Against Technology RT688X_FM.indd 1 3/6/06 10:01:49 AM RT688X_C000.indd 2 3/3/06 10:23:02 AM Against Technology From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism Steven E. Jones New York London Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business RT688X_FM.indd 2 3/6/06 10:01:49 AM RT688X_RT7867X_Discl.fm Page 1 Thursday, March 9, 2006 10:49 AM "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," in The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster © 1968 by Richard Brautigan is reprinted with permission of Sarah Lazin Books. Published in 2006 by Published in Great Britain by Routledge Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue 2 Park Square New York, NY 10016 Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN © 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97867-X (Hardcover) 0-415-97868-8 (Softcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97867-5 (Hardcover) 978-0-415-97868-2 (Softcover) Library of Congress Card Number 2005031322 No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jones, Steven E., 1959- Against technology : from the Luddites to Neo-Luddism / Steven E. Jones. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-97867-X (hb) -- ISBN 0-415-97868-8 (pb) 1. Technology--Social aspects. 2. Technology and civilization. 3. Luddites. I. Title. T14.5.J66 2006 303.48'3--dc22 2005031322 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com Taylor & Francis Group and the Routledge Web site at is the Academic Division of Informa plc. http://www.routledge-ny.com DEDICATION To the memory of Alvin Addison Snider RT688X_C000.indd 5 3/3/06 10:23:02 AM RT688X_C000.indd 6 3/3/06 10:23:02 AM CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Boom, The Bust, and Neo-Luddites in the 1990s 19 Chapter 2 The Mythic History of the Original Luddites 45 Chapter 3 Romanticizing the Luddites 77 Chapter 4 Frankenstein and the Monster of Technology 105 Chapter 5 Novelizing the Luddites 137 Chapter 6 Counterculture and Countercomputer in the 1960s 173 Chapter 7 Ned Ludd in the Age of Terror 211 Notes 235 Selected Bibliography 257 Index 267 vii RT688X_C000.indd 7 3/3/06 10:23:02 AM RT688X_C000.indd 8 3/3/06 10:23:02 AM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Everybody knows that writing a book requires a network of dis- tributed support and production. In writing this one I was helped by other scholars, curators, Webmasters, collectors, friends, and family. I’m grateful first of all to the self-described Luddite infor- mants I cite anonymously (and, I hope, sympathetically) in the Introduction and Chapter 7. Among my colleagues, Kevin Binfield, then at the University of Nottingham, shared his work in progress on Luddite texts (we once exchanged e-mails on the punctuation of “General Ludd’s Triumph,” I in the coffee shop at the Public Record Office outside of London, he at that time here in the U.S.). Later he offered valuable advice on this book in progress, and he has contin- ued to share knowledge and texts. Adriana Craciun invited me to Nottingham for a lecture at just the right time and saved time in my schedule for some reading in the library as well as a wonderful special tour of Byron’s Newstead Abbey. Huddersfield local historian Lesley Kipling was very helpful in correspondence. So was John H. Rumsby, ix RT688X_C000.indd 9 3/3/06 10:23:03 AM x Against Technology Museums Collections Manager at the Kirklees Community History Service, Huddersfield (and the museum staff was cheerful in person); I am grateful to Mr. Rumsby for permission to reproduce the images of Luddite artifacts and the drawing of Rawfolds Mill held in that collection, and to his colleague Chris Yeates for taking the photo- graphs of those artifacts. John F. Barber was warmly encouraging in a series of e-mail exchanges about Richard Brautigan; as a result, I eventually found and purchased a copy of the broadside used as an illustration in Chapter 6. To Sarah Lazin Books I am grateful for per- mission to quote from the pivotal Richard Brautigan poem originally printed in that broadside, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” Marilyn Gaull, as always, was there when needed — even to the point of correcting the style of an early partial draft. Along those lines, my thanks go to an anonymous reader at Routledge for sugges- tions that greatly improved the manuscript. It has also benefited from the editorial efforts of William Germano and especially Matthew Byrnie. My American Studies colleague Christopher Castiglia kindly read and commented on Chapters 6 and 7 (even though he’s not too crazy about technology himself). Neil Fraistat read early drafts and shared them with the students in his Techno-Romanticism class. Several classes of my own at Loyola University Chicago helped me formulate and test portions of various chapters. Orianne Smith, who was beginning her own dissertation as I started thinking about this book and has just taken the Ph.D. as I complete it, read the first draft of Chapter 1 and talked with me about the project over coffee at the Unicorn Cafe. She also served as an able research assistant, here and in the U.K. Some research and travel support was granted by Loyola University Chicago; those same forms of support — as well as so many more, and much more significant ones — were granted by the incom- parable Emi and Henry, and the always generous Heidi S. Jones, who associates many things with many things. RT688X_C000.indd 10 3/3/06 10:23:03 AM Introduction Are you a Luddite? Do you know someone who is? Someone who is fed up with technology and resists its dominance over our daily lives — even if in little ways, by avoiding computers or video games, the daily com- mute in the car, or a cell phone? Or, since it seems increasingly impossible to relinquish or escape from these forms of ever-present technology, at least the contemporary Luddite may (with some irony, to be sure) speak out against its dominance, may question the authority of technology even as it continues to be exercised all around him or her. What else can one do? Is it even possible any more (if it ever was) to resist technology? This book addresses the question of what it might mean nowadays to call oneself a Luddite — to take a position against technology. On the urban campus where I teach, just like on campuses every- where, students walk along with one iPod earbud dangling free so they can talk on their cell phones while listening to music. When evening classes let out, their ring tones begin to play all at once as the phones flip open, screens glow, and they migrate across the lawns like giant 1 RT688X_S001.indd 1 3/2/06 12:06:26 PM 2 Against Technology schools of cyborg jellyfish. Of course, many of these students also have in their backpacks laptops on which they write papers and store huge collections of MP3s, some to be transferred to their iPods, most of them probably downloaded in their dorm rooms using peer-to-peer file-sharing programs over the same network that allows them to reg- ister for classes and instant-message their friends. The network also allows me to input their grades, post syllabi, create course Weblogs, or access their transcripts. Every year some of these same students tell me that they think there is too much technology in modern life. Some of them, usually green-activists , ironically refer to themselves as Luddites — but this does not necessarily mean they’re not just as wired, as satu- rated with technology, as their classmates. They assume, like everyone else, that technology is a fact of life — the air they breathe, the water in which they swim, like it or not. I know that many of these students will go on to careers in what is called “knowledge work.” More of them than ever before will make their living by producing or maintaining or processing technology and (even more likely) the forms of information and commerce that technology makes possible. Even many of those with less obviously technological jobs will spend their leisure hours engaged with tech- nology and media, video games and large-screen TVs and personal computers. The degree to which they get it (or don’t) when it comes to this governing idea — that technology is the central fact of the modern global economy — will often help to define their status, determine their livelihoods, and shape their work and leisure time. This is not about having specific technical skills — I’m not talking about engineers and computer science graduates. It’s about the willingness to buy into two widely shared assumptions: (1) that technology’s place in our daily lives is central; and (2) that it will inevitably increase in the future. In the face of this seeming inevitability, this done-deal with tech- nology, a low-level anxiety persists about what technology is doing to us: the environmental consequences of genetically modified foods, children’s dependence on antidepressants, reduced social interaction among the “pod-people” lost in their own soundtracks or people who compulsively flip open their phones every time they are out in public.