Berry's nine standards for technology are worth considering:
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
I'm not sure even his own tool choices (typewriter and wife) meet the criteria. The typewriter replaced the quill pen, and at least initially failed conitions 1, 4, 8, and 9.
There might also be other factors for consideration. I'm not prone to jump on the latest technologies, but do own several computers (and a typewriter). Net effectiveness, suitability to task, expansion of possibilities, and other factors are amongst those I'd consider. Many of Berry's concerns would seem to me to come from the realm of unintended consequences, and might be better considered in that light.
His is a useful meditation, whether or not you adopt its conclusions.
Yes I agree, these points are worth reflecting upon. I agree with some of them but I disagree with others, here is my opinion in short, point by point:
1. Debatable. It is nice it it costs less, but if it has added or improved functionalities then each person should evaluate if for their use case the added/improved functionality is worth the extra cost or not.
2. Debatable, for the same reason as point 1: each person should evaluate this by themself.
3. I agree
4. Not sure for the same reason as points 1 and 2, but since we're in an environmental crisis this point is becoming more and more relevant.
5. I strongly agree due to environmental concerns. But also note that a device doesn't necessarily need to be designed to use solar energy: it could just end up using it because the power grid switched to a more sustainable energy mix
6. I agree, at least for consumer devices.
7. Also this could be good, although it is not granted that a private person going with his own car to a nearby shop pollutes less than a big shipping company that tries to optimize shipments as much as possible. It could be the opposite.
8. Not necessarily, also a big franchise of shops works, as long as they actually take care of repairing the devices instead of inventing excuses to not do so (look at what Louis Rossman has to say about Apple Sores for an example, but of course it is not just Apple)
9. I agree but with a catch: we need to better define what this "anything good" is. Because a new technology that replaces an old one is disrupting that old technology. Maybe the old technology was already good, but if the new one is better in some form then it's woth considering disrupting the old one. Indeed we should keep in mind potential side effects of a new technology that could harm society.
"""
I am also surprised by the meanness with
which two of these writers refer to my wife. In
order to imply that I am a tyrant, they suggest
by both direct statement and innuendo that she
is subservient, characterless, and stupid - a mere
"device" easily forced to provide meaningless
"free labor." I understand that it is impossible to
make an adequate public defense of one's private
life, and so I will only point out that there are
a number of kinder possibilities that my critics
have disdained to imagine: that my wife may
do this work because she wants to and likes to;
that she may find some use and some meaning
in it; that she may not work for nothing. These
gentlemen obviously think themselves femin-
ists of the most correct and principled sort,
and yet they do not hesitate to stereotype and
insult, on the basis of one fact, a woman they
do not know. They are audacious and irrespon-
sible gossips.
"""
Those responding saying he treats his wife as a tool are just mean-spirited. She was his editor and, apparently, as much a part of his creative process as his pencil and paper. I can certainly imagine that she was willing and happy in that role. (And yes, the marriage has lasted. She's been described as one of the most important fiction editors no one has heard of, thanks to her work with her husband.)
His reaction, though, seems to say that working on a computer rather than on a typewriter would completely eliminate her role in the process. This is, of course, a failure of imagination on his part. If she'd learned to use a word processor she would have been able to do the job she'd always done, probably with more flexibility and efficiency than when she had to type essays multiple times through the revision process.
"Berry, who is now eighty-four, does not own a computer or a cell phone, and his landline is not connected to an answering machine. We corresponded by mail for a year"
My mother doesn't have a computer or mobile phone of any kind. Landline phone, TV and snailmail is her contact with the world from home.
I did give her an old laptop but when the link to "her email" webpage was moved by the ISP she got the error message "It looks like your page has been moved." Innocuous enough error message right?
But this caused her to freak out as clearly "someone" was watching and knew what "her" page was. Ergo "someone" was watching her on the internet. So she turned off the laptop and never opened it again.
On the one hand, she has mental health issues including paranoia. On the other hand, she wasn't wrong!
Proper UI/UX design is tremendously difficult, which is why software engineers should never attempt it in a user-facing product. When it comes to on-screen text, you must choose your words very carefully, because someone out there will read them the wrong way.
Example: in the 90s, Windows, arguably one of the easiest commercial operating systems and certainly the most familiar, used to routinely frighten its users by falsely accusing them of crimes.
"This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."
If you're wondering why software UX these days is a colorful, foam-padded Barney-esque hellscape of smiling Alegria people and error messages of the form "Oopsie, we made a boo-boo :(", this is why.
> Example: in the 90s, Windows, arguably one of the easiest commercial operating systems and certainly the most familiar, used to routinely frighten its users by falsely accusing them of crimes.
> "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."
At first, I laughed.
Then I realized, I think I remember seeing this error message when I was six years old, and being freaked out.
I still don't understand how that message escaped being fixed. It wasn't rare. I would estimate a regular computer user would see it monthly? Maybe more?
I mean, I can totally see how it would happen if you didn't have a UX team, and your developers didn't have any exposure to the concept. The message makes sense to a programmer.
And, they couldn't easily fix anything post-release, right?
(This also makes the original Macintosh interface all the more impressive in my eyes. System 1 is a masterpiece.)
> I still don't understand how that message escaped being fixed. It wasn't rare.
Might have to do with why nowadays Windows 10 blue screens show a sideways ":(" smiley instead of a face despite being in graphics mode.
