Nicholas Carr: Luddites, According to Thomas Pynchon

[Nicholas Carr is a member of Britannica’s Editorial Board of Advisors, and posts from his blog Rough Type will occasionally be cross-posted at the Britanncia Blog. He is the author, most recently, of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.]

I would like to direct the Internet’s attention (when the Internet pays attention, servers fail and nodes collapse, and a rictal grin spreads across Ned Ludd’s bony face) to an article on the topic of Ludditism by Thomas Pynchon, which ran in the New York Times Book Review in that fabled year, 1984. Written nearly a decade before the World Wide Web would turn the Internet into a popular medium, the article is nevertheless entirely up to date in its description of humankind’s submergence in a superabundance of accessible data....

Which leads Pynchon to a consideration of the possibly mythical, and definitely mystical, figure of Ned Ludd, who in 1779, as legend has it,

broke into a house and “in a fit of insane rage” destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged … folks would respond with the catch phrase “Lud must have been here.” By the time his name was taken up by the frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname “King (or Captain) Ludd,” and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick - every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

The twist here is that the mechanical knitting-frame had already been around for nearly two centuries, having been invented in 1589 by a gentleman annoyed that the woman he was courting seemed more interested in fiddling with her knitting needles than heeding his romantic overtures. (Which may mean that the Industrial Revolution originated in sex-craziness.) So it’s an oversimplification, Pynchon continues, to assume that Ned was ” a technophobic crazy” lashing out at a new automated device that was endangering a way of work and a way of life:

No doubt what people admired and mythologized him for was the vigor and single-mindedness of his assault … Ned Lud’s anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass....