He was a friend of many people in my community. I met him a few times at public lectures. But his way of thinking has had a profound impact on my life.
I rejected his rejection of technology. I think he didn't appreciate the power of information technology to support exactly the dreams he held. If people can understand each other, if they can learn from the whole world how to care for their bit of earth, surely that's a good thing? Because he rejected technology he never learned of free, open source, culture. He didn't appreciate that there is another path to liberation of humans from the machines that dominate us—that we embed them in our communities, bend them to our will, and reject exploitation. There's still hope...
I however am permanently touched by his perspective on the land as our foundation.
I was so inspired that I helped start a farm on the Kentucky River. It's a journey, but we are on our way to implement a little reflection of his vision near where he dreamed us these beautiful dreams of past and future.
I read The World-Ending Fire (Wendell Berry), Hackers (Steven Levy), and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig) around the same time. I was struck by how similar Berry, Pirsig, and the early MIT hackers thought about Quality work. I gave a talk about it at an images & algorithms class I took in undergrad. It's reassuring to see Wendell Berry was an influential figure to many others in this space. RIP.
I haven’t read Berry, but he just went up on my priority list based on this.
Another link to Quality in the Pirsig sense I haven’t seen discussed much is Christopher Alexander’s work. Specifically A Timeless Way of Building which gives similar frustratingly inexact descriptions.
I guess Jane Jacobs fits in with this as well but with a bit more concreteness.
Thanks for the recommendations. Horse-Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labor Saving is a very short Berry essay and particularly relevant to this conversation.
I’m not sure I’m quite ready to take on 3 books to figure this out - can you explain a little bit what you mean about quality work? Consider my interest piqued!
I'm afraid I won't do this justice, as it's been a while since I've thought deeply about these ideas, but here is an attempt!
For me, Pirsig put it best: "Quality is the goal of Art." I too struggled to understand Pirsig's full metaphysical hierarchy of Quality, but this quote gets at the core of the similarities I saw in these books.
Pirsig was concerned with teaching his students writing and maintaining his motorcycle. Berry was concerned with doing fulfilling and meaningful work on the farm. The MIT hackers were concerned with finding The Right Thing: "the unique, correct, elegant [program]." All of these individuals were concerned with some notion of Quality.
Interestingly, they all viewed what they were doing as a form of art. A colleague remarked, "Sounds like art," to Pirsig upon hearing his ideas on Quality, to which he responded, "Well, it is art." Levy identifies "You can create art and beauty on the computer." as one of the tenets of The Hacker Ethic. "[A]ll serious computer programs are expressions of an individual." This was the first clue to me that they were all talking about the same thing.
Like art, Quality is more a description of a process than product. And the Quality way of working that all three books discuss is very much the same. For me, it is exactly the defining characteristics of the artistic process. Through their work, an artist expresses themselves. They make contact with their medium, be that motorcycle, field, code, or painting. They make choices. Their medium responds. Both evolve with each other. The process is inherently experimental. Importantly, their medium imposes limitations and constraints.
I gave this talk back in 2024, two years after I took the course. At the time, I was frustrated with my lack of artistic output post-graduation. These readings made me realize my creative/artistic outlet had just changed for the time being. I took a lot of solace in that. Recently, I've been trying to understand how AI fits into my picture of Quality programming.
If you've come this far, you might be interested to see some of my image & algorithm work [1]. The decluttering, exaptation exhibition was the culmination of the class and an independent study.
I should also mention Shop Class as Soulcraft (Matthew B. Crawford) as another book that influenced my thinking.
I was always struck that one of the letters in opposition to Berry's view was written by Nathaniel Borenstein, the co-inventor of MIME.
It was an odd experience for me because it was coming from such a different worldview that I generally felt I couldn't relate to what Berry was saying at all. (I could contrast that with some of Cliff Stoll's writings about his skepticism of computers, which are always coming from a culturally familiar place and are at least readily comprehensible for me.)