Back when i first encountered smileys (and that was at the cover of an "internet magazine" - i was already into computers and programming for years at the time and even used the internet and IRC) i didn't understood what they were, i thought they were some sort of code like the :// or @ in addresses.
My guess is that whoever added that sideways smiley is as blind to how it looks to people who don't know about them as whoever who wrote "illegal" was to people back in Win95 times.
>I did give her an old laptop but when the link to "her email" webpage was moved by the ISP she got the error message "It looks like your page has been moved." Innocuous enough error message right?
>But this caused her to freak out as clearly "someone" was watching and knew what "her" page was. Ergo "someone" was watching her on the internet. So she turned off the laptop and never opened it again.
>On the one hand, she has mental health issues including paranoia. On the other hand, she wasn't wrong!
I would call this an accessibility issue, and a failure by the ISP to maintain access for someone who has trouble adjusting to changes in the user interface.
"You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time"
For simply changing their webmail page, most of us would adjust pretty quick. If I had been quick enough I could've simply updated her link and she never would have known. But when mental health comes to paranoia, doing things behind her back is a sure way to get offside. I have zero issues with what happened, it is life.
Would you say that building wheelchair ramps is also a waste of time, because you can't please everyone all the time, and they're only a small percentage of the population?
1. You only have so much effort to spend.
2. You won't be able to please everyone with it. IE result.
Sure, for any large enough building (significant effort anyway to spend!) expecting a reasonable chunk of the population through the door a wheelchair ramp(decent chunk of populace affected) should be du jour. Hell, it is a wheelchair ramp not rocket science, I'd be happy to see them in a home building code for anywhere 2 or 3 steps are used. Little extra effort over the alternative (stairs) and get a result.
Alternately, I love my mum but it is unreasonable to expect the world to bend to meet the sheer levels of disconnection-from-reality that mental health paranoia can go to. We can't treat everyone like they are Truman from the Truman Show.
People have to be able to cope with change. When they can't, it is sad. But the world will keep changing anyway.
I'm glad people like you exist and want to make the world a better place for everyone you possibly can.
I suspect you will continue to find ways your applications are not received in the context you hoped. But is also an opportunity to do better which it seems you might enjoy.
I also think you won't be financially competitive in the larger world. And while I'd love a world where this doesn't matter, money makes the world go around until humanity as a whole can figure out how to do better. So I don't think many will follow your path.
I honestly wish you the best to make it all work. For my own part, I will continue to try and leave contexts I am involved in better than I found them.
Well, at least only the truly old school Nigerian snail mail scams will get to him!
Seriously, if you have parents going into their 70s and 80s you need to really start limiting exposure to scams or the ability to send them money. Otherwise, you won't know until it's too late, their bank account is empty, and their CC are maxed out on cash advances. Also, immediately contact the IRS and Social Security, because they've probably redirected returns and payments to their accounts.
My dad is in his 80’s and has all the tech. (computer, iPad, iPhone, etc…) Thing is, he doesn’t believe anything (true or false) from his devices. He just thinks that everything he reads is from someone trying to sell him something and/or part him with his money.
There are two types of offers that are made to me: Scams, and bad deals. If a good or service was worthwhile, it wouldn't need to try to get my attention.
> If a good or service was worthwhile, it wouldn't need to try to get my attention.
This might hold under the assumption that you invest nearly all of your free time informing yourself about possibly interesting offers. But this is clearly not the case.
That "what are they getting from me" attitude is a filter I view the world in.
I didn't realise it until I went to my local library. I had a mental glitch until I realised I could drop my suspicions and relax. Was pleasant to simply be there.
My maternal grandfather is 95 and his attitude is similar. Meanwhile my father gets into one bad deal after another.
That being said the former is, for lack of a better word, a minimalist, while the latter seized an opportunity to move out from a back then communist state and make enough money to buy property with cash.
I grew up utterly confused on how to conduct myself.
I love his writing, it makes total sense that he would see no value in the virtual world
Patch Adams is another character who has got everything he's wanted out of life without ever needing to touch a computer, at the age of 77 he corresponds by handwritten mail as he always has
One reply seems quite prescient for its time, clashing against the attitude of the original author.
We should support alternatives both to coal-
generated electricity and to IBM-style technocracy.
But I am reluctant to entertain alternatives that
presuppose the traditional subservience of one class
to another. Let the PCs come and the wives and
servants go seek more meaningful work.
-- Toby Koosman, Knoxville, TN
That's an uncharitable reading of the essay. So if we help our spouses that makes us subservient to them?
Sure, relying on the wife is not an option, or not a desirable option, for most writers. But the article is named "Why I am not going to buy a computer". His wife helps him and reducing his dependence on "strip-mined coal" eases his conscience. Good for him, though I don't think that the article has a lot of relevance for the rest of the world.
> So if we help our spouses that makes us subservient to them?
I don't know the distinction you're making here. Help and service are the same thing. The point is that it's easy and not notable to eschew computers if you have servants. There's no closer analog to "Let them eat cake!"
None of his points in this piece are wrong, including the one about him not buying a computer. They may be arguable, in fact may be highly debatable, but they're at least positions a reasonable person could have, even if other reasonable people disagree. Indeed, reasonable people can hold a variety of differing opinions, and understanding the ones you disagree with is a really satisfying activity. Good for him, not buying that computer.
> My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then.
