiously, to invest again in tech stocks and to talk about the comeback of Silicon Valley. Google was in the news as an exemplary survivor with its own IPO. The prices of technology stocks across the board began to ease back up. In December 2003, a U.N.-sponsored technology conference resumed discussion of what had been an urgent agenda of the 1990s — how to wire the remaining roughly 90 percent of the world’s population still without Internet access. And of course the marketing continued apace into the new century, a series of products that became buzzwords signifying both investment and consumer appeal: WiFi, Blackberries, text messaging, voice over Internet, video games on an array of platforms, TiVo, iPods, digital cameras, and camera-phones, Weblogs and podcasts, Amazon and e-Bay, and Google’s latest data-mining applications.

The moment of neo-Luddism’s emergence, however, of its most intense self-representations, took place at the height of the boom years. The timing is not as surprising as it appeared to many observers at the time. The boom was based largely on a collective ideation (you might say hallucination) about the infinite power of technology (“You will,” one ad campaign promised vaguely). Yes, companies did lay miles of fiber-optic cable (some of it even now going unused), and they did hire programmers and create new Web sites and software applications, but it was the abstract idea of technology as an autonomous, inevitable force, as much as it was actual applications, that fueled the economic and cultural effects of the boom. High neo-Luddism was the negatively inflected mirror image of this ideation: It too was based on the idea that technology is a powerful, autonomous, inevitable force — but in this case, a force for destruction and the diminishment of humanity. Neo-Luddism was the resistance that gave the “future” its traction. If it hadn’t existed, the technophiles would have had to invent it.

Under the surface, the general reaction against the technology juggernaut was more widespread than can be measured by the columns and books and lectures of a handful of neo-Luddite authors. But those authors did provide the public voice of neo-Luddism, a self-conscious, self-styled resistance movement constructed in part out of selected and reprocessed historical facts and legends about the original Luddites. Much of the neo-Luddism of the 1990s was inspired by one book and its author: Kirkpatrick Sale’s Rebels Against the Future (1995) became a source of quotations and a rallying point for activists, because it explicitly connected late twentieth-century antitechnology sentiments to a legendary “origin”: the Luddites of 1811.² The book is divided into two parts: Historical Luddism and neo-Luddism, and its argument for continuity of philosophy and political purpose is implicit in that structure. It is a critique of global capitalism aimed at its cornerstone: the ideology of technological progress, which it sees as essentially unchanged since the eighteenth-century industrial era. Sale’s second subtitle is Lessons for the Computer Age. His public readings and lectures in support of the book opened with a theatrical gesture as he smashed a beige personal computer with a large sledgehammer, splintering the plastic case and CRT monitor to enthusiastic applause.

Other neo-Luddites — Sven Birkerts, David Noble, Clifford Stoll, Theodore Roszak, and Neil Postman — to varying degrees shared with Sale the basic outlook of neo-Luddism. They wrote against computers, the Internet, and the spread of hypertext browsing versus traditional reading, the supposed “death of the book.” Threats to the environment posed by technology were the chief topic of Chellis Glendenning, John Zerzan, and other green or anarchist neo-Luddites.³ Neo-Luddism included a wide range of the technologically disaffected, an affinity group that looked for a few years like an emergent movement. But the most active promoters of the name itself and the myth of continuity with Luddism were part of the larger antiglobalization movement that reached its peak at the same moment in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Ned Ludd and the Anti-Globalization Movement

The writer Edward Tenner aptly sums up the shift from the original historical Luddism to recent neo-Luddism as “the indignation of nineteenth century producers” being replaced by “the irritation of late-twentieth-century consumers.”⁴ Neo-Luddism is largely a concerned consumer’s response to the modern global marketplace, and it came to the public’s attention just as the first demonstrations of the antiglobalization movement were being televised. This movement began as a loose coalition of “green” (ecology activists), “red” (leftists), and “black” (anarchists), but there seem to have been some self-identified neo-Luddites in many of these groups and all of them identified Western technology as both cause and effect of the global dominance of capitalism.

A recent novel by Robert Newman, The Fountain at the Center of the World, effectively captures the ideological conflict of the 1990s over the connection between technology and world capital.⁵ The author was in real life an activist with Reclaim the Streets and Earth First!, among other groups. His book tells the improbable, Dickensian story of two brothers born in Mexico and separated at birth. One becomes a radical saboteur and the other becomes a public relations consultant for corporations. Their paths cross, portentously enough, in Seattle, during the first major street protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. The activist brother, Chano, bombs a pipeline belonging to a chemical company operating in Mexico, following a debate on the strategy of sabotage versus the nonviolent strategy of “speaking truth to power” (14).

On the other side, the corporate consultant, Evan, uses technology as a diversion from the ideological conquests of capitalism:

In our countries we just have to depoliticize. We make it a technical question, the great science problem of our time which, as it happens, Company X is closest in the world to solving, so just get out of its way.

(71)

A brutal policeman in Mexico sees eye to eye with Evan and refers to the protesters as motivated by “Fear of the modern world, fear of change, fear of technology” (104). When one of the protesters in Seattle argues that “all the different issues are all part of the one issue” — the global dominance of capitalism — his detailed analysis of the interconnected ownership of corporate conglomerates is edited down by the TV news to a human-interest sound bite about the Red Monarch butterfly and genetically-modified crops, falsely representing him as a single-issue “green” (296–97). The neo-Luddite resistance against technology, the novel suggests, takes place in a larger context in which technology promotes global capital at the expense of nature as well as local human culture. Significantly, both sides assume that technology is the overarching force that makes possible the empire of capital.

This novel is based on the fact that the antitechnology worldview was at the center of the antiglobalization movement of the 1990s. Neo-Luddite writers and activists set out deliberately to make it so, to connect with the young and relatively unfocused protest movement, aiming to make philosophical resistance to technology one of the key planks in its emerging anticapital platform.

In April 1996, the widely publicized “Second Luddite Congress” met in Ohio. The first Luddite congress was presumably some meeting of the original Luddites in 1811, but this was just a convenient fiction, retroactively created as it were out of the need for such an origin. The 1996 meeting was organized by the Quaker Center for Plain Living and the Foundation for Deep Ecology in San Francisco, which had earlier (in 1993) sponsored a neo-Luddite group of writers and intellectuals under the direction of Helena Norberg-Hodge and Jerry Mander and inspired by a neo-Luddite treatise published as far back as the March 1990 Utne Reader, Chellis Glendenning’s “Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto.” Glendenning dramatically declared: “Like the early Luddites, we too are a desperate people seeking to protect the livelihoods, communities, and families we love, which lie on the verge of extinction.” Glendenning’s piece conveys a sense of desperation, a distrust of anything technological, and an almost theological belief that technology was already everywhere, along with an emotional, symbolic identification with the historical Luddites (“we too”). Neo-Luddism, Glendenning says, will ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Boom, the Bust, and Neo-Luddites in the 1990s
• 2. The Mythic History of The Original Luddites
• 3. Romanticizing the Luddites
• 4. Frankenstein and the Monster of Technology
• 5. Novelizing the Luddites
• 6. Counterculture and Countercomputer in the 1960s
• 7. Ned Ludd in the Age of Terror
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index