[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

A Further Response To His Mobile Read Critics From Alan Kaufman, Author of 'The Electronic Bookburning” (Evergreen Review #20)
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html


STATEMENT:

Hi-tech does not increase your brain capacity: it merely exercizes your thumbs.

STATEMENT:

"Lo-tech" does not increase your brain capacity, and, given your infantile statement that follows, it doesn't increase your knowledge either.

Not a few of you walk around with highly developed thumbs jammed deep into your own eye, like overweaned Oedipus Rex's, though lacking the nerve of that tragic king to pluck out your own eyes in order to better see the truth.

I'd gladly do is if I actually *had* the problem you're ascribing to me. *BZZZZT!* Wrong diagnosis, Dr. Kaufman. Where'd you get your medical training, the University of Incompetence?

For you are merch-juggled children breastfed on marketing strategies hatched before you were born and are so fully inculcated with h-tech propoganda that it is safe to say that with few exceptions virtually your entire generation haven't the capacity to interrogate your own experience vis a vis the addictive, soul-numbing machines that have become mocking substitutes for your human experience.

I *like* that - 'merch-juggled'. Are you attempting to create the word, 'merchandising-juggled'? And what is this with 'h-tech'? Are you attempting to state that (as a published author) you cannot figure out how to work a keyboard well enough to type 'hi-tech'? (And yes, your typing is fair game because your screed is based upon your supposed 'superior knowledge and literary ability'.

And if you find computers soul-numbing, I suggest you spend time living in a truly 12th century (A.D.) society as a serf. I'm sure that you'll find the 14-hour-per-day (minimum) slave labor quite a soul (and mind) numbing experience - enough so that you'll never use the phrase soul-numbing when describing technology.

Not a single one of you on Mobile Read, in your responses to my point, demonstrate a capacity to question the Matrix in which you float: a mental and spiritual prison of the most engulfing social conditioning ever foisted by private enterprise upon a peer group of human beings.

Prison? Come. Live in *my* shoes and *my* body for a while - sans this 'corrupting' internet access - and you'll be begging for the freedom that internet access gives you. Prison? No, Alan. Prison would be stripping me of the outside-my-home human contact that I cannot get because of my physical limitations. Thank you so much for arguing so vehemently for stripping us of one of the few things which makes my condition bearable. Yes, despite Godwin's Law, I'm going to say this. Hitler would be *SO* proud of you.

In this regard, you are no different than the children of any emergent totalitarian society, who cannot imagine a world without Big Brother. And it is chiefly that which I find so heartbreaking about the impact of hi-tech: not the machines per se but what the machines have made of you.

Am I afraid of 'Big Brother' using the internet and computers to watch me? Yes, indeed I am. I am a big-L Libertarian *because* I fear encroaching socialism/totalitarianism. But it is NOT technology that causes the problem. No, it is the desire of those same proto-totalitarians to use anything they can get their hands on to form their police-states that is the problem.

In fact, I sense from many of the responses that very few among you have bothered even to read in full or at all either of my essays but simply respond to each other's postings and vent with your thumbs instead of your minds.

Your responses, in fact, are troublingly similar, as though formed from the same pool of 50 or so monosyllabic words. This is, as I understand it, endemic to the level of discourse that occurs in hi-tech: a perpetual public convocation of spewing illiterates.

Og confused. Og not understand. Is long words bad or good? Long words most often used with hi-tech. Lo-tech most often use short words. Alan Kaufman say hi-tech bad. So why Alan Kaufman say short words bad?

Og so very confused. Og go back to cave now and beat head against rock just like Alan Kaufman say. Alan Kaufman *MUST* be right because Alan Kaufman use long words. But he not like hi-tech, which also use long words. Sigh. Perhaps Alan Kaufman should take long vacation on desert island until he understand real problem.

It appears that my essay has inspired a generational backlash among many of you, who see this as a face-off between an old fart white book-worshipping Luddite (how you portray me) and mainly young, progressive, enlightened and exciting hi-techers (how many, if not all of you, regard yourselves).

So, I'd like to extend the following invite to any on this site. Lets thumbwrestle for three shirtless private rounds in an alley of my choice, and see who's left victorious: my 6'2”, 200 pound, tattooed, 57 year old military veteran Bronx-born poetry writing streetfighting ass or your nerdy and ignorant Silicon Folly digitized selves.

Let's see. First you invite me to thumbwrestle and then you imply bodily violence against me. Stalin would *also* be so proud of you for retreating behind threats of violence.

If defeated, I'll French with a Kindle but if you go down, you must not only toss your device but read in full classics that I'll list, ranging from Marcus Aurelius, Sophocles, Homer and the Old Testament to Flaubert, Tolstoy, Babel, Stendahl, Proust and George Eliot, to name but a few.

And yes, there will be a test.

A test? Quick. Name ten great economists! Now name ten great philosophers!

If you fail to mention von Hayek, Smith or von Mises in either answer you've failed the test.

By the way, in order to understand why you failed, you'd have to be able to *read*, something which you continue to provide evidence you are incapable of doing.

Derek