Variety, Survival, and the Revenge of the Luddites

"Since human creativity will have to move in new directions as the Industrial Revolution runs down, you may be wondering what kinds of technology are suited to a sane life.  You may picture what is called nowadays a low-tech lifestyle.  Despite its popularity among cutting-edge thinkers and designers, a low-tech lifestyle is hardly avant garde.  The majority of the human population lives and has always lived with less advanced technology than most modern Westerners do.  Many live a simpler life out of necessity, because they don’t have or can’t afford the luxuries that we think of as necessities; but some individuals and groups deliberately embrace a low-tech life.

That’s not always easy to do so – adapting to the simpler technology is no problem for these lifestyle pioneers, but coping with the people around them may be.

Anyone who has ever lived a low-tech lifestyle, either deliberately or inadvertently, has had the same comments directed at them:  “I wouldn’t know how to cook without my microwave,” or “I have my cell phone with me night and day – I can’t manage without it.”  Many years ago, the high school students I was teaching, when I announced that I was leaving for Liberia with the Peace Corps, exclaimed, “Seriously?  I couldn’t live without TV!”

At first you might think that the comments are meant to be complimentary to you for managing with less, or at least self-deprecating, as they seem to be; actually, they are a type of insult (perhaps unconscious) directed at the backward people who don’t use favored technologies.  The commenters are boasting of their helplessness as proof of two things.  First, that they have higher standards – you can live like a caveman, they imply, but I aim for a more civilized lifestyle.  Second, that they are invested in The Future:  we’re on an upward trajectory, and people who claim otherwise are Luddite fun-suckers.

I heard lots of similar comments before and after my years in Liberia and Kyrgyzstan, not all just from students.  Oddly, many of the people who said those things to me were old enough to remember not having a microwave or a cell phone and grew up watching their parents manage without them.  Somehow, though, it’s important for them to show how thoroughly they have embraced the god of Progress, whose worship involves the yearly purchasing of a new smart phone and anticipating self-driving cars.  And it’s not enough that they worship progress; everyone around them must, too, or it just isn’t any fun.

I don’t mean to imply that everyone is overtly hostile to people who step out of the mainstream of so-called technological progress, although hostility certainly exists.  There are those who are just dismissive of alternative technologies, whether it’s horse farming, heating with wood, fiber arts, intensive gardening, or movable-type printing.  They see these “old-fashioned” occupations as quaint hobbies for the few nuts who enjoy them – harmless, but a bit odd and backward.

But skills, even old-fashioned ones, must be saved against an uncertain future.  The best way to save them is to practice them and teach them – just as the best way to save heirloom vegetables for the future is to grow them every year.  Even if most people are convinced that the beefmonster hybrid tomato is the best tomato and that cell phones are the most efficient way to communicate, we can’t give up variety in vegetables or communication:  what if blight strikes the beefmonster and Kessler Syndrome wipes out communication satellites?  The people who had other means of gardening and communication would be better adapted to those new conditions. . ."

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-08-05/variety-survival-and-the-revenge-of-the-luddites/