HISTORICAL DETOUR AT MAY BE FA

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It is now popular to claim that anyone who questions modern technologies, especially the digital revolution that is sweeping around the world, is a Luddite. Like so many of our labels, this one misses what was really important about the efforts of the Luddites to resist the machines that were introducing a new economic order that was radically different from the role technology played in the pre-industrial communities in the English Midlands. The enclosing of the English commons during the latter years of the 1700s, and the establishment of steam driven machines was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As Kirkpatrick Sale noted, this revolution introduced fundamental social changes ignored by those who use the label of Luddite to dismiss the critics of technology. As he noted: All that "community" implies-self-sufficiency, mutual aid, morality in the market place, stubborn tradition, regulation by custom, organic knowledge instead of mechanistic science-had to be steadily and systematically disrupted and displaced. All of the practices that kept the individual from being a consumer had to be done away with so that the cogs and wheels of an unfettered machine called "the economy" could operate without interference, influenced merely invisible hands and inevitable balances… (1995, 38)Dismissing the Luddites as reactionaries also involves ignoring the importance of the self-sufficient communities they were defending-which were models of ecologically sustainable communities.Viewed from a perspective informed by an awareness of climate change, and the many challenges it poises the world's seven plus billion people who must deal with the consequence of disappearing glaciers, droughts, extreme weather patterns that are disrupting traditional planting seasons, the acidification and overfishing of the world's ocean, the self-sufficient communities that Sale describes relied upon locally scaled technologies and economies that were largely based on the skills and crafts handed down over many generations. Many groups around the world that are aware of the ecological crisis are now attempting to recover and to make currently relevant the traditions of local knowledge of how to live off the grid, and to recover many aspects of the cultures overturned by the Industrial revolution.