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The trouble may have begun when I signed up for a political philosophy course taught by a young professor from India named Uday Mehta. He showed how our modern Western legal system favored the development of technology: In the seventeenth century the mathematician René Descartes revolutionized philosophy by reconceiving the human being as a machine. Fifty years later the political theorist John Locke handed the latter rights. Locke, arguably the greatest single influence on the writers of the United States Constitution, expounded a novel notion of “property.” By snipping apart the complex social obligations of the past, he created a discrete personal domain of freedom, or individual right. This space he called “property,” whether it referred to a person or to a thing the person owned. A hereditary commons available for a mixture of uses and livelihoods had little place in Locke’s thinking. His idea was to make the human individual and possessions inviolable. But since property was now synonymous with the person, the two became legally akin. By this innovation the machine got a toehold; it gained stature tantamount to that of its owner, even as the owner descended to the plane of the machine. The machine had acquired citizenship.

I wrote a paper for Mehta suggesting it be revoked.

Historians Merritt Roe Smith and Pauline Maier, in another course, unfolded the practical impact of technology on our society, weaving small-scale studies of traditional communities into the larger fabric of the young American republic. It was interesting to find that technology did not always receive the ecstatic greeting it does today. In the early nineteenth century there were uprisings against its encroaching domination, both here and abroad. Smith pointed out the unrest, leading, for instance, to violence against management at the Harper’s Ferry armory after new technology was imposed on skilled gun makers. If there was one moment when the scales tipped irrevocably in favor of machinery in the English-speaking world, however, it was probably back in 1817, when the legendary Ned Ludd and his followers were hanged for vandalizing the power looms that were ruining their livelihoods. At that moment came the fulfillment of Locke’s novel definition of rights: destroying a machine became legally tantamount to murder. The plea of self-defense counted for nothing, and opposition to technological “advances” has ever since been informally stigmatized as “Luddism.”

I wrote a paper for Smith expressing my sympathies—for Ludd.

Midway through the semester, I made an appointment to speak with the S.T.S. program director about my academic progress. Professor Keniston, lanky and affable, was a psychologist by training. For the time I had known him, he had patted my ego in an avuncular way. The rigors of academic life were taking their toll, and I hoped the meeting would help revive me.

Shortly after I walked in his office, however, I sensed a chill. “Eric,” Keniston asked with a frown, “do you really want to eliminate laborsaving devices?” The question came out of the blue. It had nothing to do with why I had come to talk to him.

I was stunned and for a split second couldn’t speak. I finally murmured a denial. The director went on.

“I just came back from my summer home in Maine. I was trying to move some heavy rocks in the backyard. That pretty well did me in. Took me three days. And I’m not about to do it again soon. Next time I’ll use a backhoe.”

I shuffled back to my graduate stall in a daze. Keniston had got me all wrong. It wasn’t technology per se that I was after so much as an attitude of indiscriminate license, a bias in favor of machines over the interest of human beings. But this was M.I.T., after all. In the future, I’d watch my step.

Still, even Keniston had given manual labor a try, and that was partly why I was in trouble. His misadventure helped me to clarify the purpose of my quest: not to rid the world of technology but to ascertain more carefully how much—or how little—technology