Subject: luddism > Luddite implies a throwback, fighting progress, etc. Somehow, I don't >quite see the applicability of the term here... Maybe I too, am missing >something... call it a combination of hyperbole and addiction to historical trivia. the Luddites were less militant than the 'engine breakers', who were determined to fight the advance of industrialism in all ways. the Luddites weren't necessarily opposed to technology itself, they were fighting the concept of "progress at any cost".. not so unreasonable a position, considering the cost was usually measured in limbs and lives, lost by workers in the "dark, Satanic mills". my personal take on geek-luddism is that "more technology" isn't automatically good. i believe in sticking with technology long enough to assimilate it, work the bugs out of it, and come up with something that's really *useful*.. not in trading this season's batch of random botches and blunders for a new set every six months. there are whole universes of potential technology buried in the spoil heaps of our current information consumerism. HTML is packed with low-level hooks for some really cool and useful stuff: the section was originally supposed to support popup summaries, so you could check the preview before actually loading a page; there's a whole family of relationships assigned among links which allow similar support for timeliness and coordination between linked pages.. but nobody's implementing them because they're not as sexy as multiplanar graphics with to-the-pixel placement. i see the act of saying "screw this", tossing NS or IE, and surfing with lynx, as an example of engine-breaking. ditto for anyone who maliciously surfs with image-loading off, thus robbing content providers of their banner-ad impressions. i dream of discovering the low-level kink in SMTP or sendmail that can be used to make spammers mailbomb each other. i think we need more of that kind of thing. therefore, i'm a geek-luddite.