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The Luddites are mostly remembered as people who hated technology, but they had a larger concern, as do I: the exploitation of people by those who were profiting from the new technology.
For most of my life I relished every technological advance that came my way. I remember when we got electricity at the farm when I was learning to read by the murky light of kerosene lamps. I remember the thrill of being able to illuminate an entire room with brilliant light simply by flicking a switch.
Other blessings followed: a constant supply of hot water; a self igniting furnace controlled by a thermostat that kept the whole house at a constant temperature; a television set that allowed us to watch movies in our living room. I remember the uncharacteristic grin of pure delight on my father’s face when he took me for a ride in our brand new 1953 Oldsmobile to demonstrate the wonders of an automatic transmission.
The wonders kept on coming, and their memory remains crystal clear in my mind: the first time I heard an orchestra recorded in stereophonic sound (it was Tchaikovsky); my first time on a jet plane. In the early 1980s I was the first editor at Time-Life Books, then arguably the largest book publisher in the country, to own a personal computer — a portable with a four-inch screen that could store 50 pages of text on a single floppy disk! For a professional writer who was and remains a terrible typist, the computer (with spell check) ranked as a boon right up there with providing an amputee with a prosthetic leg. I was an early subscriber to America On Line, the primitive forerunner of the Internet.
The cell phone came along, offering enhanced convenience and security to everybody. Then GPS navigation, ditto.
But something went very wrong around the turn of the century. Tech companies stopped coming up with new ways to bless our lives and started trying to con us into buying, or investing in, the Next Big Thing.
- The dot-com bubble occurred in the 1990s when the wizards of the Internet gave up on bringing the sum total of human knowledge to the fingertips of all humans, and devoted themselves to fleecing investors, lenders and consumers of their cash with increasingly bizarre websites. My favorite story from the bubble was about the firm that raised $500 million in capital, leased luxurious offices, did stuff until the money ran out, closed down and disappeared — all without devising a single salable product.
- The smartest guys in the room, what the guys at Enron called themselves, turned the energy giant away from trying to make electricity cheaper, or more efficient, or less polluting, or more plentiful, and instead concentrated on manipulating markets and grids to strip the most possible money from the bank accounts of hapless (and hostage) consumers. The company eventually flamed out, and the smartest guys in the room ended up in jail cells.
- Theranos, a biomedical company, promised to revolutionize blood testing, making the process faster and cheaper to the benefit of countless patients. Turned out the founder, Elizabth Holmes, lied to investors, lied to customers, lied to regulators and sold blood tests that were slower and less accurate than all the others. She went to prison.
- In 2016, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 cell phone was launched to extreme hype about its being the Next Big Thing. One little problem: it had a pronounced tendency to burst into flame. Two million of the devices were recalled at a cost to the company of over $5 billion. The same year brought the first major cryptocurrency scandal when a company called OneCoin went from billion-dollar super investment to busted Ponzi scheme in less than a year. Many other examples followed. All these years later, I have not found anyone who can explain to me what cryptocurrency is, and I’m not sure the problem is mine.
And the beat goes on. The Next Big Thing was virtual reality, about which Facebook was so hyped it changed its company name to Meta to signal its total devotion to VR, which lasted less than a year. Turned out nobody was interested in spending thousands of dollars for a clunky headset to help them pretend they were somewhere else. Go figure. So the tech world gracefully pivoted to artificial intelligence, which uses enormous amounts of energy and capital to ghost-write papers and articles, provide lonely people with virtual companionship and produce faked nude photos of celebrities and neighbors.
So here I am, a slow old bull surrounded by snarling marketers, trying to land a kick once in a while and laboring mightily to avoid all contact with and all expenditures on the lies and the scams and the bogus boons that just keep on coming. Could we all please just go back to 1950?
why be a pessimist? once we have enough solar panels, wind farms and electric vehicles, all our problems will be solved!
our betters would never resort to lying to us, as they are both smarter and more informed than us peons. the stars await!
Investors in Theranos deserved their fate. None of them investigated. Laboratory Medicine is a long established discipline. Plenty of chemists and hematologists at medical centers, universities, and private companies could have shown why Ms Holmes was completely full of shit.
I was first labeled a ‘Luddite’ by my daughter-in-law some dozen years ago. I’d always prided myself on being a ‘minimalist’ but have been informed that pride and minimalism are incompatible. Can you imagine? In any event, I don’t own a smartphone and have never texted anyone. If you want to get in touch with me, you’ll need to call me on my landline, email me, write a letter or come knocking on my door. I think that proposal offers plenty of choices, and if that makes me a Luddite, then sobeit. I’ll not be imprisoned by a hand-held box.
As far as the 1950s are concerned, I came at that decade from an entirely different trajectory; my folks were educated and relatively prosperous, but had grown up amid the Depression and WW2, and were thus somewhat bewildered by the advent of the emerging youth culture and momentous economic growth spurt that the decade ushered in. They liked the prosperity but were unsettled by the cultural shifts. I, on the other hand, loved the whole damn package – tasteless American excess in all its innocent gaud and glitter!
But that was then and this is now. I believe it was the Big Bad Wolf who said, “you can’t go home again”. So let it be with the 1950s. Every civilization has its high point. I’m convinced that ours occurred sometime between ‘Be-Bop-A-Lu-La’ and ‘Wha’d I – Say’.
Tom; I feel your pain/misgivings.
Maybe join up with some other old bulls, form a defensive circle, and kick away!
All the convenience and entertainment offerings just show how much discretionary income and weaponized advertising pervade the system.
Living near Amish communities, I see how communities carefully evaluate whether to adopt new tech., and are slow and cautious, weighing the overall impact to the community, not just supposed efficiency and initial cost.
The other benefit to being “Luddish”- You will be ahead of the game when all this stuff goes away as the economy shrinks back to essentials.
It helps us avoid people, so there’s that
I was mostly recently denounced as a Luddite by a friend who was explaining how technology would save us when I pointed out that technology is not a substitute for energy.
It is important to remember that we can choose whether to engage any new tech, to study if it is an actual improvement or just more complexity.
As fans and panels fail to run industry nuke power is having its green moment. Get those anti science over regulating Luddites out of the way we’re told. But capitalism has proven itself enormously effective at regulatory capture, yet big energy companies have not bothered, nor have they put on a PR campaign. One suspects they have studied it carefully and see no profit, a useful proxy for economic sustainability. (Though not for real sustainability of course)
Over this last year, the Sun has been kicking up its heels a bit.
It will continue to do so over the next year, at least.
If it produces a large enough CME it could send our technology
back to 1850 not just 1950. Maybe that would be enough to bring the
world into a period of peace since all our high tech weapons of war
would be silenced. Just a thought.