
Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite? (1984) - colinprince
https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html#m01
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themeek
This is a fascinating piece - especially concerning Pynchon's coverage of the
class warfare aspect to machinery-as-capital.

My favorite parts:

\- His treatment of Luddism as class warfare; a recognition that the access to
the means of production by the machines paired with their replacement and
downward pressure on individual wages concentrates power. We have (had?) a
myth that the internet would be 'democratizing' in its power, but it's gone
much the same way toward concentration.

\- Pynchon eerily predicts biological sciences, AI and robotics starting to
converge and how it will catch us flat footed - and already we are seeing the
emergence of extremely rough AIs contain people in information bubbles.

\- Pynchon spells the paradox of deluge of information available to us so very
well; while we might think that anyone can become an expert in anything the
opportunity cost and the amount of information immediately relevant to our
fields isolates us from being broad renaissance men.

Gravity's Rainbow was more than a pleasure. I wish Pynchon had written more of
these short critical lens essays.

~~~
psycr
I have been following the trail of these ideas - of machinery as capital, of
power, robots, AI, McLuhan, Ginsberg's Howl, etc (did you catch the Beat
generation reference in this Pynchon piece?)

Can you say more about this? "already we are seeing the emergence of extremely
rough AIs contain people in information bubbles."

Any other reading to recommend?

~~~
themeek
I didn't catch any references to the Beats and have not read Howl (my Beat
generation is weak - could only ever get into small amounts of Boroughs and
smaller amounts of Kerouac) - but otherwise yes and I would say I'm surprised
Postman and Mumford, and maybe even Kaczynski, somehow didn't make the cut;
and of course the constellation of other notables who have contributed to the
sphere of ideas. It is difficult to define a surface area to this large
volume, but if I were to suggest a few I would also add the Extended Mind
Thesis and Nudge (or something like it).

Certainly. Take the Pew Research study on news media trends [1]. The majority
of younger people are getting their news primarily or entirely from Facebook
and Twitter - both of which have algorithms that decide and organize which
news and information should populate each stream. What's worse is that these
algorithms are not only private, and difficult to understand in their
ancillary affects, but also they are controlled by parties whose incentives
are not in line with providing people with the information that helps them to
be the most informed; and in fact what's worse is both Facebook and Twitter
are major stages for both state sponsored and funded propaganda and PR
campaigns.

Beyond this, Google, Bing, Baidu and other search engines can not on principle
provide links to news on regular search terms, as people do not and can not
know what news has happened to search without first being introduced to it. In
both search and news aggregation, these search algorithms prioritize items
according to profiles they believe match the underlying personalities
performing the search. First, the same fundamental problems are present in
this search aggregation - studies have been done by governments on reordering
search terms to get elections and population affects they desire (and wide
scale search engine manipulation has been seen in at least one national
election in India) and that for search engines the customer is not the person
searching but the PR firms and advertizers who pay to use the searcher's
screen real estate establishing incentives which if not wrong on their face
are askew and should call for transparency.

Now, this is before other effects are taken into consideration. Presuming
aggregation were neither malicious, political or gamed by SEO and that somehow
this aggregation is done in a way tailored only to the expectations and
demands of the consuming entity. There exists what people call an 'information
bubble' of the sort Pynchon predicted I had quoted - where the availability of
the information in theory is overshadowed by the immediacy and digestibility
of the information that is familiar. And in fact, however anecdotal this may
seem, this is my experience with myself and the people who I know. Effort
beyond merely searching for new information must be sought. An imaginary and
completely invented scenario is as follows: Some scandal happens within
government and from outside the internet a left leaning young person hears
about it. When they perform a search to get more information about this
scandal they will almost certainly be presented - by a 'well working'
algorithm - a left leaning perspective on that event aimed towards a young
audience cruely devoid of evidence that perspectives from the right, the
middle, the top, the bottom, other countries, older people, etc even exist.

Adversarial case aside (e.g. United States Special Forces are known to
purposefully surround the media consumption of adversaries and their families
in crafted information bubbles to break their faith and ideologies), and poor
incentive structure aside (e.g. Digg) there are significant challenges faced
by the paternalistic arrangement of algorithmic management not the least of
which is knowing the 'ground truth' (a term scientists use to refer to the
ideal objective result from an intelligence algorithm) and how far a
complicated algorithm is from reaching it.

I tend to wax and wane, but I guess that's what you asked for. :P

[1] [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-
social-m...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-
is-reshaping-news/)

~~~
themeek
(I can not edit the comment, but wanted to include Nicholas Carr on the list).

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AndrewOMartin
UK Comedian Mark Steel gives highly recommendable comedy history lectures, in
one on the industrial revolution he explains that the Luddites weren't against
the machines themselves, but the lack of remuneration or retraining for people
made redundant by the machines.

In this sense, the original Luddites were much more progressive and forward
thinking than the current use of the term suggests.

It's still a good article.

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krylon
I really wish Pynchon had written more essays (or have I simply missed them?).
His writing style often seems quirky in his novels (in a very good way, IMHO,
but still), but in the few essays of his I read, he manages to make topics
interesting that I would not have given much thought otherwise.

~~~
mbrock
His essay on the Watts race riots is pretty great, too.

