technology – Deborah Makarios

September 7, 2023September 7, 2023

Gandhi, Chaplin, and the Symbol of Non-Violence

When Charlie Chaplin met Gandhi…sounds like the beginning of a joke. But in fact they did meet, in London, in 1931. Here you see Chaplin (seated, dark suit) next to Gandhi (seated, Gandhi).

Black and white photograph of M K Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Charlie Chaplin, and others.

The conversation included Gandhi explaining to Chaplin that his use and promotion of the charkha (traditional Indian spinning wheel, used for spinning cotton) wasn’t a rejection of more recent technologies – Luddite, we’d probably say these days – but rather a rejection of the exploitative system that those technologies were then serving.

Which, to be fair, is also how the actual Luddites looked at it. They didn’t object to labour-saving machinery. They objected to the idea that labour-saving was interpreted by employers to mean not “the machine does more, so now workers don’t have to work quite so hard” but rather “the machine does more, so we can work fewer people just as hard as before (and it’s not our business if the rest of them starve)”.

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May 28, 2020May 28, 2020

7 Things My Desk Says

About me, that is. What it would probably say if given free rein is “help, I’m being buried alive!” Except, of course, for the trifling point that it is not alive, being neither made of sapient pearwood, nor belonging to someone who has refused hospitality to a French enchantress lately.

But what my desk says about me is Quite A Lot, and not all of it flattering. So here is the dirt the desk would dish: seven things one can deduce about me from my desk – or at least the top of it, because even I cannot give you a clear account of what exactly I have in the cupboard and drawers thereof (which tells you something about me all by itself).

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March 20, 2020March 20, 2020

…But You Didn’t Get It

A quote I have often found myself reaching for of late comes from Douglas Adams: “We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”

To give programmers their due, it’s a convoluted world to operate in. However, I have recently discovered that the plugin I depended on to send post notifications to those who signed up for them was no longer sending said emails. At least, not to those who had subscribed prior to the ‘upgrade’ at the beginning of this year. For some reason the upgrade set defaults to “do not perform core function unless explicitly re-instructed to do so.”

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