380 lines
22 KiB
Markdown
380 lines
22 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2015-04-07T15:23:09.000Z'
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title: Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite? (1984)
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url: https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html#m01
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author: colinprince
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points: 52
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story_text:
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 8
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1428420189
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_colinprince
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- story_9334666
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objectID: '9334666'
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year: 1984
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---
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![A](/images/qa.gif)s if being 1984 weren't enough, it's also the 25th
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anniversary this year of C. P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture, ''The Two
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Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,'' notable for its warning that
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intellectual life in the West was becoming increasingly polarized into
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''literary'' and ''scientific'' factions, each doomed not to understand
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or appreciate the other. The lecture was originally meant to address
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such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of
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technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third
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world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people's
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attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some
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already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking
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certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the
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whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly
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cranky look.
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Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959,
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we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the
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world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats
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are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We
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immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide
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behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever
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''beyond'' the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy and
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access fee these days can get together with just about any piece of
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specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the
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two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local
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library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more
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than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the
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time to read anything outside one's own specialty.
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What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of
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human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all,
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sought to identify not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of
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personality. Fragmentary echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense
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taken in the course of long-ago high- table chitchat, may have helped
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form the subtext for Snow's immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion,
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''If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals
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have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial
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Revolution.'' Such ''intellectuals,'' for the most part ''literary,''
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were supposed, by Lord Snow, to be ''natural Luddites.''
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Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody these days
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wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn't sound so
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bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, ''people who read and think.''
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Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such
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as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or
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predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? And
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come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?
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HISTORICALLY, Luddites flourished in Britain from about 1811 to 1816.
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They were bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was
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to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry. They swore
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allegiance not to any British king but to their own King Ludd. It isn't
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clear whether they called themselves Luddites, although they were so
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termed by both friends and enemies. C. P. Snow's use of the word was
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clearly polemical, wishing to imply an irrational fear and hatred of
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science and technology. Luddites had, in this view, come to be imagined
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as the counterrevolutionaries of that ''Industrial Revolution'' which
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their modern versions have ''never tried, wanted, or been able to
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understand.''
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But the Industrial Revolution was not, like the American and French
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Revolutions of about the same period, a violent struggle with a
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beginning, middle and end. It was smoother, less conclusive, more like
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an accelerated passage in a long evolution. The phrase was first
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popularized a hundred years ago by the historian Arnold Toynbee, and has
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had its share of revisionist attention, lately in the July 1984
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Scientific American. Here, in ''Medieval Roots of the Industrial
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Revolution,'' Terry S. Reynolds suggests that the early role of the
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steam engine (1765) may have been overdramatized. Far from being
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revolutionary, much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had
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already long been in place, having in fact been driven by water power
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since the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the idea of a technosocial
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''revolution,'' in which the same people came out on top as in France
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and America, has proven of use to many over the years, not least to
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those who, like C. P. Snow, have thought that in ''Luddite'' they have
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discovered a way to call those with whom they disagree both politically
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reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same time.
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But the Oxford English Dictionary has an interesting tale to tell. In
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1779, in a village somewhere in Leicestershire, one Ned Lud broke into a
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house and ''in a fit of insane rage'' destroyed two machines used for
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knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking- frame was
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found sabotaged - this had been going on, sez the Encyclopedia
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Britannica, since about 1710 - folks would respond with the catch phrase
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''Lud must have been here.'' By the time his name was taken up by the
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frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the
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more or less sarcastic nickname ''King (or Captain) Ludd,'' and was now
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all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in
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the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a
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single comic shtick - every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy
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and proceeds to trash it.
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But it's important to remember that the target even of the original
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assault of 1779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was
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not a new piece of technology. The stocking-frame had been around since
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1589, when, according to the folklore, it was invented by the Rev.
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William Lee, out of pure meanness. Seems that Lee was in love with a
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young woman who was more interested in her knitting than in him. He'd
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show up at her place. ''Sorry, Rev, got some knitting.'' ''What,
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again?'' After a while, unable to deal with this kind of rejection, Lee,
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not, like Ned Lud, in any fit of insane rage, but let's imagine
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logically and coolly, vowed to in vent a machine that would make the
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hand-knitting of hosiery obsolete. And he did. According to the
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encyclopedia, the jilted cleric's frame ''was so perfect in its
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conception that it continued to be the only mechanical means of knitting
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for hundreds of years.''
