Rage Against the Machines

Witnessing the birth of the neo-Luddite movement

Ronald Bailey from the July 2001 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

Car Talk

The neo-Luddites’ general attitude toward technology is evident in their treatment of cars. Unsurprisingly, automobiles come in for a lot of opprobrium. In many ways, they remain the ultimate example for neo-Luddites of everything that is wrong with the modern world. As Jerry Mander put it in the 1991 neo-Luddite anthology Questioning Technology: Tool, Toy or Tyrant?, "If you accept the existence of automobiles, you also accept the existence of roads laid upon the landscape, oil to run the cars, and huge institutions to find the oil, pump it and distribute it. In addition, you accept a sped-up style of life and the movement of humans through the terrain at speeds that make it impossible to pay attention to whatever is growing there." Kirkpatrick Sale, in the primitivism .com interview, lays out the raw bone of contention regarding not just autos, but all technologies: "Only someone ignorant of industrialism and the Enlightenment mind-set would have thought the automobile ‘emancipating.’ It was intended to increase consumerism, individualism, anomie, community disintegration, and the power of markets, and it did."

Leaving aside the important issue of whether consumerism might itself be emancipating, it’s more than a tad unconvincing to argue that Henry Ford plotted to increase "consumerism, individualism, anomie, community disintegration and the power of markets." To be sure, Ford wanted to make a buck by providing people with cheap, convenient private transportation, and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. In 1900, there were a few thousand automobiles in use worldwide, and they were toys for the very rich. By 1950, there were 70 million vehicles worldwide and by 2000, the number had risen to over 500 million. Of course, there are downsides to automobiles, but as their burgeoning numbers show, people the world over clearly regard cars as emancipating, or at least worth owning. This is no small point, as it goes directly to the heart of the neo-Luddite enterprise: Does technology use humans or do humans use technology? Cars may not be the hypothetically perfect form of transportation, but they clearly enhance the quality of life of people who own them.

Certainly, most people prefer them to other available forms of transportation, which have their own downsides as well. Set aside for the moment questions of relative reliability and usefulness and just focus on environmental costs: Before the automobile became widespread, tens of millions of acres of land were dedicated as pasture for horses and mules. While cars do cause pollution, compare that to city streets clotted with horse manure and urine, which were breeding grounds for disease. Railroads, the 19th century’s "modern" form of transportation, consumed nearly 25 percent of all the wood used in America, for both track ties and fuel.

Neo-Luddites are right that any given technology implies many others, but they always seem to undersell the implications of the simpler, "purer" forms of technology they themselves prefer. They also insist, in the absence of convincing data, that technologies are foisted on unwilling users.

Colonial Technologies

If autos set the gold standard for neo-Luddite contempt, then computers and the Internet are not far behind. "Films, radio, computers, TV, [and] the Internet are imprinting a unified pattern of thought and a single pattern on our way of life," declared Mander, brushing aside any thought that recent technological innovations have allowed millions of new voices to be heard on the Internet and elsewhere. "We are in the terrifying situation in which a few billionaires colonize the minds of millions of people, teach people to hate where they live, worship McDonald’s, and trust corporations."

"Computers are a colonizing technology," pronounced Chet Bowers, an adjunct professor in the Environmental Studies Department at the University of Oregon. "Computers profoundly alter how we think and inevitably reduce our ability to understand nature and cultures other than our own." (The obligation other cultures might have to try to understand our culture went unexplored.)

And over at primitivism.com, Sale put it this way: "The computer, particularly the PC, will bring unmitigated disaster, simply because it enables the powers of this society to do faster and more efficiently the kinds of things it likes to do, with resulting social disintegration, economic polarization, and environmental devastation."

Colonizing? This claim can be made about any communicative activity, but for neo-Luddites, it’s an all-purpose pejorative deployed to describe an activity that one dislikes. Langdon Winner, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, summed it up thus: "Everything and everyone is colonized." That amounts to little more than the observation that everyone learns involuntarily from the social and cultural environment in which he finds himself.

"The point is the way new technologies are introduced to us without a full discussion of how they are going to affect the planet, social relationships, political relationships, human health, nature, our conceptions of nature, and our conceptions of ourselves," says Mander. The neo-Luddites have a tool which they believe will force this "full discussion": the precautionary principle. According to Stephanie Mills, the precautionary principle embodies the "sensible idea that new chemicals and new technologies should be presumed guilty until proven innocent."

But it’s clear that neo-Luddites invoke the precautionary principle not to evaluate new technologies, but to stack the deck against them. Martin Teitel, a philosopher who directs the anti-biotech activist group the Council for Responsible Genetics, was quite explicit about what the precautionary principle could do to stop technological progress. When asked how any scientist could prove that a biotech crop was completely safe without the field trials that the precautionary principle would simultaneously require and ban, Teitel replied that that’s just fine. "Politically," he explained, "it’s difficult for me to go around saying that I want to shut this science down, so it’s safer for me to say something like ‘it needs to be done safely before releasing it.’" Requiring biotechnologists to prove a negative under the guise of implementing the precautionary principle means that "they don’t get to do it period," Teitel noted.

If they feel that the world is going to hell in a high-tech hand basket, the neo-Luddites can at least console themselves with this: The precautionary principle has already been incorporated into a number of international treaties, including the new Biosafety Protocol and the Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty, which the Bush administration recently agreed to sign.

Corporate Punishment

According to neo-Luddite analysis, the force behind technological innovation -- and the only beneficiary of that innovation -- are "the corporations," a vast and vague abstraction covering virtually all for-profit activity. Neo-Luddites have two basic bones to pick with corporations. First, they object that companies offer ever more goods or services to customers who are simultaneously enticed and forced into buying extravagant, destructive junk -- a car, say, or a computer, or movie tickets, or whatever. For neo-Luddites, this is a revolting state of affairs and not only because the purchases themselves are inevitably misguided: Exchange also inevitably encompasses wider and wider networks -- the local economic scene becomes enmeshed in the global one.