Every interview any of us Luddites gave – and they had a
tendency to come at a gallop when the Unabomber was hitting the news -- would
culminate with the question “Do you own a computer?” I was gratified each time to erupt into a
Mona-Lisa smile. “Noo-oo,” I’d coo in
self-righteous pride. But then, in 2002,
the Johnny Appleseed of Cybernetics arrived at my house with his bag of knotted
wires and indecipherable gadgets -- and a second-hand, clearly cast-aside-for-something-newer
Dell laptop. And so it came to be –
perhaps the third-to-last of the Jacques Ellul bunch (Stephanie succumbed in
2003; Wendell, I’m not sure when, but he did) -- that I crossed one confused,
tentative toe into cyberspace.
The
question of what technologies one owns is a curious one.
I think
of my grandmother Clara “Mimere” Daoust’s house as a place of baskets -- willow
baskets for garnering carrots from the garden,
grass baskets for passing the bread, stick baskets for carrying sheets
and pillowcases. It was a place of
iceboxes, steam heaters, and a chute for dropping dirty clothes from the second
floor into a laundry basket in the basement.
Mimere’s first telephone was a black Bakelite contraption shaped
something like an hourglass, and she had the same number for six decades:
Fairmount 1-0900. Then, every Christmas
Uncle Brud and Uncle Jason would drag the old steam engine model down from the
attic and work all afternoon to get it fired up. They approached the machine, not with
arrogance about its quaintness, but with respect.
The house I grew up in also had an icebox, steam heaters, and a chute. As the post-WWII economy found its future in the sale of consumer goods, we acquired a refrigerator, a Magnavox with rabbit ears, an olive-colored plastic telephone, and a garbage disposal. Mimere got an electric garage door. By high school I had a pink Princess phone with my own phone number.
The house I grew up in also had an icebox, steam heaters, and a chute. As the post-WWII economy found its future in the sale of consumer goods, we acquired a refrigerator, a Magnavox with rabbit ears, an olive-colored plastic telephone, and a garbage disposal. Mimere got an electric garage door. By high school I had a pink Princess phone with my own phone number.
Throughout
my adulthood I have prided myself for owning fewer machines than my family had
in the 1950’s. Friend Hallie Iglehart
was the first to bring home the new-fangled phone answering device; there it
sat, circa 1974, on its own chair in the middle of a room like a home invasion
by Hal the Computer. By 1978, when the
device had been reduced in size to less-than-a-bread-box, I too purchased one
and spent the better part of an evening honing and re-honing my outgoing
message. Today I live in an adobe hut in
the altiplano of Bolivia and
drive a 1978 natural-gas-fueled Jeep. I
use a Gateway laptop, another of Johnny Appleseed’s cast-offs, and walk a
quarter mile through tall grasses to go online.
It is
all very interesting to review one’s personal history of technology. Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of
evil” comes to mind because the point, if one grasps the greater significance
of the Megamachine, is to review not your
history -- but its history. From the get-go technological society has
depended on increasingly complex, overarching, pervasive, and dangerous
technologies to keep it functioning. By
its very structure mass civilization
is itself a machine mirroring the mechanistic qualities of clockwork,
standardization, efficiency, centralization, expansion, and militarization –
with zero regard for life and living beings.
And we live encased within it. This is a different story -- not of a
bedtime sort featuring rabbit ears and pink phones – but a story of
powerlessness. Of grief, terror,
numbing, and rationalization – experiences each of us has known.
With his mail
bombs, on-the-lam low-tech cabin in Montana ,
and insistence on the publication of his anti-industrial treatise in national
newspapers, Ted Kaczynski thrust the subject of technology into the zeitgeist
big-time in 1995. Kirkpatrick Sale’s Rebels Against the Future came out the
same year, and what amounted to a history book about a crushed rebellion in 19th
century England was suddenly garnering more attention than,
Unabomber-less, it would have.
Kirk and I decided to put on a play called Interview with a Luddite. It was to be the Friday-night highlight of a conference, “Technology and Its Discontents,” at
Kirkpatrick Sale & Stephanie Mills |
Flyers for the event were plastered around the Village, and various newspapers and radio stations were carrying ads for it – and yet, here it was the day before and we had neither script nor set. Putting our heads together over Earl Grey tea, with occasional forays into the mossy bricked garden out the screen door, we plotted that a modern-day Luddite (me) would go to a psychiatrist (Stephanie) concerning her distress that the publishing industry now required her to submit her writing from a computer. The doctor would recommend that she sleep on it, and she would flop down on the consulting couch. And so, from dream state, would enter the original Luddite from 1811,
I knew
Kirkpatrick as a wry, earnest, and somewhat introverted intellectual -- so
nothing in my experience prepared me for what I then saw. We never actually practiced the play. We spent the morning of the performance
setting up the stage at the Learning Alliance and then retreated to our
respective apartments in the Village to get dressed.
Looking
purposefully au currant in my black
rip-stop jumpsuit, I sat waiting for him at the window table of the French
Roast at 6th Avenue
and 11th. Given that I was
about to appear in a theater performance before a New York audience -- for which there was no
script and had been no rehearsal -- I was inappropriately calm. Maybe it was like the time during an anti-war
protest when the Berkeley
police with their batons, mace cans, and rage were rampaging at my heels -- and
my mind unexpectedly switched to an English garden amid daisies, roses, and
white trellises, with me leaping in the slowest of slow motion across the
trimmed green grass. Maybe it was like
that. The crowds were crossing 6th
like geese in lockstep rhythm with the WALK signal when, all of a sudden, the
gaggle parted and I glimpsed a … a … whaaaa?
… a highwayman with clipped beard, commanding black cape, billowing white
poplin shirt, and pants tucked into high-laced boots.
Kirk!
We were
off to a magical night at the theater.
The play went – dare I say it? -- smashingly well, due in large part to
Kirk and Steph’s dramatic prowess.
Afterward Emerson Blake, editor of Orion
magazine, said to me, “Amazing. You memorized that whole script!”
A few
weeks later the Village Voice ran a
cartoon making fun of us for being foolhardy in challenging modern technology,
and New York magazine published “Die,
Computer, Die” cynically trashing Kirkpatrick’s book, Scott Savage’s Plain magazine, Jeremy Rifkin’s
anti-genetic engineering efforts –- and featuring a reference reeking of urban
superiority to the “mud hut” (read: adobe house) that was at the time my home
in New Mexico.
This blog is a book. Please feel free to read the next chapter now. Go to the Table of Contents under the introduction on the right side of the page and click on the next chapter.