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Now, given that kind of time span, it's just not easy to think of Ned
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Lud as a technophobic crazy. No doubt what people admired and
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mythologized him for was the vigor and single-mindedness of his assault.
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But the words ''fit of insane rage'' are third-hand and at least 68
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years after the event. And Ned Lud's anger was not directed at the
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machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled,
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martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass.
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There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually
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male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is
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almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he is Bad, and
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he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to
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work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying
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of scale, the multiplication of effect.
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The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had
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been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody
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saw this happening - it became part of daily life. They also saw the
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machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not
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work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or
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later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs.
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Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple
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unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate
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that grows up between humans and machinery - especially when it's been
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around for a while - not to mention serious resentment toward at least
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two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening.
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One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and
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the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of
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humans out of work - to be ''worth'' that many human souls. What gave
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King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero to
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nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified,
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multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed. When times are
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hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don't
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we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to
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the Badass - the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero - who will
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resist what otherwise would overwhelm us? Of course, the real or secular
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frame-bashing was still being done by everyday folks, trade unionists
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ahead of their time, using the night, and their own solidarity and
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discipline, to achieve their multiplications of effect.
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It was open-eyed class war. The movement had its Parliamentary allies,
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among them Lord Byron, whose maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812
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compassionately argued against a bill proposing, among other repressive
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measures, to make frame-breaking punishable by death. ''Are you not near
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the Luddites?'' he wrote from Venice to Thomas Moore. ''By the Lord\! if
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there's a row, but I'll be among ye\! How go on the weavers - the
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breakers of frames - the Lutherans of politics - the reformers?'' He
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includes an ''amiable *chanson,* '' which proves to be a Luddite hymn so
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inflammatory that it wasn't published till after the poet's death. The
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letter is dated December 1816: Byron had spent the summer previous in
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Switzerland, cooped up for a while in the Villa Diodati with the
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Shelleys, watching the rain come down, while they all told each other
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ghost stories. By that December, as it happened, Mary Shelley was
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working on Chapter Four of her novel ''Frankenstein, or the Modern
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Prometheus.''
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If there were such a genre as the Luddite novel, this one, warning of
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what can happen when technology, and those who practice it, get out of
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hand, would be the first and among the best. Victor Frankenstein's
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creature also, surely, qualifies as a major literary Badass. ''I
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resolved . . .,'' Victor tells us, ''to make the being of a gigantic
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stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably
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large,'' which takes care of Big. The story of how he got to be so Bad
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is the heart of the novel, sheltered innermost: told to Victor in the
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first person by the creature himself, then nested inside of Victor's own
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narrative, which is nested in its turn in the letters of the arctic
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explorer Robert Walton. However much of ''Frankenstein's'' longevity is
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owing to the undersung genius James Whale, who translated it to film, it
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remains today more than well worth reading, for all the reasons we read
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novels, as well as for the much more limited question of its Luddite
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value: that is, for its attempt, through literary means which are
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nocturnal and deal in disguise, to *deny the machine.*
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Look, for example, at Victor's account of how he assembles and animates
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his creature. He must, of course, be a little vague about the details,
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but we're left with a procedure that seems to include surgery,
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electricity (though nothing like Whale's galvanic extravaganzas),
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chemistry, even, from dark hints about Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus,
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the still recently discredited form of magic known as alchemy. What is
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clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt Through the Neck, is
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that neither the method nor the creature that results is mechanical.
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This is one of several interesting similarities between ''Frankenstein''
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and an earlier tale of the Bad and Big, ''The Castle of Otranto''
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(1765), by Horace Walpole, usually regarded as the first Gothic novel.
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For one thing, both authors, in presenting their books to the public,
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used voices not their own. Mary Shelley's preface was written by her
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husband, Percy, who was pretending to be her. Not till 15 years later
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did she write an introduction to ''Frankenstein'' in her own voice.
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Walpole, on the other hand, gave his book an entire made-up publishing
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history, claiming it was a translation from medieval Italian. Only in
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his preface to the second edition did he admit authorship.
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THE novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal origin: both
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resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming. Mary Shelley, that ghost-story
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summer in Geneva, trying to get to sleep one midnight, suddenly beheld
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the creature being brought to life, the images arising in her mind
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''with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.'' Walpole had
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awakened from a dream, ''of which, all I could remember was, that I had
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thought myself in an ancient castle . . . and that on the uppermost
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bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.''
