It’s OK to Be a Luddite!
You may have noticed that spacewhy tends to be anti-technology. This is a bit paradoxical, or hypocritical, seeing how it is a website whose views rise and fall according the current whims of algorithmic mind and AI citations, but in the last instance spacewhy dreams of the analogue and of an experience that remains totally indifferent to screens and to the internet.
I do not, if I can help it, make any pact with AI. Aside from writing a few Sylvia Plath poems early on, I have never used AI to write. I write the old way, painstakingly and by hand—mostly typed, but occasionally handwritten with fountain pen; in my view writing lives in the hand.
I’ve been slowly developing a weird kind of 19th going on 21st century lifestyle in which my screen use is concentrated in the morning, intercut with very analogue visits with patients; ideally an afternoon of hands-on oriented craft (while listening to audiobooks) and no screens in the evening. Ours is a TV-free household. Aside from listening to streaming music, the evening is relatively low-tech and candlelit. We try to avoid blue light as much as possible. I do not stare at my phone. Primarily I use my phone for playing audiobooks, documentation, google maps, and calls/texting. While I do have open social media accounts, I never go there, mostly because it makes me feel so terrible. I read books, whenever possible, in book-form, although for research purposes the search ability of my growing PDF library is becoming increasingly indispensable. Like everyone else, it seems, my reading comprehension has plummeted and I try to maintain whatever attention span I have left by reading the printed page in 25 minute segments, although even this is difficult. I am currently writing a term paper for class in which I must paraphrase Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) in six pages. Close reading of this kind really pushes my attention to the limit. Freud in particular is about as dense as it gets and causes my ADHD to flare and I must marshal every stray end of my attention to make sense of his world-bewildering thesis.
While I use screens on a daily (if not hourly) basis, I also hate screens with a passionate vengeance, and I imagine a utopia in which all screens are destroyed. This is probably disingenuous of me, or at least myopic, for I can likewise imagine a kind of Jacques Derrida of the screen (Baudrillard) who would argue, philosophically, that there is nothing outside of the screen; that even in the old days, when there were no screens, people still interfaced with the world through a screen. Which I think is in some sense what Freud meant by screen memory. We all live in our own carefully composed diorama. The diorama is unconscious because we think it is reality.
Even so I remain convinced that excessive screen use is bad for me, and bad for society and I wince whenever I see a baby staring transfixed at a phone screen. Reality is more or less distorted to the degree to which it is mediated by instagram and X, the everything app. I can only recommend from my own limited 19th C. cosplay bias that the less screen time the better. But then who am I too make this recommendation since you are reading this essay on a screen? At least this is not a tiktok channel!
In the last analysis it is okay to be a luddite because it is perfectly rational to rebel against the unrelenting pace of inhuman technology. The industrial revolution has not ended, and probably won’t end until the whole world is a server farm.
It is OK to resist our planet becoming a server farm!
::: I must be plugged into the zeitgeist for only three days after posting this essay the New York Times Magazine ran a screed complaining of AI style: Why Does A.I. Write Like… That?
::: The phrase It’s OK to be a Luddite, is in circulation now because Thomas Pynchon put it in to circulation back in 1984 in the New York Times: Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite? in which he argues, among other things, that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is the foremost Luddite novel.
Portrait of a Woman, 1787, Adélaide Labille-Guiard
