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October 25, 2006
The roots of our idea of technology do indeed lie in our historical period of study, the era of the Romantics and the Luddites, but in ways much more complicated than either ahistoricist neo-Luddism or ahistoricist technoculture have seemed able or willing to explore. C. P. Snow was wrong. Literary intellectuals and humanities scholars are not natural Luddites.
Work-station anxieties refers to way that the humanities academics and intellectuals are themselves being turned into what the high-tech business world is calling "knowledge workers." Humanities scholars need to engage the knowledge-work culture of postindustrial capital if they are not to be redefined as easily-redundant, mere knowledge workers.
The resistance in the new era must be to educate the incipient resistance to the ahistoricist hegemony of that business culture.The postindustrial worldview holds that there is no real difference between the past and present that is not technical, so there is no real need for historical understanding per se.
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