‘Decomputerize?’ Over My Dead Laptop!

This week, I wrote a dystopia of the dystopians, an extrapolation of current wishes among the anti-tech among us about dangers and regulation of technology, data, and the net. I tried to be detailed and in that I feared I may have gone too far. But now The Guardian shows me I wasn’t nearly dystopian enough, for a columnist there has beaten me to hell.

“To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution,” declares the headline over Ben Tarnoff’s screed.

He essentially makes the argument that computers use a lot of energy; consumption of energy is killing the planet; ergo we should destroy the computers to save the planet.

But that is a smokescreen for his true argument against his real devil, data. And that frightens me. For to argue against data overall — its creation, its gathering, its analysis, its use — is to argue against information and knowledge. Tarnoff isn’t just trying to reverse the Digital Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. He’s trying to roll back the fucking Enlightenment.

That he is doing this in the pages of The Guardian, a paper I admire and love (and have worked and written for) saddens me doubly, for this is a news organization that once explored the opportunities — and risks — of technology with open eyes and curiosity in its reporting and with daring in…