An amusing anecdote: I was in grad school in 1987. The university had a campus computer store, which gave out a pamphlet: "Should I get a computer?" It listed many pro's and con's, nothing surprising for the era. I already had a computer. The thing that stuck with me, was the advice: "Don't expect a computer to organize you. If you have a messy desk, you will have a messy computer."
Sure as shootin', even to this day, I still have a messy computer.
For a long time, this was certainly true, and still is to an extent.
I do find that software is beginning to do a good job of automatically organizing content when it has enough metadata to do so.
Photos are the best example of this I’ve see. I use Apple Photos, and from the effort I put in (none), it’s just a large shoebox full of pictures. However, the software organizes everything by date, ___location, type, subject, etc, all at the same time. This makes it pretty effortless to find anything very quickly. Trying to create this level of organization manually would be borderline impossible, and require a person devoting to their life to organizing this one specific aspect of their life.
There was recently a death in the family and everyone was looking for photos. I was able to pull up every picture of this person I had, spanning nearly 20+ years, in seconds. Others who didn’t use the software effectively spent hours and days manually scrolling through their photo grid. I attempted to tell them how they could make it easier, but they weren’t in the mood to deal with technology lessons, understandably so, so I didn’t try and press it.
My previous manual organisation of digital photos into directories on my home server was quite time consuming. I got an iPhone a few years ago and started using Apple Photos. Like you, I put no effort into organising the photos – other than adding some descriptive metadata to a few photos. Apple’s organisation and their user interface allow me to quickly find any photo that I remember taking. However, I’m curious about what you mean by “didn’t use the software effectively”.
Off Topic: one other thing I really like about Apple Photos is that I get to see my photos on the Apple TV when screensaver kicks in.
We (at least I) compensate for that by having 10k photos on it, which again makes it impossible to find anything. And if you decide to cull them because it's just too much, it's a chore.
Others who didn’t use the software effectively spent hours and days manually scrolling through their photo grid. I attempted to tell them how they could make it easier, but they weren’t in the mood to deal with technology lessons, understandably so, so I didn’t try and press it.
They spent years actively avoiding letting the software do its thing in several ways. In many cases putting forth more effort to avoid letting the software make their life easier. Their rejection of technology is what led to the struggle.
For example, I clicked a button 16 years ago for face detection, and in 16 years they didn't do that and didn't want to. I use iCloud photo library so I have access to all my pictures everywhere, while they have fractured libraries on various hard drives (that I don't think are backed up anywhere else).
Turning on face detection any time in the last 16 years and keeping their library together, solves the problem and creates less work. And sure, I end up paying $2.99/month for extra storage, but that seems cheap when factoring in the time they spend trying to avoid it, not to mention the calls I've gotten when they think a drive isn't working and they are crying, because they think they just lost everything. I'd pay the $3 for them if it meant never getting a call like that again, where I'm bracing to hear someone died, because they are crying so much they can't get the words out.
Several times when I pulled up pictures they have asked me how I'm able to do it so quickly. It's not exceptional organization or effort on my part, I'm simply using the software. I took 10 minutes, one time, to play around with the new Photos app when they revamped it, instead of just complaining that it changed, like most of the internet. There is no magic. Learn how the tools work, and use the tools. When you do that, the organization can often take care of itself.
I love using note-taking apps for this reason. They are a bottomless bucket into which you can throw unlimited unorganized thoughts. When you need them later, simply search.
The most exercise I’ve ever had is solo assembling a 295 pound Rogue Fitness Monster Lite power rack and raising it from the horizontal position I assembled it in to the vertical position.
I figured after that much effort I needn’t exercise ever again. I sold it the next week at a loss (cheapest hobby I’ve ever had). Although to be fair I didn’t realize at the time that I needed to buy the barbell and weights too. Lesson learned: stick to the monthly gym membership that I will never use.
The second most exercise I’ve ever had is solo raising my Grizzly 14” bandsaw to standing. Also never used, but at least I never had the heart to sell it.
After reading pdfs for a few years one day I bought a physical book. I remember looking at the corner of the page for time and thinking about CTRL-Fing for something.
Yes, I remember them but also observe that we’ve moved on from those trays of cards in narrow drawers systems (and good riddance!).
Those cards are no replacement for literal grep, of course. They were a search across a tiny summary of the contents, albeit a fairly structured one (which is helpful for some searches).
I caught what must have been the last itty bitty tail of that. I was a 3rd grader in 1993 and were taught all about the card catalog and the Dewey decimal system and taking notes on note cards and organizing them in notecard boxes and how important it all was for research. I'm glad we moved on from that. For me, it was a drag.
