Not the least of the many ironies the new wave of anti-technology rhetoric is that it depends for its growth on the Internet and its anti-hero is the Unabomber -- who apparently kept three typewriters, once the epitome of high technology. PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson, author of "Evolution Isn't What It Used To Be" (W.H. Freeman), is a political scientist who writes widely on technology and global governance.

Last month's arrest of Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski has inspired a great new flurry of anti-technology rhetoric, with the usual evocations of the 19th century machine-bashing English Luddites. While most people sensibly refuse to be polarized into techno optimist or techno pessimist, technophile or technophobe, the new Luddism has become a fashionable topic for conversation around the campuses, the coffee shops and the New Age bookstores -- and, irony of ironies, on the Internet.

That the anti-hero of this movement should be the Unabomber is another one of its ironies. He made his bombs partly out of wood, but used batteries to detonate them. He reviled the computer, but kept three typewriters -- apparently unaware that the typewriter was once the epitome of high technology, reviled by Luddites in its own time as the destroyer of the art of penmanship, the machine that would put honest scribes out of work. This technological nostalgia appears to be one of the common features of neo-Luddism: earlier technologies take on the patina of time and begin to seem plain, folksy and natural.

The final results of the Unabomber's work were as confused as his thoughts: scattered murders and maimings of people who were, at best, bit players in what he calls "the industrial-technological system." His actions had no more point or precision than those of some poor demented gunman who takes to firing into a crowd at a shopping center.

The greatest irony of all, though, is the affinity between the new Luddites and modern communications media -- radio, television, the press, the Internet. Neo-Luddism, you may notice, is not flashed around the world by smoke signals. I recently downloaded from The Nation's Web site the essay about the Unabomber by self-described "anti-technology critic" Kirkpatrick Sale. The Net is humming these days with Unabomber talk, including many admiring references to his huge, rambling manifesto. One group of neo-Luddites assembled recently for a national conference at a small town in Ohio. Obviously sincere people, they did not let anybody photograph their conference, but they gladly allowed in a New York Times reporter accompanied by an artist who drew a sketch, which was then duly reproduced in the newspaper and circulated to the millions of people around the world who read the newspaper. Neo-Luddism simply could not exist in its present status as a global hot topic without these various communications media -- all of which employ the highest of high technology.

Most of us would certainly agree that there is much to criticize in many manifestations of modern technology. Nuclear energy with its mountains of radioactive waste that have to be somehow swept under the world's rug. Automobiles clogging cities with noise, pollution and endless traffic jams. Plenty to criticize, and also much to be thankful for: things that make our lives easier, and other things -- such as the vaccines against polio and smallpox -- that save our lives and those of our children. The sorting out of what works from what doesn't -- and why -- is the kind of public dialogue about technology we need, not grandiose broadsides against technology itself. One may criticize bad laws without rejecting the rule of law, or a bad building design without proclaiming all buildings to be embodied evil. It is the fuzzy but ego-satisfying "anti technology" pose that renders the neo-Luddite cause truly ludicrous.

Blanket condemnations of technology are always reifications -- attempts to turn a process into a thing, a verb into a noun. They suffer from what the philosopher A.N. Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." Technology is thought, action, information, invention -- and you find it wherever you find human beings. It is not a thing, but a living part of who and what we are, and it cannot be bombed out of existence.

We see the violent products of that kind of sloppy thinking everywhere -- in the ham-handed actions of the Unabomber, in the senseless killings in Oklahoma City born of a hatred of government -- which isn't a thing either. In both cases, the root cause is a retreat from dealing with life in its complexity, a decision instead to enshrine some huge generalization -- technology, government -- as the thing to blame, the cause of all our problems, the object to be destroyed. It's quite understandable that, given the complexity of modern life, many people retreat into the comfort of such ideas. But sloppy thinking is the greatest nutrient of violence. And neo-Luddism, despite its adherents' conviction of their own goodness, is more problem than solution.