e6741d6c-71df-4223-a98f-4463feba5062 2.1 KB

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