This was written in the late 80s, but I'd guess they're still using that typewriter over 60 years after it's purchase. Not saying I completely agree with his whole essay, but there's not a lot of computing equipment still in use (or considered usable) from that era.
> But the cost would not be just mone-
tary. It is well understood that technological
innovation always requires the discarding of
the "old model"
He's not wrong. Just try to go dig up an old laptop from ~20 years ago that you might have laying around somewhere. Yes, it might work (after you replace the battery), but can you transfer files to/from it now if it didn't have USB ports then? Or if it didn't have the current USB port that all your current devices use? Floppies were ubiquitous in the 90s, but try reading one now - it's not impossible, but you'll probably have to find some service to help you do that since it's not likely that you've had a floppy drive for close to 20 years.
As an example, I'd like to get an e-reader that would be usable in 20+ years. But that doesn't seem likely. The batteries aren't easy to change in most of these devices anymore and they'll likely fail long before that. Many of them use android and when support for your device is over... you could probably use it for a while, but eventually it's going to be difficult.
All that to say that Mr. Berry's choice doesn't seem all that crazy to me.
> Floppies were ubiquitous in the 90s, but try reading one now - it's not impossible, but you'll probably have to find some service to help you do that since it's not likely that you've had a floppy drive for close to 20 years.
This is a bit rose-tinted. You can pick from a huge variety of floppy drive readers available on amazon, most for less than 20 bucks.
Additionally -
>As an example, I'd like to get an e-reader that would be usable in 20+ years. But that doesn't seem likely.
I have a kindle gen 2, purchased basically as soon as that model was released in jan 2009 (I actually ordered a gen 1 and amazon bumped me to gen 2 when it was announced). It's still going strong. My guess is that basically any kindle will go about 20 years as long as you take care of it. Battery life degrades a good bit, but even at only 20% of the original capacity, the thing still goes 3 days without a charge - used to be a month, but three days is enough.
Just a little farther back, however, and things ease again to audio tape technology. I’m still able to use my TRS-80 CoCo today because it used audio. I’ve adapted a cable to my digital audio recorder.
It was built in about 1984 and it still works. It’s rather difficult to use compared to modern computers though.
Your 1984 self had nothing else to compare it to - your current self has had several computers since to compare it to to make the determination that "It’s rather difficult to use compared to modern computers though." This is part of Berry's argument as well: once you jump on the tech treadmill it's hard to get off.
My two year old Kindle Paperwhite died last fall for no apparent reason. It certainly didn't meet Berry's criteria of being easily repairable by the local shop where I purchased it, though in its time it was an absolute beast for great battery life.
A laptop from 20 years ago would almost certainly have USB ports. The first computer I saw them on was a Sony VAIO in 1997. Compaq was also sporting them at the time, and of course Apple heavily adopted them in 1998. By 2000, practically every computer had them. Yes a USB stick should work with those.
USB floppy drives can still be purchased, and will generally work with anything, including android phones lol.
It would also have had an ethernet port, quite probably a modem port, and possibly parallel and/or serial ports. Perhaps a PCMCIA slot as well.
It's possible to establish file transfer and networking over any of these.
I bootstrapped one installation, on an early 1990s laptop, using a null-modem cable and at zmodem transfers by pasting DEB archives and tarballs into Minicom.
Once I had enough built up, I could set up first SLIP (at 57 kbps), and later PLIP networking, natted through my desktop.
That box served as a firewall for a few years until it finally fried.
Interesting. At 1.4 Million views, I wonder how much revenue the poster made by stretching the video out to to 12 minutes by adding so much filler when it could have just been 2 minutes long.
I wonder how many manhours in total of people's lives that content-producer destroyed for a few extra bucks.
(Over 31 manyears wasted watching that video, what a shame. That's longer than some people live.)
Most eReaders use Linux. Kobo still provides software updates for models reaching all the way back to 2011. For something like an English novel Epub 3 is backwards compatible enough that it'll still work fine enough even on something like a Sony PRS-505 that only does Epub 2. And there's loads of tools like Calibre to back convert files if need be.
Really the battery is the only problem but some models do still have 3rd party replacements available.
I recently purchased a couple of old PowerBook G4's (the last models from 2005, so 17 years old) There is a community still making new software for these old PPC Macs, and a custom version of MacOS with modern updates including security patches was just released.
They have USB 2.0, so transferring files is no issue. They have Dual-Layer DVD drives, not floppies. I brought the PowerBook with me to a hotel and was able to connect to their still active 802.11g Wifi. It browses sites like hacker news almost as well as a modern laptop. Although, Javascript brings it to a crawl. It can still edit video in Final Cut, make music in Logic 9, and play games like Halo 1.
Honestly any highly specced laptop made with a Core 2 Duo and up (so ~15 years old or newer) is still usable today.
You could use TCP/IP on Windows computers in 1994, nearly 30 years ago. You could still use that same 10baseT ethernet card that was most likely in it and use a modern Cat6e cable to connect it to a modern 1 gig switch.
So you wouldn't even have to mess with floppy drives if you could get the software for networking. You could just upload it.
Tech moved incredibly fast for a while there, so a computer from 20 years ago is kinda useless. A computer from 10 years ago is not though. And if you think of a computer from the 90s in 2010, that would be useless. As the pace of development slows down, the useful lifecycle of computers will increase (I hope)
I probably still have a USB 3 1/2" drive somewhere but not sure sure how many old drives I could read. And certainly would have to build a system that could read a 5 1/4" drive and there are various other old formats where reading would be a major project.
