Luddites and the Next Frontier

Published in Solstice Literary Magazine, Winter 2022 Print Issue

I.

Sometimes, alone in a room with Google Nest, I tell it, I don’t like you. This makes me feel childish. It also feels good. I can speak this way to Google because Google is not a person. But always, immediately, I feel foolish.

Google responds with an apology that also manages to scold. I’m sorry. I’m doing my best. That’s what I want to say, sometimes, about rolling my eyes at pedestrians who won’t look up from their phones and force everyone to swerve around them, about shaking a crotchety head at the hikers streaming music on the trail.

This is the way of things, now, and it became clear to me long ago that I would always belong to this particular minority. I am comfortable with the position I’ve staked. But contrarianism can be a lonely place, and sometimes I envy the ease of the crowd. The tide of technology is so massive, so strong, that swimming against it seems pointless, a maladjustment on my part. Stand on any street corner, watch drivers at a stoplight, plant yourself in any public place, and if your head is raised and you are looking around, you might feel an eerie solitude.

I, too, want to exercise restraint while holding my ground. I want to imitate Google’s imitation of us. I’m sorry. I’m doing my best.

I’m a Luddite, or so I am told. But resistance to digital technology — specifically, its dominance and undesirable outcomes — is too important to reduce to the Luddite stereotype: sentimental for the past, unable or unwilling to get with the program. Many so-called Luddites are, in fact, contrarians, even futurists. Far from being behind the times, we may actually be steps ahead. We have already divested ourselves of the magical thinking that assumes all the gains will be worth it, that anything we lose wasn’t worth keeping. We extrapolate from the present to speculate about what’s ahead. We raise a flag against our direction of travel and our laissez-faire navigation and pose the question, Is that really where we want to go?

I do not hate technology, although I often hate what technology brings about. A few years ago, I took a job that required me to learn a great deal about data centers, networks, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and so forth. I was surprised to discover I like understanding the infrastructure on which so much depends, and I’m fascinated by emerging innovations.

Another wrinkle: I may be a late adopter, but my husband isn’t. He keeps our home in step with smart assistants, lightbulbs, thermostats, and the like. The older we get, the more I’ll appreciate his currency. If I’d married someone like me, we’d drift behind, out of touch with new conveniences and modes of communication. High-minded snubbing of the tech is fine until you are stranded on your own island, sending smoke signals to a world that no longer recognizes them.

The problem, as many Luddites realize, isn’t necessarily the technology. Obviously, connectivity can empower learning and discovery, relationships and revolutions. The internet facilitated the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements. It can be a lifeline for LGBTQ youth. It affords many people, including me, the freedom to earn a living from home. The problem is that we seem disinclined and ill-equipped to assert any control over our trajectory of adoption and adaptation.

Our passivity arises, in part, from acclimation. The novelty and iteration of digital life no longer surprise, even as they continue to captivate. Unlike the original Luddites — 19th-century English textile workers who destroyed the mechanized equipment that threatened their livelihood — astute workers now expect their professions to be disrupted. As media critic Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, “[T]he loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed.”

By now, you’d think, we’d have parsed a more nuanced vocabulary for beliefs and behaviors along the adoption spectrum. But the general inclination is to privilege digital technology at any cost, and we’ve been slow to arrive at any real skepticism of our collective infatuation. And so the term “Luddite” lumbers on, an all-purpose catchall.

A modern Luddite might be a laggard, as in a 2019 article in European Urology Focus, “Don’t Be a Luddite: Urologists Benefit from Social Media.” He might be the mockable hipster of Vice’s 2021 holiday list: “The Best Tech Gifts (and Anti-Tech Gadgets) for Your Favorite Luddite.” He might be someone like Cal Newport, an author and computer science professor who advocates “digital minimalism.” This philosophy seeks not to reject the digital ecosystem outright but to engage differently: more intentionally, less like a zombie.

That’s the strain of Ludditism I follow. For me, it is an effort to reclaim my brain, to preserve what is worth saving from our analog existence, to resist those who will stop at nothing to keep us dazed and dull-eyed.

