This time around the technology is even more complex and extensive, and its impact even more pervasive and dislocating, touching greater populations with greater speed and at greater scales. [If what’s in store for us] is an “information age” with “information highways” and “information supermarkets,” then it is the computer and those who feed and handle it who reign supreme: in the country of the sighted, the all-seeing one is king. Control of information is control of power.
Predictor: Sale, Kirkpatrick
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Jon Katz looks at the current resistance to new technologies and the Luddites at the dawn of the Industrial Age, quoting Kirkpatrick Sale, social critic, historian and author. Katz writes: ”Kirkpatrick Sale, the social critic and historian best known for his prescient book on the rise of the ‘Sunbelt, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment,’ and his brilliant portrayal of Christopher Columbus as raving imperialist scum, ‘Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy,’ has come out with a vengeance as a ‘Neo-Luddite’ in his new book, ‘Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution’ … [Sale] is a card-carrying member of the famous Eastern media lite, and his book … raises the decibel level in the struggle between new and existing information cultures … to argue that computers not only keep Eddie in his room all night hacking and hitting on girls in Teen Chat, but they might destroy the planet as well … Sale comes across [… as] a reflexive decrier of popular culture, mass media, and more or less everything that has happened in the past century or two … All but the most starry-eyed digital partisans understand that technology can be destructive. But Sale embraces phobic notions and generalizations about digital culture as the Revealed Word and ingenuously puts forward statistics without attribution or context. His premise is simple: new scientific and information technologies have created a second Industrial Revolution. Like the first, argues Sale, its effects are profoundly evil and destructive, dislocating and isolating humans, continuing to ravage the environment, decimating the world’s work force, and consolidating too much power in too few grasping hands. ‘This time around the technology is even more complex and extensive,’ writes Sale, ‘and its impact even more pervasive and dislocating, touching greater populations with greater speed and at greater scales.’ If what’s in store for us, he adds, ‘is an “information age” with “information highways” and “information supermarkets,” then it is the computer and those who feed and handle it who reign supreme: in the country of the sighted, the all-seeing one is king. Control of information is control of power.'”
Biography:Kirkpatrick Sale, an author and journalist, wrote a book titled “Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution” that made him a leader of the neo-Luddites of the 1990s. “Luddites” generally believe that technological advances are an endangerment to society. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Controversial Issues
Subtopic: Jurisdiction/Control
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Return of the Luddites: A Group of Second-Wave Intellectuals Has Rejected Digital Technology and Declared a Counterrevolution
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/saleskatz_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney