Archive for December, 2010

Of course, the same society now said to be undergoing a computer revolution has long since gotten used to “revolutions” in laundry detergents, underarm deodorants, floor waxes, and other consumer products. Exhausted in Madison Avenue advertising slogans, the image had lost much of its punch.

• Langdon Winner. The Whale and the Reactor. 1986.

“Appropriate technologists were unwilling to face squarely the facts of organized social and political power. Fascinated by dreams of a spontaneous, grass-roots revolution, they avoided any deep-seeking analysis of the institutions that control the direction of technological and economic development. In this happy self-confidence they did not bother to devise strategies that might have helped them overcome obvious sources of resistance. The same judgement that Marx and Engels passed on the utopians of the nineteenth century apply just as well to the appropriate technologists of the 1970s: they were lovely visionaries, naive about the forces that contained them.”

• Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor. 1986.

Edupunks are modern-day Appropriate Technologists.How do we prevent the edupunk movement from following the same fate as the Appropriate Technology movement of the 70′s and 80′s?

update: My initial note relating the AT movement with Edupunk wasn’t really thought through, and seems to have pissed offstruck a nerve with a few people. It definitely wasn’t meant as an insult or potshot or anything like that, but that phrase popped into my head as I read the passage. Maybe a better wording would have been as a question, as modified above…