Nowtopian

I’m sitting in an old 1830s farmhouse near the border between New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It’s over 90° and quite humid, as it has been since I arrived five days ago. It seems the heat wave will only intensify in the next days. I spent a lot of time here in the 1980s and early 1990s before my daughter was born and then when she was a child we spent most summers here. I passed through once in the early 2000s, but haven’t spent time here for more than 25 years. It’s delightful to be with my granddaughters, who are now 7 and 4 and at the peak of enjoyment for a lazy summer in New England on a sprawling farm with a swimming pool, birds and bugs galore, and plenty of attentive adults to engage with as needed. I feel quite blessed to have this time with them, it passes SO quickly, and they are growing emotionally and intellectually by leaps and bounds. It’s great fun to watch it up close.

Salisbury Beach on a 90 degree day in July…

Discovering a baby bird in the barn…

Meanwhile, I’ve been groping towards writing something for my blog. I haven’t felt uninspired exactly. More that I’m lacking focus. I’ve read another ten books that I think deserve discussion and analysis as I usually do here. But unlike some times when the connections between the books seem clear and what I have to say helps link them into a larger (hopefully cohering) essay, my thoughts have not been gelling this time.

I attended a gathering of neo-Luddites at the Blue Mountain Center in the first week of June. Perhaps I should clarify that Luddism doesn’t mean what most people take it to mean: an uncritical knee-jerk refusal or rejection of all technology or “progress.” That would be a meaningless position. As Brian Merchant makes clear in his excellent Blood in the Machine that I talked about in a previous post, the actual workers in early 1800s England who attacked various factories and machines were quite selective. They went after machines that they identified as worsening their lives and making their exploitation more extreme. They did not attack all machinery, and actually were adept at choosing technologies that improved their lives and made their work lives more pleasant, more endurable. It was primarily a class struggle against those who owned the new factories and were imposing new machinery to speed up and intensify the work process without taking into account the effects on those who would run the machines. Ultimately the original movement (under the name of a mythological General Ned Ludd) was brutally crushed by the British government using capital punishment for all sorts of relatively trivial property crimes. Since the 1810s, the term ‘Luddite’ has been thrown at any and every group or individual who suggests that the decisions about technologies, labor processes, economic organization, etc. are misguided and should be critically considered. The idea that we have taken wrong paths again and again in the interests of private profit can hardly be controversial at this stage in history. And yet, every challenge that arises from anyone who doesn’t own enough wealth to make unilateral decisions that affect us all is met with derision and the dismissive term “Luddite!” In its slightly watered down version, critics are accused of standing in the way of Progress. (Read my “The Progress Club: 1934 and Class Memory” for a clear look at how this worked in San Francisco’s 20th century history.)

I anticipated meeting super interesting people at the Blue Mountain Center meeting—which I did—but I did not imagine we would find enough commonality that we’d leave there with a shared mission. As it turns out, most of the attendees endorsed a two-part agenda to follow through on. Part one, that I participated in, focused on finding a way to document and record the history of the past half century of tech criticism and neo-Luddite actions. This might include an extensive internal bibliography (since so many of the folks in the larger community already have huge libraries and have produced so much interesting writing and other works of tech criticism), as well as an annotated selected bibliography to publish online that would be a convenient “one-stop shop” for those who are beginning the exploration of these themes. The future website should include histories of past conferences, past anthologies, past publications, as well as documenting the ongoing campaigns that are fundamental challenges to the direction of technological development in our current era—I frame it as a battle over the direction of the General Intellect. Whether we’re talking about the overarching challenge to the petro-chemical industries who are primarily responsible for the unfolding climate catastrophe, cancer epidemic, and much of the biodiversity collapse too, or the burgeoning efforts to challenge the rollout of AI in the context of a rapacious surveillance capitalism dominated by a few monopoly tech firms, or the global (and tech worker) rejection of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza using state-of-the-art armaments paid for by U.S. taxpayers or produced by the only dynamic sector in Israel’s domestic economy, war tech. There are many more examples of movements “from below” contesting the design and uses of technologies, the purposes to which our shared technosphere is put. Biomedical research is another area that is presented as a benign series of technological breakthroughs, but simmering within and without are social actors who reject the resurgent eugenicist agendas bolstering much of this work, who recognize the absurd patriarchal and heteronormative assumptions that underly all of modern medicine. Peasant movements connecting with agroecologists are crossing the global north-south boundaries to contest the multinational grain and drug companies who dominate an unsustainable and ecocidal industrial agricultural system. And so on.

My granddaughters’ great-great-grandfather was Al Capp, cartoonist of the L’il Abner strip that was extremely popular from the 1930s to the 1970s. Here in 1948 he introduced his metaphor for generalized abundance, the Shmoo!

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