>Doug wrote:
>"You mean becoming Luddites and organizing against tech change? Or in favor of
>better treatment of displaced workers?"
>
>The Luddites were not against technical change. Just technical change that
>destroyed their livelihood.
Yes, I've heard this. But:
> K. Sale's book and David Noble's work dispel this
>myth.
I'm all for popular control over the evolution of technology, but Sale & Noble are both Luddites in the vulgar sense. I've heard Noble rail against email, and Sale has argued that the printing press was a mistake. I'm hardly exaggerating. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Sale by Kevin Kelly <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/saleskelly_pr.html>:
>Kelly: OK, then you tell me. What was the effect of printing
>technology? Did the invention of printing just allow us to make more
>books? Or did it allow new and different kinds of books to be
>written? What did it do? It did both.
>
>Sale: That wasn't mass society back then, but what it eventually
>achieved was a vast increase in the number of books produced; and it
>vastly reduced forests in Europe so as to produce them.
>
>Kelly: I don't think so. The forests of Europe were not cut down to
>create books for Europe. Printing allowed several things. It
>increased literacy. And it allowed more varieties of books to be
>written - and faster. It allowed better communication.
>
>Sale: Literacy does go hand in hand with industrialism, but at the
>same time, it destroys orality. No oral traditions and no oral
>abilities.
>
>Kelly: There's no doubt that technology obsoletes many things.
>
>Sale: Right. So, let's not simply say how wonderful is literacy,
>without saying what the price is for this literacy, without asking
>what is it that we are now reading with all of this fancy literacy.
>The truth is that we are reading little of merit.
>
>Kelly: I would say that in oral traditions, there was very little of
>merit said. There is this tendency to think that the old things, the
>old times, the oral traditions, the tribal traditions, were somehow
>more lofty, that people of those times used things more judiciously,
>that they didn't gossip, that they didn't use good things for trash.
>This is complete nonsense.
>
>Sale: Sure, people gossiped, and sure, people said nasty things. At
>the same time, these oral traditions were what kept these societies
>together for eons. If we lose oral tradition and all that goes with
>it, we lose a due regard for nature and the preservation of nature.
>The successive empires that have driven civilizations for the last
>6,000 years have had, almost uniformly, no regard for nature. That's
>why they were as short-lived as they were: in addition to having
>very little regard for the majority of their own population, they
>had no regard for the rest of the living world. That is essential to
>the peril we're in today.
>
>Kelly: Do you see civilization as a catastrophe?
>
>Sale: Yes.
Doug