3. It's unlikely that it's better than the current tech.
And that he won't fall for the "propaganda campaign" that says otherwise.
---
What I find super fascinating here is that the arguments back then and now are...extremely similar.
Look at any cutting-edge tech - EVs, crypto, etc. - and you find the same arguments rehashed in different ways. E.g. EVs hurt nature because of battery disposal issues, crypto uses a ton of energy for a slower database.
Food for thought: are we really all that different from Wendell in 2022?
Those arguments are directed at all tech that is bad, not just your pet technologies. They encompass all possible flaws of a thing.
1. It has negative externalities.
2. It's too expensive.
3. It's not an improvement/doesn't work.
The fascinating thing is that people see these criticisms and it counterintuitively bolsters their confidence that their tech is special, because things that turned out to be special were also criticized.
1) The number of crap things or even actively destructive things that have been criticized on these same not-so-narrow grounds are far more than the number of things that turned out to be good that got criticized. Why? Because there are far fewer good ideas than bad ones, and the bad ones get criticized more (at least on average.)
2) Not only are the listed three the only ways to criticize things, but everything is going to be criticized eventually. So, the mere presence of criticism can't be evidence of anything because everything gets criticized.
Well...yes. I think we're mostly in agreement that these arguments are meaningless because they can always be created, for every thing.
So the next time you hear an argument that falls into 1 of these 3 buckets, be skeptical both ways (for & against) because the mere presence of criticism can't be evidence of anything.
I propose we radically overhaul out diets by boosting the consumption of bees.
1. The consumption of bees has been suggested to be harmful to the pollination of plants. This is a fallacy. Not only will the consumption of bees increase the pollination of plants, but plants can be pollinated by hand.
2. The consumption of bees is not a threat to the existing honey industry. Skills in the production of honey can be applied in the harvesting of more bees.
3. Consumption of bees is superior to existing consumption of honey because bees contain a powerful combination of amino acids, the building blocks of life. Protein from bees relieves the traditionally polluting industries such as poultry and dairy. Honey is a natural preservative, ensuring the nutrition from bees is locked-in and can be stored for years, decades or longer. Bees can be produced on hillsides and other locations that traditionally have been resistant to intensive environmentally friendly farming. There is no threat to the maple syrup industry.
I will not fall to the anti-change propaganda, and nor should you. Come found the kick-starter for my ICO, details on my profile page.
I believe, assuming it exists, the flaw in this style of thinking is the unwillingness to hop on or believe in something new, when its marginal utility is still questionable. Of course, for many reasons, being early on what will become better enough to be an established part of society has advantages.
Tangentially related, Wendell Berry's short stories & novels are an excellent read. They all take place in the same fictional small town and are remarkably consistent with one another in terms of timeline, genealogy, and geography. I would highly recommend them.
I wonder whether the process has much to do with that:
"My wife types my work on a Royal standard
typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now
as it was then. As she types, she sees things that
are wrong and marks them with small checks in
the margins. She is my best critic because she is
the one most familiar with my habitual errors and
weaknesses. She also understands, sometimes
better than I do, what ought to be said"
Seems like an old school "behind every great man" thing.
It helps to realize that Berry's whole outlook on life was wedded to the idea that the best life is one anchored around one's home -- hence his ideas that good technology is purchased close to home, and repaired close to home, and that one's first best editor is found at home. Most published writers, especially those published before the golden age of self-publishing, worked with editors, and his wife was (and probably still is) that editor. It's not as if he doesn't give her credit for her part in his literary work. (Plus, men of his era didn't usually learn to type unless they had reason or inclination to.)
Financially no doubt she was covered. Should worse come to worst, by the 1980's divorce could net her significant financial worth of the partnership.
But social credit for her achievements were rather small. It is one thing to have an editor, but quite another for the editor to be wedded to the job for just one writer. Every story/book bore his name, no matter that he happily credits her work in his personal missives.
And so social standards changing in this regard is for the better. But it's not like I think he is a monster - he is a product of his day as much as we are of ours.
I think the interview is important because it seems to say that she chose her role in Berry's life, not that it was imposed upon her, as many people seem to assume.
I really like when he points out his own Standards for Technological Innovation. They are very good points regardless of the current age.
Particularly to me, are the points of repairability, and interfering with real-world relationships.
There are few exceptions to the rule where most systems today cannot be self-repaired, much less taken to a local shop and repaired with off-the-shelf parts (thankfully this is slowly changing for the better.)
In terms of relationships, it would seem to be a mixed bag. In some respects you can communicate across vast distances without a second thought. In others it would seem we are headed to our own doom due to toxicity, disconnect and disassociation from those around us, etc.
“I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.”
Wendell Barry is not for everyone, I have only read a few of his essays but I’ve read most of his Port Williams series which I think everyone should at least read a book from. I grew up pretty rural and there’s no better series is my mind that captures the complicated feelings of loss and nostalgia for a type of living that’s long gone, but also may never have existed as we remember.
To be fair, if you are a writer it might be better to work primarily with paper and pen as it allows quite a bit of flexibility in how you organize/edit the text while keeping everything in front of you. Having done the paper/pen work, final editing, spell check etc. can be done on a computer which would be far superior to a typewriter at this point.