Reminds me of the lottery… “If you aren’t happy before the money, you won’t be happy after”. Most people interviewed are not happy after relatively large wins, almost all report being isolated from family in the best cases and deeply resented and resentful more often than not.
In a cruel twist of fate most people today neither own, nor use a computer, not in the sense used in the essay. They instead use their phones to do a very restricted sub-set of things they could do on a computer and in a very limited manner.
I guess the forward-looking tech nerds of the '80s, the tip of the spear of the information revolution, must now be crying in their corn flakes with the irony of it all. Nowadays only nerds (really) use computers.
P.S. Obviously I own computers. I have four laptops and a bunch of small-form clamshells left over from a period when I collected them semi-enthusiastically (including a Viliv, a Zaurus and a Ben Nanonote). I recently went on the market to see if there are any new ones around and ended up buying two, which I shall not advertise. I'm a victim of tech advertisement.
This sounds smart and could 100% be something I would say too, but it is not true at all. People benefit greatly from phones (and in some sense, social media). The way to test it is to give up phones for some time.
I spent 3 months without smart phone, and it was inconvenient as hell. Not having maps, calculator, or wikipedia at all times sucks. So almost everyone I know definitely does use computers, in all meanings.
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This sounds smart and could 100% be something I would say too, but it is not true at all. People benefit greatly from phones (and in some sense, social media). The way to test it is to give up phones for some time.
I know quite a lot of people who gave up their mobile phone for some time, and their experience was very positive. For all of the applications, you can find better alternatives.
There exist lots of definitions of "convenience". I, for example, find it deeply inconvenient to be have a device with me that basically spies on me all the time.
i worked at a well known bookstore and the owner invited him to a reading, but he turned down with a hand written letter basically saying: "your bookstore seems nice but i never leave my farm and don't want to for a reading"
This article makes me consider how the medium of production affects the final content. There is a certain cost of writing a sentence on paper, typewriter, computer, and phone. The higher the cost of forming words, the more cognition it invites. The greater the cost of revision (especially with typewriters), the more likely one tends towards precision. It leads me towards a belief that better writing must start on paper.
For my ADHD brain, handwriting is difficult. As I progress through an idea I can watch my handwriting degrade into illegibility and the marginalia increase markedly. Crafting a cogent essay isn’t easy in any medium, but I seem to get along ok with a Doc these days. Perhaps there is something meaningful in the act of preparing a handwritten essay for broader publication that refines the work more critically than if it were ready to distribute instantly. At the risk of being too romantic it seems like handwriting may take on the quality of hand-thrown pottery, imbued with some spirit that is void in mass production.
As I peck this comment out with my thumbs I wonder how that constraint impacts the words that reach you. Next time I’ll write it on a legal pad first, but maybe you’ll not hear from me in a while.
As a child of a scientist and teacher from the ‘40s and ‘50s I think there is some romanticism in your opinion. Can’t argue with your personal situation, but I know for a fact that writing notes, copywriting, stenciling, multiplying and distributing were all tasks my parents were very happy to see replaced by technology during their careers. They were early adopters of digital typewriters, pc’s, word processors and the internet and otherwise very much not technically inclined. Those were mostly chores. (I agree with your point, as an economist ;), that the average value of a word is higher when the cost are higher.) The one thing my mom did teach me very early was a zettelkasten-like system. Never appreciated that trial (unsuccessful, alas) enough until I read about zettelkasten.
Does this theory mean that phones invite more cognition when writing than laptops or desktop do? I can type significantly faster on a computer than on a phone, and revisions are easier too.
It's neat how this magazine printed the essay along with the responses of people to it. Many of those response letters are quite biting (in a good way).
Sometimes I feel disheartedned when I see harsh internet comments in response to an essay. For example, sometimes Paul Graham posts essays and people on Hacker News post blistering biting responses. I guess we should remember the letters that people used to send to magazine essays like this and remember that sometimes these harsh responses are par for the course when writing essays...
The published magazine letters are likely curated. If nothing else, they were also posted by (snail) mail, not instantaneous emogi-laden adTech-fueling online ragelettes.
I'm sure she does, but that's beside the point. Why should we pay any attention to the opinions of a person on replacing something he doesn't use with something else he won't use. He may as well say that he won't buy a snowblower because his groundskeeper uses a shovel and does just fine.
I get your point, but good luck with that. Most (every?) influential figure had has something problematic about their person. If you can't see the good through the bad, then you will quickly find yourself with nothing.