I also have a book Berry wrote as a rejoinder to E. O. Wilson's Consilience (called Life is a Miracle). I put the two next to each other on my bookshelf!
rip, sad day for my homestate, he's a giant here. and for me too, as he's one of those rabbit hole authors, revealing a Truth (capital T).
berry is in the same lineage as somebody like muir, and it really pains me to say, but i really wonder how relevant those individualist back to nature (and i dont say this necessarily dismissively, just dont know how to put it) imperatives really are. the world is technological, the necessities of life are commoditized, production and markets are global. how can there be any turning away from it, apart from it being a fetishistic practice, or just eccentric affectation. just think, portable nuclear reactors next to every data center soon. the march goes on.
i had similar feeling with kaczinsky, who had similar views on sanctity of nature and impact of modernity, in a way the diagnosis is incredibly correct, but the regimen ~ a return to a more anarchic, hyperlocal, individualistic relation with it ~ completely misplaced.
the terroir, does it even exist, has it ever even existed in america?
> the terroir, does it even exist, has it ever even existed in america?
Not in the romantic sense and I'd imagine mostly ending in an Into the Wild kind of fate if at all.
That said, if you're living in a more rural area, it's not terribly difficult to cultivate a little patch of that experience for yourself.
It will never be picture perfect, but you can selectively engage with technology (and society) to an extent that you protect—at the very least—the little allotment you find yourself responsible for stewarding.
It requires a reorientation away from a default validation of a highly technical society (both in the literal sense and the Jacques Ellul [1] sense). But until they replace all of the countryside with data centers, it's still within reach. May require some creativity and sweat but it's still out there.
You might find Albert Borgmann a helpful voice here. He describes 'focal things and practices' which push back against the commodification of nearly everything. So, for example, making a meal and eating it with others at a table, reading a book with a friend, singing or playing an instrument, etc. Much more actionable about what can be done, reclaiming agency in a world that feels completely inevitable.
This is really sad to see. I didn't agree with him on much but his viewpoints and arguments definitely made me consider my assumptions about technology. It helped me reconsider whether it was always good for us as humans to make things easier and more convenient via technology. He helped me realize that sometimes to be human is to go through the process to see the fruit of your labor.
I've been carrying one of his poems around in my pocket recently. I'll leave it here for y'all. Maybe it'll find someone else as it found me when I needed it most:
> To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
> “If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line - starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King's Highway past the appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will.”
I have only read a handful of Berry's books, mostly novels and short story collections, but several of them are among of my all-time favorites: thoughtful, moving, humane, and surprisingly funny. They're especially enjoyable when read aloud.
Berry was one of the few celebrities I hoped to one day meet in person.
I think he'd be offended by the title of celebrity, but I know exactly what you mean. There was a documentary done on him several years ago, in part driven by Nick Offerman, in which Berry agreed to participate only if they didn't show his face.
I learned of Berry just this last year. His book 'The Unsettling of America' really had an impact on me. He was a leader who lived what he preached. RIP.
> We must address ourselves seriously, and not a little fearfully, to the problem of human scale. What is it? How do we stay within it? What sort of technology enhances our humanity? What sort reduces it? The reason is simply that we cannot live except within limits, and these limits are of many kinds: spatial, material, moral, spiritual. The world has room for many people who are content to live as humans, but only for a relative few intent upon living as giants or as gods
-- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.
Adjacent to the noble savage myth, the good ol' days illusion meets the grass is greener on the other side. Just 4 generations ago, when people worked a low tech, hand-to-mouth agrarian existence without powered equipment, proper nutrition, or antibiotics, they were at constant risk of starvation from a single low yield harvest. It's a very hard life.
This is a misrepresentation of Berry's thought. Like many traditional Amish or Mennonite communities, he wasn't at all adverse to mechanized agriculture, he simply believed that technology be used considerately, and that people seeing agriculture up close made for a rooting in local community that he believed beneficial. Even Berry's critics (and he had his share, me included) did not dismiss his ideas so readily as your post.
I grew up in rural Texas, descended from sharecroppers. He's romanticizing a kind of farming that hasn't existed in the US in 70+ years, one that would make it impossible to feed the country.
Not only that, but I know from my parents generation that small hold farm work is brutal an naturally leads to certain dynamics that contemporary Americans would find quite objectionable. When a bad harvest could starve your family directions are never polite requests and norms are very strictly enforced.
I think he romanticized the old ways of farming, but I think the overall point was to question what was good about the past and question the line we are fed that all technology is for the general good of all people.