> I disbelieve, and therefore strongly resent, the assertion that I or anybody else could write better or more easily with a computer than with a pencil.
I can’t speak to writing, which I actually do find much easier on a computer since I can backspace, rearrange, spell-check, but there is certainly truth to reading. I find reading to “stick” longer in my brain when off of hard paper than a screen, most likely something to do with the physical location of the words.
Although he probably didn't mean this, it's worth stating that if you have any kind of disability with your hands the only way you might be able to put pen to parchment proverbially speaking is through voice dictation, so his entire premise is invalid.
He is kind of like the original RMS, as he talks about repairability and things being made for the user (like really for the user, not kinda for the user, kinda for the corporation).
I liked the read despite its predictable, unoriginal, oft-repeated decry of technology with respect to its (perceived) environmental burden. There are several replies by Berry's contemporaries which vocalize their disagreement with his position and his justification.
With the distance in time to this piece, I think the point to add to the discussion is that a key implicit assumption of Berry (and in fact even to his opponents) is false. The assumption that the default mode of civilization is prosperity for all. Same mistake we make till today on all levels of politics and education.
Poverty is the natural state of "cosmos", and perhaps an equivalent of physical entropy concept. In a closed system a dis-order increases until we are all equally poor (there is NO natural/social law/system in the cosmos where would guarantee all of us equally rich/valuable by default). At the same time full and complete poverty for all can never be reached because (some) life-agents itself will try to utilize energy within (social/environmental) system to create pockets of prosperity, naturally syphoning out energy from the rest of the system. I do not want to imply a political of economic system within a conceptual paragraph -- that would be overextending the idea. The point is in my view that Berry does not ask the right question, or assumes the wrong default.
> The assumption that the default mode of civilization is prosperity for all.
First off, I'm not sure where you're getting that from reading this article, but maybe I'm missing something.
Secondly, Berry is a Christian so of course he believes that there can be enough for all - this is (at least used to be) a central tenet of Christianity. Christ said: "25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these."
Berry is coming from the worldview that God created a world of great abundance and that if we share, there is enough for all.
> Berry is coming from the worldview that God created a world of great abundance and that if we share, there is enough for all.
Sure, but he/they are simply wrong about that. The natural state of living systems is to propagate until they reach a natural limit imposed by some resource constraint or other. Our current technological civilization is an anomaly produced by the sudden release, over a period of a few hundred years, of solar energy stored over a few hundred million years, with a concomitant rise in CO2 levels and global temperatures. That party cannot be expected to last much longer, computers or no computers.
Alternatively, the anomaly is no anomaly at all. Its origins were fortuitous, but rather than a reversion to the baseline of misery it was an unlocking of a new normal though a series of irreversible (or very unlikely reversible) inventions, much like agriculture was. We used one source of energy to power our leap forward, we'll use a different one to sustain a baseline of plenty, or maybe unlock a new level soon. I see no reason whatsoever why this is less likely than the doom and gloom currently so in vogue.
Berry has written extensively about environmental degradation. Notice the caveat above: "if we share". Human greed is the fly in the ointment. Again, he's written extensively on the impact of human greed on the environment. It's not inconsistent to think that there is enough for all and also to think that when we try to grab too much of that stuff for ourselves (more than what we need) that that mutual enough-ness (I hesitate to use the word "prosperity" here because it's accreted a lot of baggage in our hyper-capitalistic modern world) is threatened.
> Notice the caveat above: "if we share". Human greed is the fly in the ointment.
No, it isn't. Basic physics and economics is the fly in the ointment. For a given level of economic activity, a given amount of material wealth will be produced. That wealth can be distributed evenly or unevenly, equitably or inequitably [1], but there is one basic fact that cannot change, which is the that average wealth per capita will equal the total wealth divided by the number of people. So if the population increases without a concomitant increase in total wealth, everyone will necessarily be, on average, worse off, no matter how much we share.
Christian theology is based on the idea that "God will provide" and intercede miraculously if we have enough faith. Unfortunately, that belief, as with most religious beliefs, collides violently with reality, and when it does, reality wins.
[1] It is also worth noting that an even distribution is not necessarily the same as an equitable one.
As individuals they may have done well, but that has nothing to do with the fact that the nation failed when their attempts to alter the laws of economics collided with reality.
Again - every nation altered those laws and most did just fine. There aren’t any “universal laws of economics”; it’s all entirely man-made and there are many different variations.
Yes, there are. Let's go back to your original claim:
> Economics, on the other hand, is man-made and can be adjusted as required.
Think about it: if this were true, it would be possible to "adjust" the laws of economics to (say) eliminate poverty. So if eliminating poverty is a simple matter of "adjusting" economics, why hasn't any nation on earth ever eliminated poverty by "adjusting" its economics? It's because economics is not "man-made", it's a consequence of human psychology, which is a natural phenomenon and therefore operates according to natural laws, not man-made ones.
It is not possible to eliminate poverty simply by "adjusting" economics. There are actual underlying constraints that you have to operate under: finite resources, the fact that people won't work without incentives, the fact that different people want different things. One man's "poverty" is another man's "freedom."
BTW, even Jesus recognized that you cannot eliminate poverty simply by sharing: Mat26:6-11.
They don't. You are confusing "the laws of economics" with "legislation relating to economics". Those are two completely different things. The latter changes, the former doesn't.
