What makes sense to technolibertarians “is a delta-world (change of a certain kind defines certain units of scientific measurement) that maps onto engineering reality (you fix the bug, improve the product, bring out a new model). The delta-world is one of management by quarterly reports, Web Weeks, and day-trading. Whether this maps well onto all aspects of human breathing or striving is something else.

“Virginia Postrel, longtime editor in chief of Reason magazine, sort of the Nation/New Republic/Atlantic Monthly of libertarianism, gets at this delta-world ideal in her ‘Dynamism, Diversity, and Division in American Politics’ speech, which she delivered at the Fifth Annual Bionomics Conference in 1996 — and which was subsumed in her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict on Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. She made good points about how the Jeremy Rifkins and Patrick Buchanans of the world have more in common with each other than, say, with their more obvious political allies. She sees folks like Rifkin and Buchanan as agents of stasis who either long for a fantasy past or want to plan (code for control-freaking/bureaucratizing/anti-individualist acting) for a better future; on the other hand, agents of dynamism believe in

the complex ecology of human beings . . . preferring decentralized choice. . . . They are open-ended… Nobody — no individual, no governing group — knows enough about a society to manage it in detail . . . . Dynamism is harder to understand than stasis. . . . It is the product of millions of unplanned choices directed by no central person or organization. . . . Popular culture . . . religion . . . the family . . . they are complex systems that do not stay put, spontaneous orders subject to no one’s control. . . . Dynamic systems not only accommodate diversity; their flexibility allows them to accommodate external change. They are resilient. When the world changes, they permit many small-scale experiments, increasing the chances of success and decreasing the consequences of failure. They allow fine-tuning.

“It sounds great. Who would not want to be on the side of dynamism? Wired magazine celebrated its sixth anniversary with an entire issue devoted to the proposition that ‘Change Is Good’ (emblazoned on the front cover). Myself, I’m so glad that I live in an era of photocopiers, laptops, call-waiting, Telfa pads, Advil, and narrow-spectrum antibiotics.

“But I don’t think all change is good, or without cost. I am a Luddite — in the true sense of the word. The followers of Ned Ludd were rightfully concerned that rapid industrialization was ruining their traditional artisanal workways and villages, creating nineteenth-century local environmental disasters and horror-show factory working (and living) conditions for family members of all ages. For decades, the displacements of the Industrial Revolution sent hundreds of thousands of people to lives of penury, starvation, disease, and despair in the slums of big cities. The Luddites were early labor and ecology activists, upset not so much with technology per se but with technology’s destructive effects to their bodies, to their children, to the places where they lived, to their ability to make a sane living. And, in a sense, they were early protesters of de-skilling.

“De-skilling is not a purely late-twentieth-century phenom (where reliance on computers means that people with less skill and knowledge — who can be paid far less — perform previously more-skilled jobs). Considering the failure of so many modern buildings (in design, execution, defect of materials, workmanship), isn’t it worth questioning whether kids straight out of an architecture program, slaved to CAD/CAM workstations and paid relatively little, are doing as good a job as the senior architect, who has knowledge not so containable in commercial software, they displaced? So the Luddites smashed mechanical looms, the symbols and agents of their oppression, and have had an unfair bad rap ever since as loons and barbarians. Not to romanticize the agrarian past, but much of urban and small-factory-town life of the Industrial Revolution was very much like that of Blake’s dark Satanic mills. Technology and trade marched on and global empires were created; monopolies arose; it all sounds familiar.

“Yes, a middle class sprang from this industrialization, and it certainly made possible the improved standard of living a century later for North Americans and Western Europeans; but that dynamism of the nineteenth century was hardly without grievous cost. In this model of how the world works or should work, there’s the spirit of Lenin: In regard to revolution, you have to break eggs to make an omelet. Or maybe the model is biological: Nature has her own cycles of creation and destruction, and who are we to argue?

“Like the Luddites, I am not so sure most change benefits most people. Postrel’s spectrum from stasis to dynamism (with sense and sensibility heavily weighted on one side of that spectrum) ignores all the largely invisible stable societal structures (just to name two: (1) public investment in sanitation, education, and public water-ways; (2) changes in common law that made it legal for women to vote and own property) that make all this dynamism productive and possible. Contrast this with the lack of centralized authority that was so dreadfully inconveniencing in the recent unpleasantness in the Balkans. The changing world Postrel refers to often changes for the better because its governments change.”

— from Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-tech (PublicAffairs, 2000)

An interview with Pauline Borsook, recorded in 2000, was re-published in the Friday Feature of January 24, 2025.

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