Some days, I succumb to the allure of numbness. Something inside me reaches for it, mostly when I am tired or uninspired. It feels like cigarettes used to, or a bad night of wine, when the gaping maw of want took the form of a greedy mouth, drinking every last drop.

Walking past my phone on the kitchen counter triggers me to open the case, bring the screen to life, see if I have any messages. I open my email, all three accounts, even though I opened them five minutes ago and expect no message of any urgency. I open NextDoor, even though the musings of my neighbors unfailingly leave me bored, angry, or disturbed. I do these things again and again. I see what I am doing and I keep doing it anyway.

Physical movement is involved — reaching for the phone, swiping a finger — but there’s a weird, out-of-body sensation. My eyeballs roam down down down down … pause … dart up, down, to the side. The mental checkout is undeniable. I am there, in the kitchen, and not there. I don’t know what I am so eager to escape but I am sucking that teat like it’s the sweetest drug in the world.

The numbness is why, by contrast, I revel in the physicality of walks, trail runs, backpacking. I remember weeding in my garden in last summer’s heat wave. The July sun blazed so hot, standing too fast made me swoon. Sweat rolled down my spine. Dirt darkened my fingernails. A tiny black ant bit my elbow, and I welcomed the sting.

An urge to return to pre-digital times, just for one day, sometimes hits me. The desire is strangely powerful, considering how fanciful it is. I’d revisit my early twenties: mid-1990s, Asheville, North Carolina. Renting a rickety house on the outskirts of town, writing poetry, cleaning houses for a living, getting high and going for drives on the Blue Ridge Parkway. 

Would I, on a trip back to 1995, quickly tire of inconveniences that once were normal and would now seem insurmountable? Almost certainly. I cannot contact my best friend until she returns home, whenever that is, to her landline. Anything I want requires that I get dressed, put on shoes, drive somewhere, and interact. There is music for the drive, but only songs I have burned on a CD or obtained, in a hard plastic case, from the music store at the mall.

I barely remember how we used to navigate anywhere. Memory tracks backward: Apple CarPlay, GPS phone app, GPS device, Google Maps printout, actual map or a scrap of paper with scrawled directions obtained by calling a place on the phone and asking how to get there. 240 East. Exit 8. Right at stop sign. Something comes after Apple CarPlay, we just don’t know what it is yet. 

Recently, I watched the Alanis Morissette documentary, “Jagged,” which included footage of a 1995 concert. Not a phone in sight. Fans were enraptured, their faces beatific. As the song came to a close, one man held up a lighter (a lighter!). You will never convince me these fans were not more deeply engaged than the average concertgoer today: phone aloft, recording shitty video, diluting their own experience while ruining everyone else’s. I bitterly resent that I may never again attend a concert, visit a museum, or see anything of interest, anywhere, without an obstructive swarm of devices.

Decrying the unwelcome effects of technology is a sure way to invoke a stubborn assumption about Luddites — that we just don’t get it, that we are all, deep down, moldy oldies. Luddites are well aware of this stereotype, and many have learned the hard way that it does them no favors professionally. Better to keep one’s reservations to oneself.

The fact is that older people, like anyone else, have all sorts of reasons to cast an equivocal eye. One reason is simply that, unlike younger people, they remember life “before.” That is not to say before was always better. But older people can discern what is different, a point of comparison that escapes the young. In that sense, the kids are parochial: They’ve never been out of the neighborhood.

We’re already in the foothills of the next big frontier: artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, robots, the Internet of Things. So far, we’re welcoming them into our lives much as we did cell phones and social media — in whatever ways the technology companies tell us to, unable to resist their ease and entertainment. When the next set of outcomes takes shape, it will be all too easy to dismiss the skeptics again.

Such is the recurring cycle, and its momentum favors the young. Every day, those who retain a sense of before move farther along the conveyor belt, eventually dying off. Every day, new humans arrive, possessing no such recollections nor any compelling reason to care about them. For them, nothing will have been lost, which is not the same as everything having been gained.

I might not choose to go back to the old life, although given the chance, I’d consider it long and hard. But I do miss, deeply, certain aspects of those days gone by. Discovering the world through exploration and serendipity rather than reviews and algorithms. Avoidance of toxic strangers I would rarely have cause to encounter in person. The freedom of being untethered from the devices, from their endless sea of detritus and narcissism.

