The other day I thanked the New York Times for proving my point. Now it’s The Guardian’s turn, albeit for a different point. I’m sure that by now many of you roll your eyes and think, Reagan like, “there he goes again” every time I write about the New Luddites. A sane person would have a hard time believing such people actually exist and that Irreal isn’t just indulging itself with a long-running gag.
That’s what you’d think but you’d be wrong. These people must assuredly exist and in case you think I’m exaggerating I offer this nifty little opinion piece by Ben Tarnoff appearing in the Guardian. In it, Tarnoff declares that we must “decomputerize” and explicitly urges a new Luddism to accomplish that.
His reasons for that are the usual but he gets a bit confused. He keeps conflating surveillance and computers. To be sure computers make surveillance easier just as cars make it easier for criminals to escape after a robbery1, yet no one—at least no one serious—suggests that we go back to the horse and buggy. It apparently never occurred to him that you can have surveillance without computers and computers without surveillance. If the problem is surveillance—and it is a problem—then fight the surveillance not one of the tools used by the snoopers.
Of course, when Tarnoff isn’t confusing computers with surveillance, he’s carrying on about all the power those computers use. But as I mentioned in my post on saving the world with smartphones, electricity use has been flat (at least in the US) for the last decade. As with smartphones, the New Luddites like to go on and on about how much power some piece of technology uses but they never consider how much power its use saves. It’s not hard to think of ways that using computers saves resources (teleconferencing is an obvious example) but you have to be willing to look.
I do wish these people would repair to their farms and live off the land or whatever it is they want to do and leave the rest of us in peace. But no, they have to drag us all along. I, for one, am not interested in outdoor toilets, dirty water and typhus, 19th century medicine, famines, or a life expectancy of 50 so I’m going to remain in the modern world. With my computers.
Footnotes:
Indeed, cars were once decried by a judge for making it easier for criminals to escape crime scenes.