Once again, Peters and Toffler may well be right, as from Hollywood to Harvard, America's brainlords rebel against computer technology. In his pungent new book War of the Worlds, Mark Slouka joins the rising chorus of resistance. Similar chimeras recur in antitech crusades. Bathed in the ultraviolet frequencies of sunlight, humans throughout the history of the species have raced through a planetary magnetic field of half a gauss in power on a terrestrial sphere charged by worldwide lightning strikes a hundred times a second to a capacitive level of 100 volts per meter of height. They defy the fact that around the world use of electricity correlates almost perfectly with greater longevity.
Publishers sign up other disgruntled nerds to write hymns to noble savagery and gardening.
And from the fever swamps, a Marxist enrage posts bombs through the mail and addled editors detonate them in the pages of the Washington Post. With life expectancies rising eight years in the developed countries and 22 years in the Third World since 1950, people have more time to lash out at industrial benefactors who gain wealth and create it from sources hard to comprehend. Misconceptions about the Internet, however, also abound in more savvy circles. From Stewart Alsop's Agenda conference to the Internet Society, serious critics are emerging to predict that the network itself will bog down and degrade, jammed by traffic and trivia. Often unconsciously, these critics feed upon a spurious vision of capitalist ecology.