Luddite, sort of

My very favorite pen is a beautiful, retro-styled fountain pen. Which I bought online. I can't stand microwave ovens, and I announced this to the world on Twitter the other day (for those who cared). I am exulting in not having a functioning TV, but I have no qualms about getting my news-and-entertainment hit via the Internet (although, as the weeks go by, I find I'm spending more and more of my day in utter quiet). I love making food the old-fashioned way, but I forge my definition of what that means by looking stuff up on the Internet. I'm about to go hiking this weekend ("go bush," as the Aussies say), but I'll be setting up the final logistics by phone and email.

My point?

Hard-line Luddism is just as silly now as it was two hundred years ago. And hard-line technophilia is just as silly now as it was in my childhood, when we were told techology was in the process of solving everything. I'm not going to fatuously and santimoniously intone that "technology is entirely value-neutral; it's the uses people put it to that matter." We can all look around us and see that that's only partly true, that there are plenty of technologies that are, by their very nature, offensive and/or dangerous and/or just plain creepy. But I will say that clinging to retro things like fountain pens is something that should be done because one likes fountain pens, not because one hates PDAs, or because retro makes one feel smug and noble. It's not its retro-ness that makes my fountain pen so beloved. It's the feel of it, how it looks, how it writes, how much fun it is to use. Sure, part of that fun is the connection to the past. But that's not what makes it better, it's just what makes it fun.