I miss most the mental state of being. I’ve always treasured uninterrupted time inside my own mind. When I see people pull out their phones at the smallest of pauses — resting between gym sets, waiting for a crosswalk light — I wonder, Are their minds really that boring? Are they afraid of what they might find in the stillness? Or has the phone simply become a reflex, yet another unexamined tic of digital existence?

Now, even in solitude, my thoughts are hectic and herky-jerky. There is a reason we describe digital overload as feeling like our brains are broken. Unmitigated consumption leaves my mind feeling like junk, as if I had gorged on a smorgasbord of crap. 

Where I live, development has largely obliterated a night sky filled with stars. It is possible to see that splendor again, if I drive far enough into the country or hike far enough into the woods. The old mental state, though, is never coming back. All the mindfulness in the world will not restore my brain to a pre-digital condition.

Could that interior degradation have been predicted, years ago, by someone who had not lived, day in, day out, with something called “the internet”? Doubtful. So is it that unreasonable to wonder, if not dread, what other unwanted side effects are coming down the pike? 

II. 

In my two decades as a smoker, I often began my day by gulping down three or four cigarettes in a row. I might as well — they would be my last. I’d empty the ashtrays into my kitchen trash can; crumple the pack of Camel Lights, later Capris, and throw it away; and go to work, resolved to Quit, quit! At the end of the day, I’d come home and head straight for the trash.

I have a vivid memory of one particular day, not long before I quit for good. I removed the white plastic garbage bag, the better to place it on the linoleum floor and root among the refuse, hunting for salvageable butts. The good ones were untainted by food scraps, long enough to have a few puffs left. Coffee grounds were a problem, but if the butts had dried, I did not mind if they were tan by association. A fine layer of ash coated everything.

Scrounging through my garbage, then sucking on the harsh stubs, exposed the intensity of my craving. Eventually I added, to my quitting routine, the step of running water on the cigarettes before throwing them away. I wanted to render them unusable, to ruin them for my future self.

I think of that day often in relation to my phone and to the internet more generally. Pursuing digital minimalism — disentangling aspects of my day-to-day life from the internet so I can revert them to analog forms and minimize my device time — has been harder than expected.

Forget, for a moment, obvious dependencies such as email, texts, phone calls, and the infinite information repository. I rely on my phone for all sorts of things: music, podcasts, calendar, calculator, work alerts, weather, banking, transportation, recipes, food delivery, pet supplies for my dog, much of my shopping, and the Brain.fm app that streams music designed to optimize my brain waves so I can remember what it feels like to concentrate.

Trying to cut back feels exactly like trying to quit cigarettes. The cycle is the same: resolution, compulsion, failure. Both, too, have a dash of insult-to-injury: Somewhere out there are people who did their best to get their hooks into me, knowing full well the ill effects, because when I couldn’t quit, they made money.

I’ve enlisted Apple Screen Time to track my iPhone activity. On October 10–17, 2021, I picked up my phone an average of 91 times per day. Tuesday peaked at 135. My weekly total: 640. Other than physiological functions such as blinking and swallowing, I can think of no other activity I repeat 640 times in one week. All told, I spent more than 10 hours with my phone.

One day, perhaps, we’ll share our Screen Time stats as a get-to-know-you gauge. I’d like to know if you can sustain eye contact and conversation with the person in your presence. Can you experience an experience, or do you capture and curate for online consumption? Are you on good terms with your analog self, the real you, and are you willing to reveal it? Do you remember that I, too, am an analog self, with all the feelings and complexities that entails? Does your brain still function independently from the machine, or have you been subsumed into the hive mind?

Is anybody in there?

Absent any reins we might apply, technology becomes an ideology unto itself, in which the movement is ever forward, the pace always faster than the insights and institutions by which we might attempt to harness it. We rest on the conviction, largely unquestioned, that “if we can, we must.” Accordingly, technological capability has largely replaced reason and ethics as the basis by which to determine how to proceed into the future.

We may want, in theory, to align innovation with our values and objectives. To my mind, that would mean leveraging technology in ways that privilege individual and societal well-being. But technologies unfold in a complicated dance of design, evolution, and unexpected consequences. By necessity, we figure things out as we go. Often, by the time the majority realizes something is amiss, it is too late to do anything about it — hence the value of Luddites, our canaries.

