THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 12, 1995 TAG: 9507110018
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: KEITH MONROE
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
We're all swimming in a sea of technology these days, and sooner or later everyone begins to feel they're in over their head.
Some people would just as soon ban the phone and go back to the days of long letters. Lots of people think the speed of jet travel is undercut by its discomfort and annoyances and wish they could return to the romantic (or at least romanticized) days of the Orient Express and the ocean liner. They don't imagine traveling steerage, of course.
Some people cling to manual typewriters and refuse to process their words. And even some computer enthusiasts occasionally get the willies when they fall down a gopher hole and wish they could return to the days of the card catalog.
In other words, there's a point beyond which everyone entertains Luddite thoughts. Ned Ludd may have been a mythical figure, but his followers in the England of 1811 weren't. They thought the knitting machines of the early industrial revolution were causing low wages and putting them out of work. They were, too. Their answer was to go around breaking the machines, but it didn't work.
The machines were a juggernaut whose inexorable conquest couldn't be stopped. Still, there's a little Luddite is all of us. In The Magnificent Ambersons, young George Minifer exclaims that ``automobiles are a useless nuisance.'' As such, ``they had no business to be invented.'' One of their inventors agrees that George may turn out to be right, but it doesn't matter. ``They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different. . .
Engineers have a saying to the effect that when it's time to railroad, somebody will railroad. They mean that many inventions are less the result of individual genius than of slowly accreting communal knowledge. When enough is known to create light bulbs or atomic bombs or personal computers, they will be created. If not by Edison, Oppenheimer or Jobs and Wozniak, then by someone else.
Besides, when we rail against progress and modern times, inventions we wish never had been invented, we often don't mean it. On Masterpiece Theater, the Edwardian era looks like a dream of the good life - no modern warfare, no televised O.J. trial, no stinking traffic jams, a life more gracious and far less lewd and rude.
But if we could be transported back to those days of supposed calm. We might be shocked to discover it wasn't all watercolors and piano recitals. The plumbing would horrify us and the streets leave us speechless. The servants and factory workers lived in a squalor we'd find intolerable, and the press in those golden days was yellow.
The irony of being a Luddite in a technological age has been pointedly demonstrated by the Unabomber. This violent crackpot has been blowing people up for almost 20 years - scientists, researchers, computer types, engineers and even an ad man.
It turns out he's got a gripe against our techno-times and wants to turn back the clock, perhaps to the hourglass. He doesn't like mass production, mass media or mass man. Yet his method of protest is technologically sophisticated - high-tech high explosives.
Even more ironic is his demand to have his manifesto widely disseminated. He wants it printed in The New York Times or The Washington Post. In effect, he's admitting that even protesters against technology must lodge their protests by means of it. To get out his anti-technology message, he wants to employ the technological marvel of a modern automated newspaper printing-and-distribution system. The alternatives are even more sophisticated, posting his screed on the Internet or broadcasting it over radio or television.
No matter how the Unabomber tries to spread his gospel, he's going to have to use technology to do it unless he peddles his peeves door to door or issues his warnings from horseback like Paul Revere. All of us who occasionally bemoan the mixed blessings of technology are in the same boat. We can't live with the stuff, but without it we'd be sunk. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is an editorial writer. by CNB