Rage against the machine

Neo-Luddite author Nicols Fox's pious embrace of the simple life makes technological utopianism look good.

By Wesley Yang

Feb. 3, 2003 |

Calling a product or idea "innovative" has become such a mark of praise, it's easy to forget that for most of the world's history, it was anything but. Until only a couple of hundred years ago, "revolution" meant motion like a spinning top: Things went around and came back to the same place they were before. Everything worth preserving or fighting for was "ancient," while everything "new" tended to mean trouble.

All that began to change in the 18th century, when big upheavals -- a political one in America, and a commercial, industrial one in Britain -- began to shake up just about every aspect of human life around the globe. Sensible people used to know that not all revolutions deliver what they promise, and all revolutions, of every kind, bring unintended consequences. The good they do never comes without a heavy price.

Nicols Fox's new book, "Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives," is split between two entirely distinct impulses. One is a sensible skepticism regarding the continuing fast pace of technological revolution. The other is a destructive rebellion against progress that's become increasingly influential among those disillusioned with the effects of change.

Fox's book combines personal commentary and narrative with a broad analysis of the resistance to technology that appears in the writings of 19th century Romantics, American transcendentalism, John Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts tradition, environmentalism and the back to the land movement. It starts off with an appeal to common sense. If more people thought about the changes in the way we work, play, worship, socialize and eat that have occurred over the last 200 years, we'd see just how shoddy many of them are, she argues.

To take an easy example, compare the leisurely midday Mediterranean siesta to the burger passed through the drive-in window. We call the latter "convenience" -- but whose convenience are we really talking about? Our own, or that of our employers, who get to squeeze more work hours out of us in the interest of ever-increasing productivity?

The principle can be usefully extended to almost any facet of life, and Fox is at her best when she sticks to showing how the official ideology of progress prevents us from even asking whether these changes are worthwhile. The numerical "standard of living" (a measure of how much we can buy with the money we make) so often fails to reflect the true of quality of life, for example. Sometimes it seems as if they're inversely proportional. As our consumption and material wealth increase, so do other quantifiable indexes of our discontent -- the billions spent on drugs, therapies and treatments for stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, as well as on substitute gratifications like pornography. People complain about contemporary life, about working harder but feeling less rewarded, but few of us do anything about it.

Few of us know how to begin. We literally can't afford any serious reflection on the equations of technology with progress and of consumption with happiness. Our national prosperity is based on both. We are the buyer of last resort for all the world's exports, egged on by the extension of dubious consumer credit. When you search for alternatives and find them too costly to be viable -- If you don't have a car, how will you get to work? How will you buy your necessities if they're only sold at chain superstores on the highway? -- the point is really rammed home.

Then there's what this cycle of continuous growth does to the natural world. All of the basic resources that sustain life -- from air to water to soil to fisheries -- are threatened. As with the Social Security system, if business as usual continues, if either technological advance or new models of producing and consuming don't emerge, we're going to use it all up.

And here's where we arrive at the second impulse running through Fox's book -- the revolt against progress that has inspired an effort to reclaim the term "Luddite."

People usually deny being a Luddite just before launching into any criticism of technology. The historical Luddites didn't just resist machines, they smashed them. Literally. The Luddites were a group of highly skilled English weavers who attacked the mechanized looms that were about to replace their craft traditions and turn them into unskilled laborers. Their protest, beginning in 1811, lasted for several years before being snuffed out at the gallows. It didn't stop the rise of the factory system, but it created a potent and lasting legend.

It's easy to see the Luddites' appeal to critics of technology who've grown frustrated with the industrial free market system. The Luddites identified the cause of their troubles, and acted. They attacked machines, not people, and they only resorted to violence when peaceful attempts to preserve their way of life failed.

The acknowledged guiding influence of "Against the Machine" is Kirkpatrick Sale's "Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age," an important tract that helped inspire a highly visible wing of the anti-globalization movement, dubbed "eco-terrorists" by the media. Sale, a self-proclaimed "tribal anarcho-communalist," believes that after civilization's impending and inevitable collapse, self-sufficient tribes will settle in distinct bio-regions marked out by natural groupings of flora and fauna.

Sale's book was released in 1995 when the techno-utopianism of the emerging Internet culture and economy was on the rise, and it gave him a certain celebrity. Generally presented as a curiosity -- Here's a man who actually calls himself a Luddite, and he goes around smashing computers with a sledgehammer! -- Sale proved a savvy media presence with a formidable analysis of machine-age culture. He presented a clear and compelling case and wasn't afraid to draw big conclusions.

Next page: "Lifestyle Luddism": Living in a yurt with polished doorknobs