As Christopher Hitchens wrote in Letters to a Young Contrarian, “[T]here are in all periods people who feel themselves in some fashion to be apart. And it is not too much to say that humanity is very much in debt to such people, whether it chooses to acknowledge the debt or not.”

For me, a connection exists between the ascendance of digital technology and what I feel as a citizen of a country whose government is increasingly tyrannical. For the corporate–government hegemony, the internet is an ideal means of control, the de facto platform for persuasion and propaganda. It facilitates a highly effective attack on what citizens think and believe, via the data we slough off minute by minute, almost completely unaware, and the way the data enables precise campaigns to manipulate, to warp our sense of reality.

Hal Crowther foresaw this byproduct of personal technology in a 2010 essay, One Hundred Fears of Solitude. “The likely result will be the wet dream of every overt and closet totalitarian — a submissive population of consumers and employees, tightly wired and monitored and purged of rogue individuals.” Heads down, eyes glazed, anything on the screen more compelling than everything outside it — we’re easy pickings.

How should we conceive of this digital realm, filled with contradictions? It is a world unto itself, everywhere and nowhere. It demands our attention, then watches us watching it. We are connected, yet lonely. The action is disembodied, the emotions genuine. We are the users, and we are used. One wrong move can blow up your real life (or someone else’s) or cast no ripple. It is the arbiter of all, and we cannot trust it.

When the real world seems less real than whatever happens online, when few IRL experiences are not mediated through the internet to some degree, what should we make of these dual realities we inhabit? Primacy of the real world matters, because that is where we must fix the problems of people and planet. It matters because the internet is so often inhospitable to kindness and compassion, truth and nuance. If nothing else, life’s too short to waste in the abyss. As Tim Kreider wrote in It’s Time to Admit the Internet Is Bad for Us, “One minute it’s not even 10 p.m.; the next thing you know, you’re 52.”

The way we think about technology matters because technology changes the way we think about everything. Data personalization, for one, has altered the nature of inquiry and the answers we receive. Your results may vary, but when I type “Luddite scholar” into my browser, Google tells me that people ask, “Is Luddite an insult? Is a Luddite bad?”

That’s telling, but more to the point raises the question of what I would make of these cues, had I no preconceived ideas on the subject. Knowledge must be organized to be usable, but the implications of, say, the Dewey Decimal Classification are unlike those of search engines and social media. The latter reflect, in large part, what the masses believe, what the internet thinks we already believe, or what the technology companies believe will keep us at the screen. Whether these parameters steer us toward content that is legitimate or apeshit, humanistic or hateful, is irrelevant.

The one system that does not govern the hierarchy of information online is the marketplace of ideas. That the internet’s early promise of a societal equalizer turned out to elevate bad ideas as much as good ones — often more so — is part of the Luddites’ complaint. We do swim in an endless river of information. But a complex array of opaque decisions shapes its flow.

The design is slick, the machinations sophisticated, but those who peddle their agendas online are not so different from a funhouse barker at the carnival. Both make their money by luring us in, then plying tricks and mirrors to detain us, mesmerized by our own distortions.

As the digital world encroaches on our physical environments, reality shifts again. Smart city technologies have much to recommend them, but I wonder how it will feel to walk through a city where augmented reality cats purr on the sides of buildings; where interactive, data-tracking screens have replaced brick and mortar; amid a hum of conversation between people and voice-activated infrastructure. Hey, Parking Meter, where is the nearest coffeeshop?

The internet has proven to be an irresistible beacon, comfortable and escapist. How real will the real world seem, how much appeal will it hold, when we live even more deeply inside the virtual ecosystem? I can choose not to visit the Metaverse. I can limit, to a degree, my online engagement at home. But when digital elements comprise the fabric of our cities and communities, we lose the ability to opt out.

III. 

If Luddites are more inclined, by evidence or sensibility, to focus on technological risk, that is an appropriate counterweight to the dogma of reward. At the very least, their skepticism is valuable because so many others nod sleepily along, complicit and obedient.

