A harder look at the soft luddite

I introduced the idea of “soft luddism” in a recent post, and attempted to define it by alluding to a genre of writing that I assume to be widely recognizable. I should have worked harder to give a more explicit definition, because the soft luddite is too easily confused for a number of similar characters.

The old-fashioned, “hard” luddite dislikes a specific technology or class of technologies for the enumerable disadvantages they deal him. The soft luddite, however, is uneasy about “technology” as an abstract category, because of the affront to humanistic values that it is perceived to represent. His error is diametrically opposed to that of the gadget fetishist or other bleeding-edge enthusiast, who loves this abstract category, “technology,” without regard to what use a given technology may be put.

This “technology” never includes familiar or naturalized technologies, but only the bleeding edge, technology in the most obvious sense. The humanistic values that the soft luddite defends are almost always underdefined, since to define them explicitly would be to make them available for fair comparison with the advantages offered by the technology under critique.

There is almost always an unconscious element of classism in this refusal. The soft luddite is usually a member of the upper-middle class. He mingles with the wealthy and knows their ways. He is thus acutely self-conscious of his need to live by the working-class values of utility and efficiency, but romanticizes the inefficiency that is the leisure of the wealthy. That same inefficiency is also the prison of the down-and-out, which gives us what is perhaps the most common criticism of the “voluntary simplicity” movement: that most of the world’s people are already practicing simplicity of the involuntary kind!

Rebecca Solnit has an article called “Finding Time” in the present issue of Orion magazine. It’s more honest than most soft luddite pieces you’ll read, in that it actually offers up some of the values that must be compared in making a rational technological choice:

The gains are simple and we know the adjectives: convenient, efficient, safe, fast, predictable, productive. All good things for a machine, but lost in the list is the language to argue that we are not machines and our lives include all sorts of subtleties—epiphanies, alliances, associations, meanings, purposes, pleasures—that engineers cannot design, factories cannot build, computers cannot measure, and marketers will not sell.

You’ll notice, however, that the comparison is handicapped. On Solnit’s telling, convenience, efficiency, and the rest of the first list are not human values but machine values. We’re back to the bogeyman of a looming technological essence.

To compare these two lists is not to compare machines with humans, but to compare two different tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. People who are struggling to feed themselves can’t worry, just yet, about epiphanies, meanings, and pleasures. Solnit explicitly rejects the accusation of elitism, but her “nomadic and remote tribal peoples” and “cash-poor, culture-rich people in places like Louisiana” (and other flyover states, presumably) are acting out of necessity, not free choice.

Both the gadget enthusiast and the soft luddite are to be contrasted with the rational actor who does not recognize one category of technology as more “technological” than another. This person first defines his individual and social ends—including, perhaps, values from both of Solnit’s lists. He then chooses technologies—new and old—which seem to him to be the ones most likely to bring those ends about.