Destruct Design

   For Lebbeus Woods and destruct-designers at NJIT:


   Wall Street Journal, April 12, 1996, pp. B1, B3.


   Digital Age Spawns 'Neo-Luddite' Movement

   By G. Pascal Zachary


   Let others groan under the weight of their electronic mail
   and jabber into their cellular phones. A small but ardent
   segment of the populace is having none of it. Scott Savage
   and his family have chosen to abandon most of the trappings
   of modern technology. Three years ago, when they got rid of
   their radio, "there was this tremendous silence at first,
   and we didn't know what to do," says Mr. Savage, a
   36-year-old grant writer who lives in eastern Ohio. "Then
   we started bringing home songbooks from the library and
   singing in the kitchen." The lack of recorded music "makes
   us all less self-conscious and willing to sing a lot more."

   While most Americans strain to keep pace with electronic
   innovations, the radio-free Savages also live without a
   telephone, television, computer and even electricity. They
   say their decision has strengthened their family ties and
   made them more self-reliant and appreciative of nature.

   "This is a religious journey for us," says Mr. Savage, who
   with his wife converted six years ago to an austere brand
   of the Quaker faith from mainstream Protestantism.

   Nobody tracks theil numbers, but a backlash appears to be
   gaining strength among those overwhelmed by the pace of
   change and unwilling to discard old, cherished ways.

   Some extremists reject technology. Unabomber suspect
   Theodore J. Kaczynski lived without electricity or running
   water until his arrest last week in Montana.

   But plenty of solid citizens also refuse to join the march
   of progress. Their movement is in no way monolithic; it
   embraces a panoply of views and partisans of many stripes:
   radical environmentalists, Internet debunkers, opponents of
   genetic engineering and biotechnology, the Amish and other
   spiritual traditionalists and right-to-death activists who
   reject life-extending technologies for the terminally ill.

   The one common thread may be an unwillingness to treat
   technology as an abstraction, says Carroll W. Pursell Jr.,
   an historian of technology at Case Western Reserve
   University in Cleveland. "After all," he says, "there are
   different machines and tools. You can accept one and reject
   another."

   For all their variety, most opponents of technology
   acknowledge common historical roots, harkening back to the
   early 19th-century English weavers who broke textile
   machinery, apparently at the urging of their leader, Ned
   Lud.

   "The original Luddites made bad choices in resorting to
   violence, but they were trying to protect their way of life
   and so are we," says Mr. Savage, who this weekend is
   convening a "Luddite Congress" in Barnsville, Ohio, a rural
   part of the state where many Amish live. The gathering is
   expected to draw a few hundred "new" Luddites, who are
   being encouraged to travel there by train. Photographs and
   tape-recordings of the proceedings won't be permitted, but
   a stenographer will record the discussions, which will be
   held in a century-old, brick meeting house.

   "Even as the rush of technology is gaining speed, there is
   more questioning of it," says Jerry Mander, program
   director of the Deep Ecology Folmdation, a San Francisco
   philanthropic group. Ten years ago, the personal computer
   and video-cassette recorder were household novelties.
   Today, few homes offer refuge from digital intruders:
   pagers, fax machines, call-waiting signals and cell phones.

   In some quarters, that's led to a growing willingness "to
   poke fun at technology, to point out the gap between its
   promise and the reality," says Clifford Stoll, an Oakland
   computer-security sleuth who contends the Internet leads to
   social isolation and a breakdown of community.

   Others simply cling doggedly to low-tech tools. Book editor
   Bill Henderson, of Wainscott, N.Y., has formed the Lead
   Pencil Club, and has published a compendium of advice from
   members on how to live "contraption-free in a computer-
   crazed world." Steven Leveen, who publishes the Levenger
   mail-order catalog, sets great store by the fountain pen.
   Delighting in what he calls the "ritual" of refilling it
   from a bottle of ink, Mr. Leveen began hand-writing most of
   his business correspondence a year ago. He apparently has
   plenty of company: He has watched in arnazement as
   Levenger's sales of fountain pens tripled to $5 million in
   1995.

   Aversion to technology can be part of a spiritual quest for
   a simpler, more fulfilling life. Others -- often social
   critics who hold forth in academia and in the media --
   don't necessarily feel compelled to forgo modern
   conveniences in order to question the implications of
   technological change.

   "Some of us are focused more on the critique of technology,
   while others are more focused on living," says Chellis
   Glendinning, a psychologist in New Mexico who gave the
   movement a boost five years ago when she wrote a
   "neo-Luddite" manifesto that appeared in the Utne Reader.

   But many neo-Luddites share an attraction to an austere,
   back-to-the-land life. "There's a profound anti-urbanism in
   a lot of self-styled Luddism, a deep pastoralism at work,"
   says Iain Boal, a geography professor at the University of
   California at Berkeley who has studied the movement.

   "The Amish are in some sense an ideal, because they combine
   a rejection of technology with a spiritual attachment to
   the land that I think is essential," says Kirkpatrick Sale,
   an environmentalist and historian of the Luddite movement
   who lives in Manhattan.

   Mr. Sale's own brand of Luddism is symbolically aligned
   with that of the original Luddites. Last week, before
   delivering a lecture at the New Jersey Institute of
   Technology, he smashed a personal computer with a
   sledgehammer.

   Even those who share Mr. Sale's views don't always approve
   of his theatrics, arguing that they simply reinforce the
   negative image of Luddites as foolish tilters at windmills.
   He retorts that such tactics are a "swift and symbolic way"
   of conveying that "the control of technology is at this
   moment absolutely undemocratic," in that it rests with
   corporations, rather than individuals and communities.

   The sense that people are serving machines, and not the
   other way around, is what most irks Luddite syrnpathizers.
   To describe what, in her view, are technology's ravages on
   both mind and body, Ms. Glendinning has coined the term
   "technoaddiction." And with a nod to 12-step programs, she
   exhorts the stricken to "recover from Western
   civilization."

   [End]