Fear of Technology

What the Luddites were actually objecting to

The received version has them opposing machines. The material corrects it precisely: resistance did not occur where a new technology assisted a work process without significantly changing it. They protested the application of the machines rather than their invention.

Their argument was about property. They held that their labour was a central part of the economy and that the skills involved were property requiring protection from the autonomy of machines. That is an economic claim rather than a fear, and it is why the word technophobia sits awkwardly on the group most associated with it.

Why the definition of technophobia turns on routine

A 2018 study proposed a definition from a critical literature review, and it is more specific than the usual one:

Technophobia is an irrational fear or anxiety formed in response to a new stimulus arriving as a technology that modifies or changes the individual's normal routine in performing a task.

The response may be active and physical, meaning avoidance, or passive, meaning distress and apprehension.

The load-bearing phrase is that it modifies the routine. On that account the object is not the device but the disruption, which puts the term close to neophobia with a device attached, and explains why the same person may accept one new machine and refuse another of equal complexity. The narrower aversion to algorithms runs the other way: a measured preference for human judgement over a system's, held by people entirely comfortable with technology.

Larry Rosen, a research psychologist at California State University, Dominguez Hills, divides the population three ways:

• uncomfortable users
• cognitive computerphobes
• anxious computerphobes

Why technophobia figures split so sharply by country

A study published in Computers in Human Behavior between 1992 and 1994 surveyed first-year college students across several countries. Of 3,392 respondents, twenty-nine per cent reported high-level technophobic fears. Japan reported fifty-eight per cent and Mexico fifty-three.

A country reporting double the international average is not describing a different distribution of individual temperament. Whatever the survey caught, national context is a large part of it, and the material offers no explanation for the split.

A report published in 2000 estimated that roughly eighty-five to ninety per cent of new employees at an organisation may be uncomfortable with new technology and technophobic to some degree, which is a figure so large it functions as a statement about workplaces rather than about people.

Where technophobia was general rather than personal

The nineteenth century is treated as the period when the pace of change outran comfort, and the Romantic movement as the expression of that. William Wordsworth and William Blake held that the industrial changes were polluting a view of nature as perfect and pure, and the Romantic preference for imagination over reason and the organic over the mechanical is presented as a response to the same pressure.

The twentieth century supplied harder material. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear proliferation and the Cold War introduced a version of the question that had no historical precedent, since humanity now had the capacity to manipulate the world to the point of destroying it, and nuclear anxiety became a research subject in its own right. Napalm, explosives and gases produced commercially during the Vietnam War damaged public confidence further. Environmentalism grew alongside:

1. the first international air pollution conference was held in 1955
2. investigations into the lead content of petrol caused outrage in the 1960s
3. the ozone layer and global warming were taken seriously from the 1980s

Why the Amish are not technophobic

The Amish and other Old Order Anabaptists are frequently cited as an example and the citation is wrong. Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner and Steven M. Nolt state that the Amish modify and adapt technology in creative ways to fit their cultural values and social goals, and that Amish technologies are diverse, complicated and continually changing.

What the Ordnung governs is selective use, particularly for personal use, in order to maintain a belief and a culture. Selective adoption after deliberation is the opposite of a phobia, and the group most often named as an example of this fear is an example of something else.

How films have staged technophobia since Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the early instance. The Terminator gave technophobia commercial success in the 1980s with a computer that becomes self-aware and decides to kill everyone, which is the shape the Frankenstein complex takes in fiction. Virtuosity, from 1995, sends a virtual serial killer into the physical world.

Doctor Who supplies the most interesting version. The episode The Robots of Death features a character whose fear of robots comes from their lack of body language, which the Fourth Doctor describes as making them appear as dead men walking. The series consultant Kit Pedler drew on the same fear for the Cybermen, from his own concern that artificial limbs might become common enough that it would be impossible to tell when a person had stopped being a man and become a machine.

A 1960 Twilight Zone episode, A Thing About Machines, concerns a man's hatred of electric razors, televisions, electric typewriters and clocks. Sixty-six years later the list reads as a period piece, which is the point: every generation's technophobia is about whatever is new.