Fergus Cassidy

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Just then Ned Ludd
came 'a running in the room
he saw that power loom
and he sensed impending doom,
and we don't know why
but Ned Ludd went awry,
he screamed and had a fit
and he crashed right into it.

And it shuddered and it fell.
and the weaver's liked it well.
            The ballad of Ned Ludd

LIKE Captain Boycott, Ned Ludd's name lives on today, though usage of both is waning faster than you can say eponym.

The Luddites are now almost extinct, save for a tiny band who rail against 'the threat' of technology, seemingly unaware of the switches, processors and chips awash in their centrally-heated, light-filled homes.

I suppose they should really be called neo-Luddites, seeing as everything else is gone all neo- these days. Neo is this decade's crypto and the previous decade's quasi. A hinted reminder of another old adage: if it ain't broke, don't prefix it.

I would describe neo-Luddites as people who feel society is changing too fast and hold that technology is one of the main contributing factors to that speed of change.

I have some sympathy with that view but not a lot of time. The danger lies in cherry-picking one technology from another, an impossible task since most technologies are inter-related and inter-dependent in one way or another.

But I also have great difficulty in seeing the past from a romantic or starry-eyed perspective. The more we in Ireland find out about the past, the more irritating the rose-tinted glasses become.

One figure in recently released statistics from the Central Statistics Office should shatter any illusions. A child born in 1925 would, on average, only expect to live to around 55 years of age. A child born in 1995, however, can expect to live to around 75 years of age.

The way I see it, a genuine neo-Luddite is slightly hypocritical and contrary about technology. Modern day cherry-pickers. Organising sieges on mobile phone mast sites, using mobile phones to organise themselves! Hurtling around the roads in lumps of metal past huge obituary road signs.

Or whizzing off to Paris (or someplace within 100 miles of it), in pressurised lengthened tubes of metal at 400mph, 20,000ft off the ground with only a belt, a fancy buckle and the drinks trolley for safety.

What does this say about our attitude to technology? Landing at night or in conditions of bad visibility is known as flying by wire, a more obscure way of saying that the pilots press a few buttons, take out the newspapers and a bank of computers brings the plane back to terra firma without the human touch.

We accept the risks inherent in technology when we can see that it makes sense and has overall beneficial effects. A plane journey is no longer a jaw-dropping feat of engineering science. Or trepidiation. It's just a way of getting people from A to B and their luggage from A to Z.

Useful technology gets taken for granted. And that's because it not only works but there are very good reason for having it around. The technology must be able to justify its existence. And it highlights a very important question which Ned Ludd (in his own way) raised: what is the problem to which this or that technology is the solution?

There has to be a problem in the first place before technology can be applied to solve it. Anything else belongs in the bags of snake oil salesmen.

But apparently there is a problem with the way we vote in this country. So much so that a system that served well for almost 100 years is to be consigned to the dustbin of history. In its place will come machines and computer code.

Next June the local and European elections will no longer involve pen and paper, two other technologies that were once ordained to be obsolete by now.

We'll be pushing buttons on machines, not knowing (or caring?) what happens after that. This is voting by wire and the powers that be seem intent on landing it on us. But what is the problem that electronic voting is the solution? Massive voter fraud? A trigger-happy army? A downtrodden and rebellious people?

As a fan of technology, this evoting lark impresses me about as much as a banana straightener. Or a tin of striped paint.

Voting with pen and paper is cumbersome but damn it it works. The technology behind it is old but so is the light bulb.

There is no reason strong enough to justify changing the current system until a better one comes along. What has been developed so far is too experimental and has the potential to create far more problems than it solves. Evoting technology as it stands is a solution looking for a problem.

Count me out.

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