When I was a young boy growing up in the UK, there was no such thing as television. My first experience of it was in 1952 watching the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.  I was 8. We were the first in our street with a TV, (black & white in those days). I’d never heard of computers and I was in my 40’s before the first PCs became available …. with a hefty price tag! So you can imagine the steepness of the learning curve of someone who remembers life before TV trying to keep up with developments. My 8 and 5 year old grandchildren, on the other hand, seem to have been born with a mouse in hand.
But there is one thing us baby boomers and aging hippies have going for us. The idea, however dormant  that we don’t want to conform with conventional post industrial revolution square society. We rebelled against it, remember? Most of us conformed eventually, of course, just so that we could eat and raise a family, but in our souls, we just wanna be free man!

Now today an opportunity has presented itself that can enable us to dust of those sixties dreams, grow long hair, buy a lava lamp

and live a life of hippie freedom ….. oh .. err … man.
I refer, of course, to the internet. Invented by hippie nerds and developed to its current incarnation by the hippies’ children and grandchildren. Little know-it-alls. Just because they grew in the computer age!

‘So come on people now, let’s get together’ use the technology to drop out and make money at the same time. Possibly lots of it. Let’s face it even if your employer hasn’t stolen the superannuation money there is still not going to be enough to live on!

So how does it work? you ask.

Well, the ways you can make money on the internet are only limited by your imagination, but basically you are going to sell your own product or information, sell someone else’s product or information or use your websites as advertising hoardings.
Personally I prefer to sell someone else’s product for a commission. That way I haven’t got to worry about warehousing, inventory, post & packing, getting paid or dissatisfied customers. You can also use it as an advertising hoarding at the same time.
Here is a pretty good training course on selling other people’s stuff. It costs $US27 a month for an 11 month course, but if you are starting from scratch it’s a good way to learn and it’s pretty cheap.

Of course having a spiffy website and a great product to sell is only a part of the story. You’ll need people to find your website and click on the link to buy the product. In my opinion, the best method of doing that is offered by a company called Social Media Science. They even have a website construction service.

Now, you can have as many websites and products to sell as you like. Your only limit is time.

So, get to it baby booming hippies, let’s create a baby boomer lead recovery!
At the same time we can make lots of money, live outrageously and embarrass the children.

It was a morning that heart attacks are made of.

Bitterly cold with rain that could be best described as a miserable heavy drizzle. The sun had not yet made it over the horizon to brighten up the top of the rain cloud blanket.

The figures at the bus stops were barely discernable. Grey shapes with umbrellas against grey houses and pavements, limply illuminated by sickly yellow sodium streetlights. And it was Monday. The first day of the working week.

The bus driver was a different story. Relentlessly eccentric, laughing at a world that takes itself far too seriously. He had decorated his bus with stuffed toys of all colourful varieties, a lioness, a gorilla in a RAP outfit, a clown fish, a puppy dog in a fireman’s hat. In a plastic ice cream container taped to his change counter he offered free lollies for his passengers and wore on his head a hat in the shape of a pink pig with wings. The dismally damp Monday morning commuters could not help but smile when confronted with this theatre of the absurd. Folding their soggy umbrellas they fumble with frozen fingers to find money or season tickets.

As I watched the shadowy grinding traffic and listened to the hiss of tyres on wet tarmac, it struck me. Why on earth am I doing this to myself? Why is anyone doing this to themselves?

The truth is that we have gotten used to this way of life over the centuries, ever since the Luddites failed to stop the inexorable march of the industrial revolution. The factory or office and technology became more important than human beings or quality of life. It was this that the Luddites were actually opposed to. Technology that enslaved humanity rather than adding to what it was to be human.

So here we are a couple of centuries down the tarmacadam and we now accept as normal the concept of going somewhere away from home and family to exchange time for money in order to survive. A total dependence on some one else’s business and self-interest for survival.

A plague on this 19th century poverty mindset. I needed to take control of my life. Live how I want to live, relying on my own talents and initiative. Stop travelling on buses on dark wet Monday mornings. I’ll start an internet business.

The Internet is, in effect, the next revolution. Most interestingly it enables those who are willing to embrace it, a chance to return to the idyllic days of a pre-industrial revolution lifestyle, but with broadband and enjoy a modern day version of self employed bliss.

And what an enviable way of life it was back then. Picture this, (please go to iTunes download and play ‘Morning’ from the Peer Gynt Suite), a cottage in the bucolic English countryside. Butterflies flit from colourful flower to colourful flower whilst the birds sing sweetly in the lush green trees by the babbling brook. Inside the cottage the weaver is contently finishing his latest creation destined for the markets of Europe and because the price of his goods never changes, he knows how much he will be paid. His wife and children are happily helping him in his tasks. Pausing to refresh himself from his labours, he wanders out into the garden to check on the progress of the spinach, pulls a few weeds out of the potato patch and throws the chickens some food left over from the family lunch. At no time is he separated from home and family and he never gets on a Monday morning bus!

