by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1998 by Michael Finley

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Comments on this column:

I read with shared comradery (please excuse the Marxist pun) your article "You know you're a Luddite when...." However, your facts are incorrect. Ned Ludd was not fictional. You can read all about this flesh and blood trade unionist of the first 2 decades of this century in "The Making of the English Working Class" by E.P. Thompson (an English Senior Lecturer in the Extra-Mural Dept. of Leeds University) or so says the book jacket. It is not a novel.

That being said, I can say that sometimes technology gets to be too much. The truth is that while it is often feared that technology will put us all out of work, "you can be replaced by a button", many of us have jobs because of it. So far, Ludd's fears were unfounded. Technology has created more jobs then it has eliminated (good jobs too, if you have the right training).

The performance artist Laurie Anderson sings of the angel struggling to go back and set right all that was wrong "and the storm, blowing the angel, backwards, into the future, is called progress."

John R. Weiss

I'll go with you to Innisfree. We can buy tickets online, download some maps, buy books from Amazon.com... Well, anyway, I'm sending a nice photo of Innisfree, with a note saying that Yeats also hoped to give up women and love.

Rhonda Keith

I'm afraid I'm farther gone than you. When I think of unplugging everything and going out under a starry sky, I feel more like Anne Sexton in her poem, "Starry Night" (written off the van Gogh painting):

The town does not exist except where one black-haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky. The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive. Even the moon bulges in its orange irons to push children, like a god, from its eye. The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night, sucked up by that great dragon, to split from my life with no flag, no belly, no cry. Kathleen Marotta

Having been in the computer business since the early days of mainframes - and now a Personal Computer consultant and instructor - I shouldn't quarrel with something that's provided my lifelong bread and butter. But I am very aware of the computer's harmful effects. To me the most evident has been the way the PC has put us in the position of idolizing speed. The faster computer is better; so is the faster CPU and the accelerated video card. As a result, I think, we've become increasingly impatient. I know I feel it in myself. I don't like to wait for people to finish speaking sentences, and when my beginning senior-citizen students are having trouble manipulating a mouse I want to grab it out of their hands and move it myself.

And of course I find it harder to relax. After a few minutes in a soft chair I've reached the limits of my patience. Time to get up and accomplish something.

Is it all the PC's fault? Yup, I think so. Or most of it, anyway. Have you noticed the same thing?

Frank F.

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A Master of the Wired World?

I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.

What's remarkable is that this collection of manifestos about the new age a'dawning contains proclamations by Tony Blair, Al Gore, Charles Handy, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler ... and me.

Anne C. Leer, editor

To order, click here. Discounted price is $18.87 from Amazon.

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Luddite, n., a follower of Ned Ludd, fictional 18th century rebel against automation. 2. Someone who feels oppressed by technology generally.

Many of us seem ambivalent on the sea of technology these days.

Something is up. I see an entire generation checking out of the technology race, and puttering over to calmer waters. We who so loved computers and networks are turning, many of us, into Luddites. Which is a little alarming.

To aid in diagnosis I have compiled this list of symptoms, to gauge your own LQ (Ludd Quotient):

If you are able to keep a level head when all around you are frantic about acquiring the latest upgrade, or the most powerful processor, why then, you are probably becoming a Luddite.

Instead of having more features on MS Word, you wish there were fewer features. Just enough to do the basic job, without the unnecessary bells, whistles, and animated paper clips.

If, having heard all the promises of the Pentium III, and IE 5, you take a deep breath and say to yourself, "That sounds great, but I can live without it," chances are you are well on your way to becoming a Luddite.

When an associate boasts that his wireless infrared always-on Windows CE autosynchronizing smartphone with e-mail and web news allows him continuous digital three hundred and sixty degree contact with everything and everyone, do you find you want to make realtime contact with his forehead with an analog ninety degree two-by-four?

Have you come to equate information technology, despite its terrific potential for communication and self-expression, with a disturbing loss of individuality, the effective barcoding of the human race?

When you hear the Lexus commercial on the radio ("Dedicated to the relentless pursuit of perfection"), do you want to say, "Get a life, preferably a non-anal one?"

Does your dog understand your commands better than your listserver?

If you think the joke about Bill Gates' wedding night, in which his bride exclaims, "Now I know why it's called Microsoft!" is funny, the odds are good that you are becoming a Luddite.

Do you like the longevity and connectivity of modern life, but feel you could do without seven e-mailed copies of an exclusive stock tip for "the next killer Internet IPO" from a pirate brokerage in Sri Lanka with forged headers?

Does it sometimes seem to you that, because of technology, the average person in the world today wields the throw weight of 250 people in your grandfather's day, without a neutrino of your grandfather's judgment and common sense?

If you have considered it might be more fun to watch your Tamagotchi pet curl up and die than feed and water it, there is the possibility that you may be becoming a Luddite.

Have you ever cleared your desktop to clean it, and gazed for a moment at the rich natural wood grain underneath, and considered the possibilities?

Do you sometimes get confused about whether you're supposed to stop and smell the roses, or stop and smell the coffee? Have you ever tried to stop and smell both at the same time? Where were you?

Have you ever, after a long day of computing, switched one component off after another, and listed as the hum, the whine, the buzz and the drone died away, and all you could hear was the blessed silence?

Finally, you may be becoming a Luddite if all your life, you have thought of poems as a waste of time, but now, reading the following poem ("The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats), a part of you feels half inclined to unplug everything, and go stand under a starry sky:

Mike Finley has a birch-bark wallpaper file for download at http://mfinley.com/birch-bark.bmp