Our knowledge of the laws of economics changes. The laws themselves don't because they are simply logical consequences of the laws of physics. The latter doesn't change, so neither does the former.
But all of our inventions are constrained by physics. We invent airplanes too, we do not invent the laws of aerodynamics. We invent electronics, we do not invent the laws of electrodynamics.
Economics is likewise constrained by natural law. This why, for example, you cannot eliminate poverty by printing fiat currency and giving it to poor people.
No, I am saying that you cannot eliminate poverty by printing fiat currency and giving it to poor people.
(I also happen to believe that you cannot eliminate poverty with UBI, but that is a completely different claim. I also believe that we should adopt UBI despite the fact that it won't eliminate poverty. But that is yet another discussion.)
> what’s the difference between printing money and deducting the same amount of money from taxes
Inflation.
But it's actually much more complicated than just that. An economy is a complex dynamical system. It is chaotic in the formal mathematical sense, which is to say its response to changing circumstances is not 100% predictable. But in general if you print money the result is inflation. In the long run, the value of the money supply has to aymptotically approach the value of the goods and services in the economy. (This is an example of a "natural law" of economics.)
So the answer to your question depends on the details. Do you print money once or do you do it on an on-going basis? If you do it once then you get a transient response. You will eliminate some short-term hardship, but in the long run the economy will most likely settle back into its previous equilibrium with slightly higher prices. If you do it on a continuous basis you will cause hyperinflation and the currency will collapse. Depending on the availability of alternatives, the currency collapse may or may not take the rest of the economy down with it.
Redistributing wealth through taxation doesn't have that problem, but it has other deleterious effects. Figuring out what those are is left as an exercise.
I don't own a computer. I have a pocket tablet that shows me the newspaper (and makes phonecalls). I have a screen on my desk that plays old Nintendo games. I have a typewriter which I use to write computer code. But I have no interest in owning a computer.
People decry the energy wastage brought about by the Crypto Mining, rampant invasion of privacy & trust by mega corporations, ubiquitous presence of misinformation and vitriol in social media, mismanagement of e-waste, global climate change and the impending doom upon the entire human civilization, and a thousand things more, and yet find this article condescending.
This is not to say that I agree entirely with it either but, I find myself empathizing with the author at some level. If nothing more, it's a fun mental exercise to imagine what life today would be like had there been no personal computing.
True, but notice how I said personal computing and not computing in general. There's no denying that much of the scientific advances today would be impossible without computers in research facilities and/or universities.
I like this kind of discussions and as members of society it's hard to reason on things that are widely accepted. If one shares his point of view but doesn't want to give up his personal computer, one way may be to buy an used computer or repair one if possible. You'd still use energy, but at least won't support the making of new electronics which is a waste too
Actually Wife is far more energy/work intensive than a computer. She requires constant maintenance, she has plenty of alarm bells that can't be turned off at all, her speaker constantly makes noise that can't be turned off either, costs way more to keep and, on top of all of that, has way more downtime.
My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then. As she types, she sees things that are wrong and marks them with small checks in the margins.
Gordon Inkeles:
Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative: Wife - a low-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile of handwritten notes on Wife and you get back a finished manuscript, edited while it was typed. What computer can do that? Wife meets all of Berry's uncompromising standards for techno- logical innovation: she's cheap, repairable near home, and good for the family structure. Best of all, Wife is politically correct because she breaks a writer's "direct dependence on strip-mined coal."
History teaches us that Wife can also be used to beat rugs and wash clothes by hand, thus eliminating the need for the vacuum cleaner and washing machine, two more nasty machines that threaten the act of writing.
Frigyes Karinthy, a very famous Hungarian author active roughly 1910-1935 rightly famous for his humorous writing. He is also often billed as a translator -- this, however, is not quite true. His son, much later, in 1981, confessed he had a mentally ill sister, Emilia -- as an example, she used to put buttered toast in her handbag as is -- who nonetheless was a translator genius. She spoke 15-20 languages and she was capable of such feats as typing text in Russian dictated in Spanish. It was she who made the rough translations and Frigyes rewrote these in his style. This, for example, resulted in Winnie The Pooh becoming a cult classic book in Hungarian, much beloved by every Hungarian child (and let me quietly note: adult too) -- and it only resembles Milne's original passingly. Aside from the few sentences this son told the grandson in 1981 we know nothing of her. There are no photos, no records, nothing. Nonetheless the textual evidence is extremely compelling -- it was a longstanding mystery how could Karinthy translate Milne and Wells when he didn't speak English well.
(Tangential note: there's nothing in English Wikipedia about this. Obviously not. And I'd rather gnaw off my arm than try to fix anything there ever again. I tried once.)
“ Sophia acted as copyist of War and Peace, copying and editing the manuscript seven times from beginning to end at home at night by candlelight after the children and servants had gone to bed, using an inkwell pen and sometimes requiring a magnifying glass to read her husband's notes.”
Stop and think about that: WaP in Russian is 1225 pages. Seven times!
That seems to be extremely common in that time period. Fyodor Dostoevsky got married to his stenographer, Anna Dostoevskaya (neé Snitkina).