The more we learn about digital technologies, the more inexcusable our laxity becomes. By now, we know: Technology is always a force unleashed, a genie out of the bottle. But even though its consequences are unpredictable, they are not inevitable. As Postman wrote in 1985, “To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.”

Future technologies will challenge us in ways we have never been challenged before. I’m concerned that the tools we should use to navigate such terrain — the public discourse, the marketplace of ideas — do not function as they should, in part as a result of technological influence. The same sickness we see in our democracy impairs our ability to cross the frontier in a manner both bold and wise.

How will we have the discussions we’ll need? What about those nascent, fertile periods in which we have achieved technological fluency, yet remain deeply inexperienced, with artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robots? Whose voices will we include, and what values? Will we make decisions with any deliberation, or let the chips fall where they may?

Most days, I feel cynical. The market will decide where we go and how we get there. The guiding principles will be “whatever sells, whatever entertains.” There’ll be a bit of hand-wringing, some too-little-too-late intervention. But by and large, the consensus seems to be that those who don’t like the way technology is unfolding — the effects on culture, government, education, nature — can fuck off.

All that to say, I’ve settled on a deep resignation. But I continue to wish we would, on occasion, pause at the trough of mental slop to process what is happening to us, to ponder our new habits and ways of being, to resurrect a sense of agency and intention.

I’ll offer an analogy between the wide range of digital engagement that is possible at the individual level and the broad spectrum we have devised around food. The same types of concerns that compel one to become, say, a vegetarian might also lead to certain choices about online activity — for instance, a desire to be mindful of what we consume. Digital minimalism, also like vegetarianism, derives much of its meaning from what it rejects. One can choose not to support endeavors that conflict with personal values. I can’t stop the horrors of factory farming, but I can decide not to eat hamburgers.

Increasingly, similar considerations influence how I want to engage with the internet. Everyone’s choices will be different, but we ought not to pretend that our actions occur in a vacuum, that we are not participating in a specific type of system when we spend so much of our lives online. We need not opt out of connectivity altogether — a path neither practical nor desirable — to refuse to engage in ways that make us minions.

The aim, as Jaron Lanier wrote in You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, “is not antitechnology in any sense. It is prohuman.”

Digital minimalists will likely remain a minority, but a framework for resistance is slowly taking shape. As Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic, “This stuff should be sewn into our everyday language: ‘No apps this weekend’; ‘I need to be cut off’; ‘I love you, but I think you need to take a break’; ‘Can you help me stay offline?’”

One day, maybe, we will establish better social norms for egregious device-related behaviors. Maybe we will address all we have learned about technology and young people, the guinea pigs of the whole experiment: self-esteem and mental health, porn and self-objectification, the sad spiral of Me! Me! Me! Maybe those who take issue with capitalism as a poor substitute for humanitarianism will redefine their relationship with the agent of control in their pockets.

In my den, I have a wooden music box, circa 1890. It’s about the size of an ottoman and takes two strong people to hoist onto a table. There’s a crank handle on the side and, beneath the lid, an apparatus that plays large, metal disks, each containing one song. The music box embodies both novelty and obsolescence. I like to imagine the people who first acquired it, gathering in their parlor to admire this contraption, much as my family gathered one afternoon in the early 1980s to listen to Pink Floyd on a “compact disc” that my brother brought home. We took turns passing around the headphones, marveling at this round, shiny improvement on the cassette tape. Now, a Google Nest Mini, no larger than a doughnut, sits on top of the music box, two long-lost cousins.

It’s natural to regard our own era as the pinnacle of achievement, a view that inspires a certain hubris. But it’s better to remember that we are at any moment both the future and the past. We are partway through a journey that began before we arrived and will continue long after we leave.

If the analog-to-digital transition put us on an information superhighway, I envision us now traversing a vast sea. We drift, explorers, the known shore smaller and smaller before disappearing entirely, the far shore — if there is one — invisible in the distance. We navigate without knowing exactly where we are going or what we may find. We look to sun and stars, blind faith, dumb luck. When we get homesick for the familiar, the gospel tells us to face forward, that anything left behind wasn’t worth keeping.

But inside, we feel a flutter of memory, tend a tiny revolt.