Comment & Debate
Neo-Luddite Kirkpatrick Sale argues that expansive technological capitalism will disrupt lives and undermine the cultural and social sources of meaning: “Industrialism is always a cataclysmic process, destroying the past, roiling the present, making the future uncertain. It is the nature of the industrial ethos to value growth and production, speed and novelty, power and manipulation, all of which are bound to cause continuing, rapid, and disruptive changes at all levels to society…And because its criteria are essentially economic rather than, say, social or civic, those changes come about without much regard for any but purely materialist consequences…” [Sale, 1995]According Sale and other critics of globalization, some values are superior to any amount of mere material gain. If these values are challenges by the ethos of technology and the global market, then the wholesale repudiation of that ethos is in order. “