It’s been said many that time moves in a circle, taking us to points where we’ve already been so that we can move forward; something suggested by no less than the great mathematician Kurt Godel while exploring the possibility of time travel. Yet the idea can likewise be applied to societal movements and tendencies; this notion that we may have to move back into the past in order to move forward in the present; or so it would seem in the case of certain Luddite students at Temple University in Philadelphia who are according to them, “promoting conscious consumption of technology” by significantly walking away from what they consider to be the destructive parts of it.
Members of the Luddite Club sketch and paint while sitting side by side rather than surfing the web or checking their phones for text messages. They sit together and read quietly, favoring writers like Dostoevsky. Kerouac, and Vonnegut. They sit on logs in the outdoors and complain about how TikTok is dumbing down their generation while their flip phones (yes, flip phones) are decorated with stickers and nail polish; with those from different parts of the world who have become aware of what they are doing responding by the hundreds, including famous activists like Ralph Nader, who wrote in a recent essay that their rebellion needs support and diffusion.
Furthermore, two years after their club began, according to reporter Alex Vadukul of the New York Times who was the person who originally wrote about them, these Luddites still have disdain for social media platforms and how they use impressionable young people, causing them to create picture-perfect false identities online which have little to do with who they really are. Possibly most heartening of all, they still rely on flip phones and laptops rather than succumbing to the enticing addiction of smart phones, and they have even drafted a mission statement aimed at connecting young people in various communities who share their antipathy to digital addiction.
Furthermore, the activities of so-called Luddite organizations like this one might seem to beg the question of what real progress is. Is it something like increasing the capacity of artificial intelligence sites like ChatGPT to not just provide information but to actually give prescriptive advice? Is it a production of a new smart phone which everyone can wear on their eyeglasses or carry in their wallet or purse? Or is it an approach to digital technology by which we can reclaim access to our short and long term memories, our capacity to attend, or the depth of our impressions and emotive lives that many of have seemed to have lost in this radical new digital age?
Those scientists who study the dynamics of our universe, and who have in the past speculated that time may indeed be circular, and so we need to occasionally delve into the past in order to progress in the future may indeed be worth listening to now; which of course means that we may need to revise our ideas concerning what forward progress really means, particularly in this new Internet age. In other words, what me may need is a much broader discussion concerning what moving forward really means simply because the idea may not be as simple as we previously considered it to be.
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