The story of Fyodor's proposal (excerpted from Wikipedia) is pure gold:
In the Memoirs, Anna describes how Dostoevsky began his marriage proposal by outlining the plot of an imaginary new novel, as if he needed her advice on female psychology. In the story an old painter makes a proposal to a young girl whose name is Anya. Dostoevsky asked if it was possible for a girl so young and different in personality to fall in love with the painter. Anna answered that it was quite possible. Then he told Anna: "Put yourself in her place for a moment. Imagine I am the painter, I confessed to you and asked you to be my wife. What would you answer?" Anna said: "I would answer that I love you and I will love you forever".
I too snickered at that reply. Then I scrolled, and found his answer adequate.
This doesn't mean that exploitation of women as unpaid labor is fake, it's _extremely_ rare. But, on the other hand, it's not inconsistent for someone suggesting _relying on your community_ to, you know, _accept help from said community_.
The issue with the unpaid labor of women isn't that we're helping our families, or even that we're not receiving monetary remuneration - it's that it's frequently non-consensual (in the sense that there's no safe possibility to refuse) and without any respect for women's agency.
And, you know - thinking about that this way - it's not like I never proofread a friend's manuscript. It's an interesting, and on many levels enjoyable activity. It's also a quite personal, even intimate, way of helping a friend.
Berry's response to that (and similar) letters is quite sharp, but fair, I thought:
> I am also surprised by the meanness with which two of these writers refer to my wife. In order to imply that I am a tyrant, they suggest by both direct statement and innuendo that she is subservient, characterless, and stupid -- a mere "device" easily forced to provide meaningless "free labor." I understand that it is impossible to make an adequate public defense of one's private life, and so I will only point out that there are a number of kinder possibilities that my critics have disdained to imagine: that my wife may do this work because she wants to and likes to; that she may find some use and some meaning in it; that she may not work for nothing. These gentlemen obviously think themselves feminists of the most correct and principled sort, and yet they do not hesitate to stereotype and insult, on the basis of one fact, a woman they do not know. They are audacious and irresponsible gossips.
There's nothing in the essay that said he didn't ask, and that she wasn't a willing participant, doing the work because she loves him. (And why wouldn't your wife love proofing your work if she loves you? Just curious if she's told you either way.)
I would not be so mean as to say for certain he did not ask. The tone reads to me as written by the type who does not ask, or more precisely has ended up in a situation where the default is for his wife to proof read his work.
On its most basic level, it reads that Wife does the boring work while the author does the fun creative work. We can not tell from the article but I am highly doubtful that the author proof reads and types his wife's articles.
I would go so far as to be willing to lay a quarter for a nickel that he has never offered and a dollar for a cent that he has never done so.
I have often been asked why I don't use [Word Processors], and my honest answer has always been that there is for me so much to write that I cannot afford the use of these time-saving devices.
Like Berry, Dijkstra took the existence of menial labor for producing printed or typed products for granted, although, to be fair, for much of his writing (letters and research notes), his longhand was supposed to be the final form, and he had very legible handwriting.
I also have problem recording my thoughts using a computer, writing by hand is more convenient for my brain than using a pc to write the sketch, math symbols and everything else it's just too convenient compared to any note taking device on a pc or tablet.
I think he found something about handwriting to be more natural for the manuscripts he wanted to write. A good pen and paper note taking system can allow freer more direct expression than some sort of editor program.
My mom typed my dad's book manuscript over and over and over again. Even a simple computer revolutionized that inhumane practice.
When I worked at Boeing circa 1981, I was expected to write documents out longhand and then hand it to the secretary pool to type. Screw that. I invaded the word processing room, a windowless room with about 20 women working on Wang word processors, with a supervisor facing them. With all the charm I could muster, I talked the supervisor into letting me use one. She warned me that it was very difficult to learn, and I must take a 2 week Wang course beforehand. I said nah, just gimme the manual, and I was using it in 5 minutes (she was horrified by that).
I'm not sure they appreciated you demonstrating their superfluity, even if you believed it was for their own good. I was once or twice in my career surprised by such ingratitude before I realized that some jobs continue as both soft charity and a means of inflating managerial importance under a polite fiction of usefulness.
Appreciated? They didn't like it at all. It didn't matter what I did, their fiefdom relied on people being afraid of computers and not realizing how simple word processors were. That could not possibly last, and it didn't.
I see. I thought you extended "inhumane practice" to the secretarial pool. What I don't understand is why people were afraid of typewriters before they were afraid of word processors and computers. They're frankly not that threatening.
Most of the responses were pure gems. I wonder if comments on internet sites will be qualitatively better if people are asked to snail mail their comments to the editorial teams (to be formed) of the sites. HN thankfully doesnt need this yet.
I'm amused at the mix of condescension and vehement beliefs contained in this essay. There is some irony as his beloved typewriter is a consumer-good technological invention which happens to be his "established" tool. There are legitimate critiques in the piece, especially around repairability, supporting the local community.
Blanket disregarding the reality of technological advancement and the prosperity it can bring is an ideologically extreme position. Billions of people can grow far beyond their circumstances of birth with access to inexpensive cellphones. We can be thankful that consumers and technologists pressed onwards with their efforts despite the dramatic moral take presented by the author.
The original Computer Vegan, complaining about the coal used to power a computer while at the same time using a typewriter that is made of steel that had to be fired and forged probably using coal. I'm not saying he's wrong, but unless he mines his own metal and has a solar powered forge, he's fooling himself.
Forging one (unpowered?) typewriter in many decades vs forging and powering all the computers you'd end up replacing over those decades to stay current? All the chemicals involved in making the electronics? The e-waste? A discarded typewriter would also leave very little behind aside from rust.
