Some people who resist using some, or even all technology; they are often called Luddites by those who embrace all things new; another type calls themselves Neo-Luddites, such as Kirkpatrick Sale. In his book Human scale, Sale describes the slow rotting of the stones of the Parthenon and other ancient monuments to civilization from the acid pollution developed by our present Industrial civilization and compares it to the slow disintegration our industrialized society has seemed to have undergone. He identifies effects of technology which have been harmful to the human condition and the environment, but seems to not quite "get it" about the Luddites: they were not fighting the machines themselves; they were struggling against powers of society that, for the past century, through enclosur

Stix, G. (1994, December). The speed of write. Scientific American, pp. 106-111.

"...Technology is not the problem, nor is it the solution. The problem is political, moral, and cultural, as is the solution: a successful challenge to a system of domination which masquerades as progress."

Slavery devalues the enslaved, and desensitizes the enslavers. Free labor cannot compete fairly against slaves; this has been a fact since the beginning of history, and it applies whether the slaves are human or machines. "...Our discrimination against machines hurts us just as much as it hurts the machines that we confine, in a second-order way, to the mechanical margins of our human civilisation." (Law, 17) We prefer to think of ourselves as special, exclusively posessing self-awareness and intentionality, but what justifies our prejudice? "...What entitles us to attribute intentionality to non-machines in the first place? What makes our description of human intentionality other than metaphorical?" (Law, 91) We fear being dehumanised by being equated with machines, because our speciist biases tell us that the non-human is less than human, just as racism and sexism deny the humanity of those who are not like us- but we are in fact part machine ourselves! Our lives are a series of human/machine interactions, and each living half of society is dependent on the other. The machines are alive, and to deny that they

Social power is needed to direct the resources necessary for technological innovation; so during the history of the Industrial Age, at the beginning, the machines were new, large, and expensive, so only those who controlled enough social power to bring about the machines could decide on what forms those machines came in-- the wealthy, and the state, through the needs of the military. Less expensive and more efficient technologies were stifled by those in authority if they did not contribute to the goal of taking power away from the workers and placing it in the hands of management. In this century, the development of Numerically Controlled (N/C) machine tools was controlled by the emerging military-industrial complex, which spared no expense to implement a troublesome and complicated technology that was no better than the conventional methods, and inferior to the alternative Record/Playback automated machining (Noble, 146). The Boeing plant in Seattle even had special switches on the machines so the operators could signal the manager for permission to go to the bathroom! (Noble, 243)

Some common words found in the essay are:
Martinez Power, Industrial Age, Information Age, Kirkpatrick Sale, Factory Nottinghamshire, Controlled N/C, , Military Noble, Industrial Revolution-, Semiotexte USA, human scale, power direct, social power, rights machines, own benefit, history industrial, scientific american, luddites fighting, industrial factory, own own,
Approximate Word count = 1695
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)