Neo-Ludditism

There is a smear afoot that casts people (like me) who do not like what falls under the vague rubric of “technology” as Luddites. The term refers to people who – summoning Websters – “organized to destroy manufacturing machinery between 1811 and 1816 to protest the displacement of skilled labor, wage reductions and poor working conditions caused by industrialization.” 

That is not quite the same thing as what is suggested about people such as myself.

I very much like indoor plumbing, hot and cold running water, electricity and refrigeration, to mention just a few. I also love cars, especially my 1976 Trans-Am. What I do not like is a refrigerator that does more than just keep my food cold. I do not like “smart” refrigerators that connect to the Internet, or that have LCD touchscreens or other such unnecessary electronic affectations that do not make a refrigerator cool better or or cost less and last longer.

The same goes for washing machines. I like clean clothes and I like not having to wash clothes by hand. The washing machines made 30 and 40 years ago did this work superlatively. New washing machines often do not wash as well – or last as long. They have electronic  displays and controls rather than simple, durable mechanical controls and no displays. I don’t need a display.

I need clean clothes.

I also like a washing machine – and dryer – that still works fine even though it was bought 30 years ago. This used to be generally true about home appliances. People like me who were kids in the ’70s and ’80s grew up, went to college and came back home to visit and the same washer and drier that mom and dad bought in the ’70s and ’80s was still washing and drying in the ’90s and 2000s. If you were there, you remember. Today’s overteched appliances might last five years. Then one day a chip or fails and it’s not worth replacing because the cost is half as much as a new appliance and it’ll probably just glitch again. So you throw it away and buy – probably on credit – a new over-teched appliance to replace it.

Hot and cold running water is a marvelous thing. I have no interest in building a wood fire to heat a tub of water in order to get myself clean. But I have little (make that no) interest in “technology” that decides how much hot water I’m allowed to use or how hot the water gets. Just as I do not want a toilet that doesn’t flush what I deposit in it without multiple flushes. Toilets worked better in the pre-tech past than they do now. Perhaps you have noticed – and also that this is true in general. Car AC systems used to work better, too – in that they got much colder (and much faster) when they used freon (R12) to cool you down. Compressors got smaller and the refrigerant used cooled less effectively. Am I a Luddite for preferring the meat chiller cold of my ’76 Trans-Am’s Freon using AC system to the merely cool breeze generated by the AC systems of the new cars I test drive?

How about preferring that the AC in my TA is controlled by a mechanical (slide) interface rather than tap/swipe icons on an LCD screen? Does a tap/swipe interface cool any better or offer any functional advantage? I can manually move the slide from warmer to cooler faster than you just read that sentence. It’s a positive interface that’s intuitively superior in that moving the slide from left to right (from cooler to warmer) is something the brain and finger registers more easily than tapping an icon to do the same, which requires watching while you’re doing it because the absence of feel – of left or right motion – provides no feedback. The mechanical slide and similarly simple switches and buttons are inherently much more durable, too – and if they do fail, they are inherently inexpensive to repair or replace. A power window controlled by a body control module is not.

I prefer metal keys over push-button ignition, too – because I don’t find it a chore to insert a metal key into a lock. Also, I like that metal keys are (once again) much more durable than keyless (electronic) fobs and (once again) far less expensive to replace if you ever need to. I could go on.

Is it Ludditism to prefer simpler, less expensive, more reliable – and less intrusive – over more complex (without meaningful benefit), more expensive, less reliable and more intrusive?

Has the smartphone improved our lives over the corded wall phone? The latter could not make calls from outside the house – unless you had a really long cord – but it lasted for decades and (this is really important) it stayed in the house so that when you left the house, you were looking at the world rather than staring at a screen. Kids played outside. Today, they tap and swipe inside. Social media has gutted socialization. “Customer service” means responding to AI voice prompts like a bipedal Pavlovian dog. We are watched by inhuman eyes everywhere we go.

The Unabomber – if you remember him – warned us about “technology” in extremis. Meaning, “technology” that develops beyond making ours lives easier and instead, making our lives more exasperating (as well as expensive and unreliable). In other words, “technology” for its own sake.

We are – as the sign on the wall says – there.

Frank Herbert, who wrote the Dune series, also foresaw what would happen to us when “thinking machines” replaced thinking humans. In the novel, human beings revolted against the thinking machines. These humans were not Luddites. They used technology. But they understood that technology can get out of hand and when it does, it is not Ludditism (neo or otherwise) to rise up and smash those machines.

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