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In Walpole's novel, this hand shows up as the hand of Alfonso the Good,
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former Prince of Otranto and, despite his epithet, the castle's resident
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Badass. Alfonso, like Frankenstein's creature, is assembled from pieces
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- sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, all of them, like the hand,
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quite oversized - which fall from the sky or just materialize here and
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there about the castle grounds, relentless as Freud's slow return of the
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repressed. The activating agencies, again like those in
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''Frankenstein,'' are non-mechanical. The final assembly of ''the form
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of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude,'' is achieved through
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supernatural means: a family curse, and the intercession of Otranto's
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patron saint.
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The craze for Gothic fiction after ''The Castle of Otranto'' was
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grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier
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mythical time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways
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more and less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon
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a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so.
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Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly
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formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the
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Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. Blake's dark Satanic
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mills represented an old magic that, like Satan, had fallen from grace.
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As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism and
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nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife,
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for salvation - bodily resurrection, if possible - remained. The
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Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening were only two
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sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front
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which included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the
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Gothic novel. Each in its way expressed the same profound unwillingness
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to give up elements of faith, however ''irrational,'' to an emerging
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technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing.
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''Gothic'' became code for ''medieval,'' and that has remained code for
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''miraculous,'' on through Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of-the-century tarot
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cards, space opera in the pulps and the comics, down to ''Star Wars''
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and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery.
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TO insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of
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its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly
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and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in
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transcendent doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933)
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becomes your classic Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the movie, you
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recall, goes: ''Well, the airplanes got him.'' ''No . . . it was Beauty
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killed the Beast.'' In which again we encounter the same Snovian
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Disjunction, only different, between the human and the technological.
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But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the laws of nature - of
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space, time, thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself - then we
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risk being judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently Serious.
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Being serious about these matters is one way that adults have
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traditionally defined themselves against the confidently immortal
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children they must deal with. Looking back on ''Frankenstein,'' which
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she wrote when she was 19, Mary Shelley said, ''I have an affection for
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it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were
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but words which found no true echo in my heart.'' The Gothic attitude in
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general, because it used images of death and ghostly survival toward no
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more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged
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not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the
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only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say,
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closely defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance
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novels, love conquers all. In whodunitsses we know better. We say, ''But
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the world isn't like that.'' These genres, by insisting on what is
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contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined
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under the label ''escapist fare.''
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This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which
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the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of
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literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as
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important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more
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important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had
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been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy
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years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures,
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science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges,
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in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.
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By 1945, the factory system - which, more than any piece of machinery,
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was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution - had been
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extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket
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program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major
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gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might
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plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have
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watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems
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acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An
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unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure
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body counts has become - among those who, particularly since 1980, have
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been guiding our military policies - conventional wisdom.
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To people who were writing science fiction in the 50's, none of this was
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much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come
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up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most
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irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in
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a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold
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war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different
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direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more
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humanistic concerns - exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios,
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paradoxes and games with space/ time, wild philosophical questions -
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most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a
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definition of ''human'' as particularly distinguished from ''machine.''
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Like their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back
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yearningly to another age - curiously, the same Age of Reason which had
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forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.
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But we now live, we are told, in the Computer Age. What is the outlook
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for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile
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attention as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers of all
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descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors. Machines have
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already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of
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Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and
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stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus
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that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward
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conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the
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logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible. If this is
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so, Luddites may at last have come to stand on common ground with their
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Snovian adversaries, the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed
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to have the ''future in their bones.'' It may be only a new form of the
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perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the
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deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer's
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ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most
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good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will
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cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for
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everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk -
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realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.
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THE word ''Luddite'' continues to be applied with contempt to anyone
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with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites
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today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable
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machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D.
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Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent
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power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up
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against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed,
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although Ike didn't put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep
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tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data
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revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people
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any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to
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watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of
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research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology
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and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable,
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and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be
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caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to
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look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as
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Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord
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Byron's mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers
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of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our
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own revolutionary origins. It begins:
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*As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
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Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
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So we, boys, we
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Will die fighting, or live free,
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And down with all kings but King Ludd\!*
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