inf-site/quotes/e6741d6c-71df-4223-a98f-4463feba5062

author: Ursula K. Le Guin
content: "As for elitism, the problem may be scientism: technological edge mistaken\
  \ for moral superiority. The imperialism of high technocracy equals the old racist\
  \ imperialism in its arrogance; to the technophile, people who aren't in the know/in\
  \ the net, who don't have the right artifacts, don't count. They're proles, masses,\
  \ faceless nonentities. Whether it's fiction or history, the story isn't about them.\
  \ The story's about the kids with the really neat, really expensive toys. So \"\
  people\" comes to be operationally defined as those who have access to an extremely\
  \ elaborate fast-growth industrial technology. And \"technology\" itself is restricted\
  \ to that type. I have heard a man say perfectly seriously that the Native Americans\
  \ before the Conquest had no technology. As we know, kiln-fired pottery is a naturally\
  \ occurring substance, baskets ripen in the summer, and Machu Picchu just grew there.\r\
  \n\r\n[...]\r\n\r\n\"Newton's Sleep\" can be, and has been, read as an anti-technological\
  \ diatribe, a piece of Luddite ranting. It was not intended as such, but rather\
  \ as a cautionary tale, a response to many stories and novels I had read over the\
  \ years which (consciously or not\u2014here is the problem of elitism again) depict\
  \ people in spaceships and space stations as superior to those on earth. Masses\
  \ of dummies stay down in the dirt and breed and die in squalor, and serve 'em right,\
  \ while a few people who know how to program their VCRs live up in these superclean\
  \ military worldlets provided with all mod con plus virtual reality sex, and are\
  \ the Future of Man. It struck me as one of the drearier futures.\r\n\r\n[...]\r\
  \n\r\nI hope the story doesn't read as anti-space travel. I love both the idea and\
  \ the reality of the exploration of space, and was only trying to make the whole\
  \ idea less smugly antiseptic. I really do think we have to take our dirt with us\
  \ wherever we go. We are dirt. We are Earth."
id: e6741d6c-71df-4223-a98f-4463feba5062