While one option is not zero impact, it is still many orders of magnitude lower impact. They aren't equivalent, he wasn't fooling himself.
At the same time he's basically looking at the equipment that just so happens to perfectly fill his desires (to be a writer) and justifying them by saying "well there's worse things out there."
I'd not even worry about the steel used in his typewriter.
Paper is made through an energy and chemically intensive process. I'm sure someone can math out the kwh that go into each sheet of paper, but it is far from 0. Paper costs anywhere from $0.005 -> $0.02 per sheet and that price point is going to be very closely tied to the energy used to produce that paper.
Here in Idaho, power goes for around $0.11/kwh and is primarily non-co2 emitting sources (hydro is the big one with nuclear, solar, and wind up next. Coal exists on our grid but isn't the prime source of power here). So, that'd put the power cost for one sheet of paper at a max of 45 -> 181wH.
If he wants to be energy conscientious, then I'd argue a raspberry pi with a low power oled display will beat the pants out of paper and pen in terms of energy consumed per page. Especially since writing with a keyboard is much faster than pen/paper or a typewriter.
Rpi = ~5W of consumption
OLED display = ... idk, can't really find good numbers on this but certainly less than 100W which is where a 65' oled display maxes out. For a 13' display, that's what, ~9W?
So, with a 15W system, you can write for 3 hours before you get to the max possible energy cost of a piece of paper. I'm guessing the author can use more than 1 piece of paper in that timeframe.
And, of course, you can pair such a system with a solar + battery setup to get completely coal free writing (except for the cost to produce the chips for the rpi, display, solar, and battery)
It is an interesting comparison, but if you want to be fair to him, it would make more sense to make generous assumptions for the energy cost of a piece of paper, rather than guessing at a max.
The solar power for the pi -- we could be generous to him again, and say that it is hypothetically possible to power either setup with solar, although there is something to be said for the fact that he has direct control over what he plugs his pi into.
On the other hand, a chalkboard could be used for first drafts.
Yeah, I tried to be as fair as possible with the energy consumption comparisons, inflating and rounding up for the r-pi and couching all statements about paper as "this is going to be the max".
IDK if, without an in depth study, there's a better way to to figure out wH per piece of paper. My inclination is the cost based method I used will end up being in the same order of magnitude. Obviously, I can't prove that.
The reason I think it'll be pretty close is paper is, for the most part, highly mechanized so the cost of human labor will be somewhat low. Further, profit margins are (I'm assuming) somewhat low (lots of competition). So, pull those two things and what are you looking at? Mostly shipping and processing costs which go pretty much directly to the power used to produce a piece of paper.
I don't know. If we're just looking at it on the basis of how many natural resources it cost to build the thing, you may have a point (although, computer chip manufacturing is a notoriously dirty business -- look what it did to the orchards of Silicon Valley).
But, consider what it would take to run the thing. Unless you power your computers by solar energy or somehow have a nuclear reactor in your back yard, you're probably expending non-renewable energy to power it. The typewriter, being made in 1956, is almost certainly a manual model and only uses ribbon and paper to keep it going. I daresay the typewriter has a lower lifetime environmental impact than any computer.
> although, computer chip manufacturing is a notoriously dirty business -- look what it did to the orchards of Silicon Valley
If I wanted Silicon Valley to have good air and soil quality, I would simply not have built suburbs and auto infrastructure on top of all of it.
The idea that single family homes aren’t pollution and industry is comes from 70s boomer environmentalism, which is part “if I don’t see it, it’s not happening”, part pastoralist NIMBY (because you just read Cities as Growth Engines), and part explicitly trying to stop people from having children (because you just read The Population Bomb).
I would’ve said the modern examples are Marin County NIMBYs and MCU’s Thanos. But it seems like the guy in the article is an even more orthodox example.
Note that the Bay Area’s residential only zoning may be commonly thought to keep away dirty industry, but since it was invented here in Berkeley you can just look up what the inventors thought they were doing, and they just wanted to keep out Chinese people. “Residential zoning” meant “no home businesses” and by that they meant “Chinese laundries” with a side of “immigrant corner shops”. It wasn’t about factories.
He, uh, says that he writes "with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper". Not a typewriter. I'm not saying he's right, but I don't think he's fooling himself. I think his response at the bottom makes that clear:
> I did not say that I proposed to end forthwith all my involvement in harmful technology, for I do not know how to do that. I said merely that I want to limit such involvement, and to a certain extent I do know how to do that.
And then hands it to his wife, who types it on a typewriter and edits it. I think the assertion is very much pencil + servile wife + typewriter > computer.
He has a workflow that works for him and has produced great works with it. Where this all goes awry is when his criticism strongly implies that the computer might not be better for others (who may not have a wife that types everything for them, for instance).
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
I'm not sure even his own tool choices (typewriter and wife) meet the criteria. The typewriter replaced the quill pen, and at least initially failed conitions 1, 4, 8, and 9.
There might also be other factors for consideration. I'm not prone to jump on the latest technologies, but do own several computers (and a typewriter). Net effectiveness, suitability to task, expansion of possibilities, and other factors are amongst those I'd consider. Many of Berry's concerns would seem to me to come from the realm of unintended consequences, and might be better considered in that light.
His is a useful meditation, whether or not you adopt its conclusions.