> Luddite implies a throwback, fighting progress, etc. Somehow, I don't
>quite see the applicability of the term here... Maybe I too, am missing
>something...
call it a combination of hyperbole and addiction to historical trivia.
the Luddites were less militant than the 'engine breakers', who were
determined to fight the advance of industrialism in all ways. the
Luddites weren't necessarily opposed to technology itself, they were
fighting the concept of "progress at any cost".. not so unreasonable a
position, considering the cost was usually measured in limbs and lives,
lost by workers in the "dark, hellish mills".
my personal take on geek-luddism is that "more technology" isn't
automatically good. i believe in sticking with technology long enough
to assimilate it, work the bugs out of it, and come up with something
that's really *useful*.. not in trading this season's batch of random
botches and blunders for a new set every six months.
there are whole universes of potential technology buried in the spoil
heaps of our current information consumerism. HTML is packed with
low-level hooks for some really cool and useful stuff: the <head>
section was originally supposed to support popup summaries, so you could
check the preview before actually loading a page; there's a whole
family of relationships assigned among links which allow similar support
for timeliness and coordination between linked pages.. but nobody's
implementing them because they're not as sexy as multiplanar graphics
with to-the-pixel placement.
i see the act of saying "screw this", tossing NS or IE, and surfing with
lynx, as an example of engine-breaking. ditto for anyone who
maliciously surfs with image-loading off, thus robbing content providers
of their banner-ad impressions. i dream of discovering the low-level
kink in SMTP or sendmail that can be used to make spammers mailbomb each
other.
i think we need more of that kind of thing. therefore, i'm a
geek-luddite.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
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