Harper's (where the article was originally published) requires you to submit by snail-mail, but many places require email submissions. Guessing that computers won partly because they are a lot more convenient for publishers - if you're typing something up then the publisher has to type it again on their end.
"Finally, it seems to me that none of my correspondents recognizes the innovativeness of my essay. If the use of a computer is a new idea, then a newer idea is not to use one."
Hardly a new idea, I'm fairly certain that Berry had heard of the Luddites, maybe he didn't realise he was hewing as close a course as he was.
Ironically, much if not most food we eat is dependent on fossil-fuel energy, largely through nitrogen fertiliser (natural-gas based), but also pesticides, mechanised agriculture, and the distribution network's transport, cold-chain, and retail elements.
That's not a defence of fossil fuels so much as noting that Berry's arguments here sits a little loosely with reality.
His lifestyle - activism included - is a fantasy of pastoral individualism which is only possible because science and technology keep the lights on for everyone around him.
He still doesn't use a computer, and his wife still uses a typewriter to transcribe his rustic hand-hewn longhand.
But after that the words are typed into a computer by another assistant.
Would a return to small-scale farms and communities be a good thing? Of course. But he's blaming "lazy city folks" when the real culprits are corporate raiders and would-be plantation owners.
The dubious position that being forced to participate in society invalidates his activism is addressed in response to reader letters, and so are consumers who consider themselves blameless cogs of the capitalist machine. Have you seen the web comic that goes something like:
Geothermal energy and tidal power don’t come from the sun either. Hydroelectricity is half sun (evaporation) half Earth’s gravity. (Well, one could argue that without the sun we wouldn’t have liquid oceans.)
It's just carbon neutral, not "technically" carbon neutral.
The reason we even care about CO2 emissions is that industrial emissions reconnect carbon reservoirs that were disconnected from the atmosphere for millions of years, i.e. underground oil, gas and coal deposits, back to the atmosphere. Not that CO2 in itself is harmful in any way.
The fact that we have ~8 billion people now vs ~1 billion in 1800 does make a difference to the equation, in terms of our own respiration and not just our deliberate use of fossil fuels. Admittedly it's minor, and I don't know what's happened to other biomass in that time. But still. The point is: having people eat more so that they could pedal a stationary bike hooked up to an electric generator, would not give "clean" power at the margin.
We are carbon neutral against the earth as a whole. The problem is that sequestered carbon is now in the atmosphere. It doesn't matter how many people are breathing out carbon. It matters where that carbon came from, and where it ends up. Of course we now have so many humans that the majority of them are dependent on fossil fuels to survive, and as others have pointed out, not just for energy.
No, you are not getting what people are trying to tell you: growing the food for the extra 7 billion completely cancels out the co2 emitted from the 7 billion pairs of lungs. We know that because the C in that emitted CO2 all comes from food eaten by the person at some point in the person's life.
I think you might be missing the point too. Yes, the carbon in the food we eat is where the carbon in our breath comes from. But the carbon that we used to get the ingredients in that food didn't certainly come from the atmosphere (e.g. half of the nitrogen used in agriculture comes from fossil fuels). You can't be a perfectly optimal salad eating machine. One of your fellow humans will ruin the equation the moment they buy produce from the modern supply chain.
No, all the carbon in food plants comes from CO2 from the atmosphere. (Ditto nitrogen by the way: the natural gas used in making nitrogen fertilizers is a source of hydrogen and possibly reaction energy, but not a significant source of N.)
> No, all the carbon in food plants comes from CO2 from the atmosphere.
Yes, this is what I said.
> the natural gas used in making fertilizer is a source of hydrogen and energy, but not a significant source of N.
There is no nitrogen at all in natural gas.
Plants cannot use atmospheric nitrogen on their own. They depend on either bacteria or humans to create some usable form of nitrogen. Any carbon captured in a plant that depended on a fossil fuel source of nitrogen cannot be considered carbon neutral, unless you draw a useless system boundary.
I have questions about whether Berry would own that relationship even if (big if) he were convinced carbin capture was beneficial.
But more importantly — chances are VERY strong that Berry transcends most of the categories you’re familiar with and a few that you aren’t. He’s an outstanding voice, and a worthy thinker for anyone to sharpen their own mind with or against. Though even where I part ways with him — for example, I was always going to buy a computer (and more computers) — I usually discover that there was a tradeoff and value worth defending on the other side of my choice.
Also, the overlap between his standards for technology and open source values is pretty high.
