Last updated on 2023-04-11
For some reason, I can’t quite put my finger on, I have been thinking a lot about the short essay by Chellis Glendinning from 1990, entitled, “Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto.”
I remember reading it in the Utne Reader in the early-1990s and being inspired by the idea that all technologies are political, and the obvious tendency to promote new tech as utopian, while ignoring the externalized costs and negative effects of the same.
Although the itemized list of technologies seems quaint due to the total absence of mobile phones, modern internet, social media, data collection practices, surveillance capitalism, and ad-driven search, algos, etc.; the author was far-sighted enough to include “computer technologies — which cause disease and death in their manufacture and use, enhance centralized political power, and remove people from direct experience of life.”
So, don’t let anyone tell you that we could not have foreseen the risks of rising fascism, when Mondo 2000, Utne Reader and other publications were contemplating the rise of computers “enhancing centralized power” in the early 1990s.
You can read more about the movement here, or the original Luddites, and a more modern take on this essay at Gizmodo from 2015.