In Praise of Luddites: Towards Humanistic Technology
As headlines in recent weeks blare about nuclear contamination in Japan, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cruise missiles raining down on Libya, and a recent New York Times Science section piece reports on a study by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley warning that global warming may indeed be pushing life towards its sixth great extinction (there have been five major extinctions since life began on Earth between 2 and 3 billion years ago), one can be forgiven for cringing about the darkish side of modern technology. After all, if technological expansion is to be credited with improving human life, it must be said that it has been inventive in also finding ways to destroy life.
On that note, it shouldn’t be overlooked that this year marks the 200th anniversary of a movement whose name is synonymous with technophobia and/or incompetence. The Luddites burst on the scene in northern England in 1811. It was quite a harsh time to be a stockinger (textile worker) or a worker in general: no minimum wage, the only rare ability of stockingers to own their own frames (machines), common child labor, Napoleon’s boycott of
