A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient bet on tech and civilization’s fate. Now their decision weighs in.
ON MARCH 6, 1995, WIRED’s government editor and resident techno-optimist Kevin Kelly went to the Greenwich Village condo of the writer Kirkpatrick Sale. Kelly had requested Sale for an interview. But he deliberates an ambush.
Kelly had simply studied an early replica of Sale’s upcoming ebook, known as Rebels Against the Future. It informed the tale of the 19th-century Luddites, a motion of employees against the equipment of the Industrial Revolution. Before their insurrection changed into squashed and their leaders hanged, they actually destroyed a number of the mechanized looms that, they believed, decreased them to cogs in a dehumanizing engine of mass production.
Sale loved the Luddites. In early 1995, Amazon changed into much less than a yr vintage, Apple changed into inside the doldrums, Microsoft had but to release Windows 95, and nearly nobody had a cell phone. But Sale, who for years have been churning out books complaining approximately modernity and urging a go back to a subsistence economy, felt that pc generation could make lifestyles worse for people. The sale had even channeled the Luddites at a January occasion in New York City in which he attacked an IBM PC with a 10-pound sledgehammer. It took him blows to conquer the object, and then he took a bow and sat down, deeply satisfied.
Kelly hated Sale’s ebook. His response went past mere disagreement; Sale’s thesis insulted his feel of the arena. So he confirmed up at Sale’s door now no longer simply looking for a verbal brawl however with a plan to show what he noticed because of the wrongheadedness of Sale’s ideas. Kelly installation his tape recorder on a desk at the same time as Sale sat in the back of his table...
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