Luddism: Revisited

Flashback to fall of 1998: a younger Paul is a college senior thrashing violently against his impending entry into the "Real world" of work, revulsion, and compromise. All summer long, during breaks from his cubicle-oriented existence as a design intern at a software company in the Nightmare Suburbs, he's been reading the wildest of wild written work by wildmen anarchist authors like John Zerzan, Hakim Bey, Feral Faun, Bob Black, Guy Debord, and others. His general conclusion: technology sucks, work is for suckers.

That fall, as a design student, he was required to spend more and more "lab" time at the computer wokring on design projects, putting up with finnicky technology and generally confining his once-wild gaze to a 21' rectangle of glass and pixels. In reaction, he skipped class, wandered the woods, broke bottles, drank too much, trespassed, stalked, screamed, howled, and smashed a window with his bare hands. The gleamin maw of Info-Capital awaited him, and he wasn't going down without a fight.

Flash-forward 5 years: Paul's favorite non-wild (anti-wild) philosopher hires him on as a designer, gives him a laptop, funds his cell phone, kicks him a free iPod, and throws him into the mix of an exciting young internet company, idealistic winding its way through fields of Capital in search of something greater.

Technology = information = noosphere = progress = evolution = spirit = destiny.

But Paul still hates technology, or rather, what technology requires of him: Squinting. Pinching. Sitting. Shifting unfortably. Granted, an opposite form of movement, like hiking, is equally painful and as inherently meaningless, only in different ways. But really, is his techno-sedentary paradigm truly required by evolution, truly a natural expression of spirit-in-becoming, truly the next, Mac-powered step on the road to worldcentric destiny?

Paul ain't so sure....