Great article, thanks for sharing. I enjoyed hearing the author's viewpoint, and his list of criteria for buying stuff can be useful with some minor adjustments. Also, the replies regarding his wife were hilarious, if a bit nosy and presumptuous (or maybe because of that).
While those things may not have been true in 1987, many of them are true today, now that computers have had several decades to evolve.
1. Cost is arguable today, as cheap computers exist, and quality typewriters have become more expensive. A cheap computer will work better than a beat up old typewriter.
2. A modern laptop, tablet, or phone is much smaller than a typewriter.
3. A computer is demonstrably better than a typewriter, by several orders of magnitude, assuming the user has electricity and a printer (if one of their goals to end up with a printed page).
4. The typewriter still wins here. Though, one could argue, that it takes less physical energy to transport and use a computer vs a typewriter.
5. A computer could be powered by solar energy today, with enough solar infrastructure behind it. I’m also thinking back to the OLPC that had a crank to charge its battery.
6. The typewriter still wins here, though I don’t think the average typewriter user is doing their own restoration or major repairs.
7. Computers now win here, simply due to popularity.
8. This seems to go hand and hand with number 7. A few lucky people may have a local typewriter shop, but they are few and far between.
9. I don’t think the computer inherently creates this disruption. I didn’t notice a shift here until the internet really exploded in popularity. The computer has also attempted to solve the division it created, and has been used to keep families together. I’m thinking of times where I had to travel for work, and I’d get a FaceTime call to bring me into a birthday party happening thousands of miles away.
Is much as I appreciate Berry's work and writing, I'd actually look to that list as a foundation of counterarguments, and possibly, alternate rationales.
Many (though not all) innovations benefit by scale. This would include freshwater viaducts, transportation canals, sewerage systems, and mechanised agriculture (even at modest levels).
Many technologies are less expensive at scale. Berry's beloved typewriter is more expensive than a quill pen, as one of his respondents notes. Computers rather famously have fallen tremendously in price:performance (though we've also bumped up the minimum acceptable performance level).
Some technologies are truly transformational. Going back before computers, and in the realm of information storage, retrieval and distribution, I could point to the lowly index card, reversable bindings (which made subscription updates to information possible, as with encyclopedias, business directories, manuals, specifications, and the like), and the printing press and moveable type themselves. Computers fit into this continuum, to which we could add telecommunications (signal flares, optical and electrical telegraphs, the telephone, broadcast and cable radio and television, packet-switched communications, as well as automated data systems, databases, revision control systems, and wikis).
Reparability is fine, and I'm strongly opposed to unnecessary additional barriers to repair (as the Right to Repair folks are correctly fighting). But again there are cases where the complexity and maintenance costs are offset by the increased capabilities. It's ironic to note that the computers of 1985 which Berry writes of are extremely repairable by contemporary standards (presuming you can find, or fabricate, replacement parts).
I could go on.
Mind that I'm sympathetic to Berry's points, and I'd be inclined to make similar arguments against much current technology. As Douglas Adams said:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Anti computer people are blissfully unaware of your feelings toward them, maybe they're onto something
Wendell Barry had a perfectly successful career without having to touch computers, and there will be people in twenty years who lead careers without having to interact with AI personalities
well if the marginal value of labor goes to zero, only those with capital will be able to survive. we may need to think about what kinds of redistribution are socially acceptable.
Minimum wage is barely (in many cases not even barely) enough to live on. Raising minimum wage is a herculean task that rarely succeeds. Federal minimum wage hasn't been raised in 16 years. But we'll have not only a livable UBI in 20 years, but one that's enough to "retire to a life of leisure"?
Minimum wage isn't directly comparable, because that's the government setting a rule on what two private parties can agree to. It's not the government but the employer who pays it.
UBI is distributed by the government directly, so it's basically a question of what gets taxed, how much inflation results, and whether that inflation and taxation proves more unpopular than the UBI is popular.
This is silly. To a first approximation, zero percent of the opposition to minimum wage increases comes from a principled stance of "I support taxation, even high taxation, but I am opposed to the government interfering in private labor market contracts"; 100% of it is from "they're taking my money!". There is no reason to expect any less opposition from the much, much larger amount of wealth redistribution which would be required by UBI.
What does minimum wage have to do with taxation? It's not the government paying those wages, it's McDonald's, and the opposition to it comes from people who say it will result in McDonalds closing stores or replacing cashiers with touchscreens rather than paying more for employees; ie, low-value labor simply becoming unemployable rather than getting a pay boost.
