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Last week's power outage inconvenienced millions of people across a wide swath of eight states, but it made
 Kirkpatrick Sale's day.

As the nation's foremost critic of technology -- his book "Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their
 War on the Industrial Revolution" is still a must-read (well, at least until the sun goes down) for all
 technophobes -- Sale enjoyed every minute of the famed Blackout of '03.

And the next day, he was still gloating when I called him at his Cold Spring, N.Y. home.

"A blackout shows how totally dependent we are on electricity," said Sale, who is not. "But I didn't miss it.
 Without power, there was nothing to do but drink, eat and talk. We ate by candlelight, had a bottle of wine
 and got into bed at 8. And we made love, of course, which you're supposed to do in a blackout."

To Sale, last week's power failure should be a wake-up call to simplify our lives. After all, most of us
 couldn't sleep through the night without the air conditioning, couldn't get home because the subways weren't
 running and we can't even eat because our electric stoves wouldn't light.

"Unfortunately, it will probably be a 'go-back-to-sleep' call rather than a wake-up call," said Sale, who used
 to famously bashed a computer before lectures, his own personal protest against humanity's surrender to a
 machine.

"It saddens me, but I've given up on the idea that this nation can be reformed," he said. "Americans love
 technology. We get aggravated when our machines don't work instead of saying, 'Let's see if we can do without
 them when the electricity comes back on.'"

I reminded Sale that I was talking to him on a device that was the most-important technological breakthrough of
 the 19th century. "I'm not against all technology," he said, "just the mega-technologies. Technology, of
 course, solves problems, but it always creates other problems." Like that air conditioner that makes your room
 cooler, but spews out very hot exhaust on the rest of us.

Of course, Sale realizes that he and his Luddite allies aren't exactly convincing people by the thousands to
 live a technology-free future, so for his next crusade, he's looking to the past to explain why everything is
 so screwed up in the world today.

In his forthcoming book, "After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination," Sale argues that 70,000 years ago --
 give or take a week or so -- everything changed for the worse. The reason? The early humans learned how to
 hunt large animals.

"It changed everything because this was when we began to think of ourselves as having power over nature rather
 than living within it," Sale argues. "And we began exercising power over our fellow creatures. And we got to
 be very good at it, so we did more and more of it."

Of course, you could look at the bright side: The early humans figured out how to dominated an entire planet
 without electricity.

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gersh.kuntzman@verizon.net