The question of
whether volcanoes are Luddites is relative. A student of mine was fond of
pointing out that in her native country of Peru, earthquakes are part of life’s
routine and are not seen as emergencies or catastrophes at all.
Over
the past week I have been surprised not just by the spectacle of disaster we
have seen in the news but by the robustness
of technological systems, in the sense of networks of actors and technologies
and objects.
The volcano in Iceland has stopped hundreds of
thousands of flights. Many people have had to stop, change their plans, look
into other ways of communicating, improvise, and explore different ways of
moving around - or indeed have been forced to not move around.