Today, thanks to appropriate technology, we have the opportunity to conduct business at home whilst packing the kids off to school, planting the spinach, feeding the chickens and maybe indulging in an afternoon delight between google-ads.

The computer has replaced the weaver’s loom, the Internet has replaced the traveling merchants, software has replaced the yarn, but I bet you we have the same aspirations for peace, joy and happiness as our ancestors. But probably not pink pig hats! They didn’t need them.

Have you ever stopped and looked around you, at the nightmare of commuting, struggling to find or keep a job, never enough money, pollution, war and thought to yourself, “how on earth did I end up like this?’. Well my friend, the journey started sometime ago.

Let me take you back a few centuries.

You’re a weaver living in England. You work from home with your family around you. You buy raw materials from the traveling merchant and sell him your finished product. A product renown throughout Europe for it’s superior quality. There is no free market economy so prices are predictable and consistent, which means so is your income. You have an idyllic quality of life.

And what an enviable way of life it is. Picture this, (please go to the  iTunes shop, download and play ‘Morning’ from the Peer Gynt Suite), a small cottage in the bucolic English countryside. Butterflies flit from colourful flower to colourful flower whilst the birds sing sweetly in the lush green trees by the babbling brook. Inside the cottage the weaver is contently finishing his latest creation destined for the markets of Europe and because the price of his goods never changes, he knows how much he will be paid. His wife and children are happily helping him in his tasks. Pausing to refresh himself from his labours, he wanders out into the garden to check on the progress of the spinach, pull a few weeds out of the potato patch and throws the chickens some food left over from the family lunch. He is is self sufficient and abundant.

At this time the idea emerged that it was possible to create machines that would produce goods much faster and with less manpower. Not only that, unskilled manpower. It also meant that you could sell the products at a much cheaper price. Of course the woven articles produced by machines were of a much inferior quality but hey, they were cheap.

And so the industrial revolution started, powered by water and then the newly invented steam engine. Along with it came the free market economy, land enclosure and the idea that people were human resources to serve the machine. In those times people displaced from the land by the new factories or put out of business by the free market economy had no option but to work in appallingly dangerous conditions in factories for extraordinarily long hours and very little pay.
The weavers fought against this ‘progress’ and developed into a group of people who became known as the ‘Luddites’, after a mythical character who was, supposedly, their leader. They petitioned Parliament, protested, marched, waged guerrilla war and were eventually defeated soundly by the army, police force, and the Government. The Government, of course, had a lot of members who stood to gain from this new technology and they soon enacted laws to suppress any opposition to what became the industrial revolution.

History is written by the victors and that is why now we understand the term ‘Luddite’ to refer to some fool who cannot cope with new technology. The Luddites, in fact, were trying to hang on to the idea that technology should serve mankind and not the other way round.

Count me as a Luddite.

What’s all this got to do with our modern world, I hear you ask. Well, everything. As a result of the change of thinking that occurred in the 18th century, we now accept as normal the idea that we leave our home and families to go to a place of work, could be a factory or a shop or an office, where we exchange large slabs of our time for cash. More importantly, we accept that the welfare of human beings is secondary to that of technological ‘progress’. Progress is when the machine becomes more efficient or produces more in less time with less human input. The focus of progress is never to improve what it is to be human except in the most superficial way in order to sell more products and keep the machine going.

Another knock on effect of industrialisation is that systems become more centralised and so people who lived on the land must congregate in cities in order to exchange their time for money. You can see this happening all round the world as nations become industrialised.

So here we are – leaving our homes and families everyday to go to a place where we exchange our time and skills for not enough money to live the life we’d really like. All because the Luddites lost and were steamrollered by the captains of the industrial revolution.

I’m coming out.
I admit it.
I’m a Luddite. A true Luddite. I believe that technology and progress should serve humanity not enslave it. I believe it is more important to enjoy being a human being  than make the machine more efficient. I believe that the planet is a part of us and we are a part of the planet, so technology and progress should serve it not wreck it.

Interestingly, the internet revolution currently in progress offers us the chance to return to the days of the cottage industry. With computers and the internet it is now possible to run a very lucrative home business. Once again the weaver, now the internet entrepreneur, can pause from his or her labours wander out to the veggie patch and inspect tonight’s dinner. Since it doesn’t matter where the modern day weaver is physically located, he or she can live in a cottage by a babbling brook complete with butterflies and colourful flowers, (with a broadband connection of course).

Us New Luddites are using technology to improve our lives. The original Luddites would approve.

Who will join me?