I recently discovered that I am a Luddite. I didn’t know the word “Luddite”, but I was one.
Well, I am bound to be ain’t I? I mean, I am a bike for Pete’s sake. I have nothing to do with your technology and progress and as far as I am concerned, you could have put a stop to your inventive madness as soon as you were done inventing us, bikes.
Bikes are reactionary, almost by design. It is simply hard to improve on perfection, and our way of thinking is that leave well enough alone, if you see what I mean. Oh, I am not saying I am not glad when I hear of another gadget for me or my master, a gadget that might improve his or my quality of life, but I could easily live without it. You know my position on cars but cars are just the tip of the iceberg. To put it bluntly, you cannot afford to continue this trend. And there are too many of you and too little of us.
When I say I am a Luddite, I am saying it in the 21st century sense. I am not about to storm high tech companies and smash bright brains (the 21st century equivalent of the milling machine of the 19th century) and revolving robots. The first Luddites were protecting their jobs, or so they thought. Today, the modern Luddite must aspire for a moratorium on growth. We have gone far enough and it is time to take some steps back. If I was joking earlier about too many of you and too little of us, then I promise you I am serious when I say too many of you and too little water. And really, water, is just another tip of the iceberg. what is really needed is a moratorium of population growth, shifting of resources towards sustainability, changing people’s perceptions, this sort of things.
Being a bike I am not afraid of the New Luddism. As long as we rely on human legs (and lungs), we are safe. So we won’t all have pneumatic brakes and some of us will be heavy and ungainly, but we can survive everything, from energy crises to ecological disasters. So, if I am not worrying about myself and my kin, who am I worried about? You, humans, of course.
Because without you, we are just a piece of useless machinery, albeit a very elegant one.
So please, for the sake of our future together, do something to stop your inexorable march towards the abyss.
Leave a Comment
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
