Anti-technology

'Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed cotton mills?'

(Charles Lamb, ‘The Superannuated Man’)

I don't know why I'm keeping a blog. After all, I'm hardly what you'd call a technocrat. Deep down, I believe it is every writer's job to be - at the very least - suspicious of technology. Ever since Romantics like Charles Lamb, it has been every writer's job to resist industry, technology, so-called 'progress;' and the internet should be no exception.


It seems fairly obvious to me that all technology of whatever kind is, at base, a matter of either sex or death. I'm not being Freudian here - or not just. I'm not just saying that all technology is propelled forwards by repressed impulses from the unconscious, from the twin Gods 'Eros' and 'Thanatos.' I'm not saying that precisely because these impulses aren't repressed, or concealed when it comes to technology. They're open secrets. Everyone knows (and knows consciously) that DVD technology, for example, was introduced for the porn industry, so people could cut quickly to the (ahem) good bits; everyone knows that the internet is 95% pornography, and the other 5%, consisting as it does of social networking sites and Friends Reunited, is basically an electronic knocking shop. On the other hand, everyone knows (and knows consciously) too that technology is propelled forwards most rapidly during times of war (which is to say all times) by the armaments industry.


So everyone knows, whether they admit it or not, that technology is ruled by Eros and Thanatos. And perhaps, at base (and here I am going to sound like Freud), Eros and Thanatos are the same thing when it comes to technology. Sex and death, love and death, pornography and war - they combine in all sorts of ways (American newscasters, after all, often pedal pornography-as-war).


So there you are. That's why writing a blog is a bit of an ambivalent experience for me. And I've yet to decide whether this blog is more about sex or about death, or if it combines the two.

P.S. there's stuff about technology here too:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1865942,00.html