There are a lot of counterarguments to a high minimum wage, some even from UBI proponents, but none of them are "they're taking my money" because that doesn't make sense in the context of a minimum wage.
You can frame the opposition to a minimum wage that way, e.g. if you raise the minimum wage then the cost of a Big Mac goes up and you're the one paying it. Or, suppose you're a small business owner who employs three people and you pay them each $20,000, and then after paying them you're left with $50,000/year for your own salary. If you were required to pay them each $30,000 then you'd be left with $20,000 yourself, and that might make you pretty unhappy. More to the point, it might make you close the business and go get a job doing something else, and then those three people lose their jobs instead of getting a raise, which is precisely the argument against a minimum wage.
But that still doesn't apply to a UBI, because a UBI is universal. The person buying the Big Mac or running the small business gets it too, and the breakeven point would be around the average income, so you don't have the problem the minimum wage has where the people paying the cost are often the people who weren't making that much money to begin with.
There's plenty of reasons to doubt, but you could reframe it as "lower pension age to zero".
In optimistic scenarios, if AI can do so much that nobody's even getting paid to make robots, then AI are making robots that also makes the cost of living lower.
In practice, I think that the path from here to there is unstable.
We can't even get universal health care or a decent minimum wage through the opposition from our oligarchs, and those are much, much smaller asks than UBI. Why on earth would you expect UBI to be possible, never mind inevitable?
"Universal healthcare" is typically used as a euphemism for government-operated healthcare providers, which would wipe out both the health insurance industry and a lot of private healthcare providers. You get the strongest opposition to a policy when a specific group sees it as an existential threat, because that group will then organize to lobby vigorously against it.
Minimum wage is a price control. Price controls are trash economics and should not be used. They're a political issue in the US because a federal minimum wage is doubly counterproductive, since different states have a different cost of living. But because of that the states with a higher cost of living see a smaller deleterious effect from a higher minimum wage. Then representatives from those states can claim to want to raise the minimum wage so they can paint their opponents from the lower cost of living states as the villains when they fight against it. But nobody really wants to increase it because it's a bad policy, most of the proponents are from states whose constituents wouldn't even be affected because their state already has a minimum wage in excess of the federal one, the proponents just want to make their opponents vote it down again so they can cast aspersions over it.
A UBI is equivalent to a large universal tax credit. A slight majority of the population would receive more than they pay on net because the median income is slightly below the mean income, which creates a large base of support. If everyone voted purely in their own personal financial interest it would have simple majority support. Meanwhile most of the people who would end up paying on net would only be paying slightly (because they make slightly more than the average income), and in general the net payers are a very large diffuse group with no common interests or organizational ties to one another.
A UBI is a thereby easier to bring about than either of those other things.
This writer doesn't look obnoxious to me they make good points. Of course they make good points only for their use case. I'd rather keep computers as a thing and have all the medical advances, plane safety, science advances we have seen. I also couldn't do what I first did on a computer with a pencil: program an automaton. But it is worth reading other points of view and seeing their side.
I am sympathetic with his message today, when I would have been dismissive of it in 1987. I also realize that I shouldn't have been dismissive of it in 1987. Even though the industry of today is far more damaging than it was then, it is only because there were so many benefits yet-to-reap. The industry itself was just as manipulative and just as greedy. While most of the old empires have fallen, new ones have taken their place.
That said, I think his tone was a mistake. It is not that technology is inherently good or bad. The fault is in how we fail to examine the role it should play. Each of the nine criteria that he lays out could have been met, but as individuals and society we have decided upon a different path.
By anti-AI, do you mean people who oppose the seemingly whimsical (while potentially being an existential threat) creation of genuine artificial intelligence without exercising unprecedented levels of caution, or people who mistake LLMs for intelligence?
Plenty of people are anti "AI" because the uses they see it being put to are AI slop posted on Facebook to be responded to by boomers or bots. Or both. The dead Internet theory is becoming real.
Maybe it's just me, but while I have an issue with text slop, GenAI images never bothered me. My experience is that they're only really used where the alternative would have been a lazy stock photo or clipart image. And in these cases, it seems to me that writing a prompt is actually more of an artistic expression than the even more minimal effort that they likely would have spent on taking the first image they would have found on google.
In theory there's no reason this has to be the case, but in practice there is a very strong correlation between using a blog using GenAI images and the blog being shit. On Substack in particular, use of GenAI images is a strong "don't waste your time here" signal.
Sure as shootin', even to this day, I still have a messy computer.
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