I'm wearing clothes, aren't I? As far as you know, I mean?

Anonymous thinks ColumbusGuy hates technology. I'm pretty sure he's mistaken. Most of the time I'm unaware of it, I'd say, and of the remainder I'm ordinarily neutral to impressed by it.

But let me quote the imitable Rex Stout:

At dinner he started on automation. He has always been anti-machine, and on automation his position was that it would soon make life an absurdity. It was already bad enough; on a cold and windy March day he was eating his evening meal in comfortable warmth, and he had no personal connection whatever with the production of the warmth. The check that had paid the oil bill was connected, but *he* wasn't. Soon, with automation, no one would have any connection with the processes and phenomena that make it possible to stay alive. We would all be parasites, living not on some other living organisms but on machines, arrived at the ultimate ignominy. I tried to put up a stiff argument, but he knows more words.

and:

"I have no inkling. I have no plan. I have only a commitment, and I intend to meet it, though at the moment I have no idea when or how. How many times has the answer to some bothersome question come while you were brushing your teeth?"
"More than once."
"I'll be brushing mine in a couple of hours. Not with an electric thing; with that machine the fear of electrocution would squelch all mental processes. As an anthropologist, are you concerned with the menace of automation?"
"As an anthropologist, no."
"As a man you are."
"Why . . . yes."
"Your son is twenty-one years old. Are you aware that by averting this calamity for him we will be compelling him inevitably to suffer a worse one?"
Very neat. Confronted by a father worried sick about a son locked up for the big one, he had dealt with that in less than a quarter of an hour and steered him to automation; a fresh audience, better than me, since he had had me at dinner. Neat.