<nettime> postmumford digest [armitage, hirsh]

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John Armitage <john.armitage@unn.ac.uk>
     Where  have all the Luddites gone?
jesse hirsh <jesse@tao.ca>
     Regarding Mumford

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From: John Armitage <john.armitage@unn.ac.uk>
Subject: Where  have all the Luddites gone?
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 15:13:38 +0100

Hi folks
Following on Sean's bibliography, how about two cheers at least for the
Luddite tendency, somehow lost in the flood of the 1980s?:

Frank Webster and Kevin Robins' (1986) Information Technology: A Luddite
Analysis. Ablex, New York.

Theodore Rozak's (1986) The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers
and the True Art of Thinking. Cambridge. Lutterworth.

David Noble's (1984) Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial
Automation.

Three classics of Luddism in my book. 

Kirkpatrick Sale (1995) made an heroic effort to get the Luddite view heard
above the clamour in the mid 90s with his Rebels Against the Future: The
Luddites and their War on the Industrial revolution- Lessons for the
Computer Age. Addison.

Since then, not much, unless others know different?

Best

John
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John Armitage
Head of Multidisciplinary Studies
School of Social, Political, 
Economic and Social Sciences
University of Northumbria
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 8ST, UK.
Tel: 0191 227 4971
Fax: 0191 227 4654
E-mail: (w) john.armitage@unn.ac.uk
(h) j.armitage@technologica.demon.co.uk
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 11:03:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: jesse hirsh <jesse@tao.ca>
Subject: Regarding Mumford


I wrote a reflection piece after I read Mumford's Myth of the Machine
titled: "A Faith for the Possessive Individual"

http://jesse.openflows.org/mumford.html

Here's an excerpt:

"So what is the Internet? A wicked pyramid scheme; the perpetual war
economy; a get-rich-quick scam with free pornography; a fundamentalism for
fundamentalists; a faith for the possessive individual. Like all tools
that one would use, its shapes are that which make it, and how we make it
shapes us. Which in this case is an issue of identity (communications) and
possession (exchange). Created for war, and distributed by command, the
Internet is the autonomous agent of Capital accumulation, with the primary
commodity being intellectual property, in all its many forms."

...

"Of course this is not to suggest that reality has become fragmented,
rather it is society that is fragmenting, while reality remains unified in
the metaphor of mind (resident in the cultural construction of the
Internet). If we were to imagine this mind as manifest in the material
world, it would be a `MegaShoppingMall'. It's primary function would be as
a commercial space, designed to alienate, and constructed to contain
consumers, while capturing their capital. The faithful in this world, are
those who constantly accumulate anything they can, more often than not,
for no reason whatsoever (Pokeman). The power in this system exists
outside of it, parasitically removing the profit and value of the world.

The only real interaction the inhabitants of this world have with those
who control it, are via the security cameras in the ceiling, and the
marketing data generated by their purchasing patterns. It is a
self-contained, self-reflective, self-interpreting prison of habit and
anxiety. Its primary means of control are in fact the conformity and
totality of its commercialism. Anything can (and will) be bought and
sold.

Capitalism, as the system of economic control, fetishizes its own process
of commodification, offering it (consumerism) as a religion unto itself,
(foolishly) thinking that it can subject said religion to its (political)
economic concerns and mechanisms of control. Culturally this religion is
articulated as `Virtual Reality', which is another way of saying: unto
each person shall be granted their own reality, if that is, the price is
right, and their credit is good. The promise of this religion is that
anything is possible, and that the boundaries of reality have been
extended so far as to enable the instant actualization of that which we
can imagine."

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