Rebels Against The Future: The Luddites And Their War On The Industrial Revolution: Lessons For The Computer Age - Softcover

Sale, Kirkpatrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201407183 ISBN 13: 9780201407181

Publisher: Basic Books, 1996

Synopsis

Kirkpatrick Sale is at the tumultuous center of a technology backlash, actively challenging Bill Gates on the one hand and the Unabomber on the other. The subject of bets, barbs, and grudging praise in the pages of WIRED, The New York Times, Newsweek, and The New Yorker,Rebels Against the Future takes us back to the first technology backlash, the short-lived and fierce Luddite rebellion of 1811. Sale tells the compelling story of the Luddites' struggle to preserve their jobs and way of life by destroying the machines that threatened to replace them; he then invokes a new-Luddite spirit in response to today's technological revolution and calls for another sort of rebellion: not one of violence but rather of intellectually and ethically sound protest.

About this title

About the Author

Kirkpatrick Sale is a contributing editor of The Nation and the author of many books, including Conquering Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy.

From Publishers Weekly

Legendary Englishman Ned Ludd hated work so much that his master whipped him, whereupon he took revenge by destroying his knitting frame. In 1812, his followers, the Luddites?weavers, combers, dressers of wool and artisans?banded together to fight with pike and gun "progress, or what was held to be progress." With the introduction of the Industrial Revolution, their former way of life was ending. The Luddites took their stand in Nottingham at the factory of one William Cartwright. The retribution, according to the author, "called forth the greatest spasm of repression Britain ever in its history used against domestic dissent." Sale draws distinct portraits of both sides. The Luddites, reminiscent of the quixotic Irish Fenians of the 1860s, fought not only for survival but also for principle, sacrificing their lives for land and better conditions for laborers. The mill owners and politicians, on the other hand, were anti-union, pro-child labor, polluters of stream and sky and in favor of mass deforestation and demanded 10- to 18-hour workdays. Sale (The Conquest of Paradise) also displays the Luddites' situation in a modern context when he compares the Industrial Revolution to the information superhighway, situations "with unprecedented technological consequences." He has done a magnificent job of showing us the past and given us a peek into our future.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0201407183
• ISBN 13: 9780201407181
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336