I think it is possible to say that subsistence farming leading to disease and starvation is bad, and a gigantic corporate oligopoly run monoculture farm is also bad. One of his biggest points is really that life should be human scale and speed with human relationships as a priority, the idealized farm was just a way to show what that life looked like in the past.
My grandfather nearly starved to death on his parent's farm a couple of times during the Dustbowl and he contracted a disease while in an immunocompromised state due to malnutrition that left its mark throughout his bones. Later, he helped his mother buy a combination general store and house to support herself.
Surely there is an agreeable third option between life-and-death subsistence farming and spiritually/ecologically/gustatorily desolate conglomerate monocrop agriculture.
Organic vegetables are still monocrops grown by large companies, which I don’t think is a bad thing. Large scale agriculture has made food plentiful and cheap, that’s a good thing. We’ve eliminated famines in every nation with a stable government and market access outside or war zones.
>Just 4 generations ago, when people worked a low tech, hand-to-mouth agrarian existence without powered equipment, proper nutrition, or antibiotics, they were at constant risk of starvation from a single low yield harvest. It's a very hard life.
That's why we like it. The people in chairs in Wall-e don't.
I was a bit surprised by WALL-E and its premise; here was a space movie with a large corporation at the center, but it wasn't "evil" in the mold of Weyland-Yutani. BnL's CEO, Shelby Forthright, lived up to his name and generally meant well. The tragedies of the film lay entirely in unintended consequences.
Which is even darker in a sense, because it seems to try to tell us we're going to gum up the Earth even without the usual motives of greed and a lust for power, just a desire for the best life for everyone.
Wendell Berry is practically unknown in the UK, and I tried to introduce his work to a book group a couple of years ago. Unfortunately due to the nature of the book group, we had new members who hadn't read it and another who seemed more interested reading George Monbiot than Wendell Berry (a shame since Monbiot is overexposed and has little personal experience of working the land).
Quote from Wendell Berry on big business and big government: 'The corporate mind at work overthrows all the virtues of the personal mind, or it throws them out of account. The corporate mind knows no affection, no desire that is not greedy, no local or personal loyalty, no sympathy or reverence or gratitude, no temperance or thrift or self-restraint. It does not observe the first responsibility of intelligence, which is to know when you don't know or when you are being unintelligent. Try to imagine an official standing up in the high councils of a global corporation or a great public institution to say "We have grown too big," or "We now have more power or money than we can responsibly use," . . . -- and you will see what I mean. . . .'
Perhaps Tir by Carwyn Graves would engage the interest of the Monbiot generation and lead them into a slightly different framing (and introduce some Welsh)?
Why would I care about some anti-tech person? As someone who grew up in a rural area, with family that ran a hobby farm, descended from sharecroppers, there's nothing to romanticize.
Edit: but really, I can't see any possible reason to read this person's writing over, say, something about Norman Borlaug. Never heard of this person before now, HN never contextualizes obits, didn't come here just to fight.
I'm actually with you. Having read some of Wendell Berry's work, he comes across to me as an impractical dreamer. Not only do his ideals not scale to support humanity, but he refuses to acknowledge the external impact of his decisions.
Henry David Thoreau's writings about self-reliance are harder to tolerate once you learn that he was supported by family. Yes he lived in the woods, but his mother literally brought him food. In the same vein, Wendell Berry's writings about technology are harder to tolerate once you learn that he made his wife type up his manuscripts for him to be sent on to publishers.
It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.
> It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.
Yes! Making informed decisions about technology is vital, but when his writings appear to boil down to "technology bad, old things good", well, why bother to even engage when there are better thinkers out there?
You have never heard of him before now, but feel confident in boiling down his large body of writing and laying judgment on the quality of his thought?
>Wendell Berry's writings about technology are harder to tolerate once you learn that he made his wife type up his manuscripts for him to be sent on to publishers.
Why is that? In his essay (that's linked above) him writing with his wife is one of the reasons he explicitly names as to why he didn't use a computer. As he says, it would have not just replaced something, but someone. He valued working his wife, and she in all likelihood did too.
There's no hypocrisy, dependence on other people was why he shunned technology. It's very telling that we now have a generation of people grown up on machines who think having to rely on another person, in other words community, is some offense to what he argued for.
Therein lies the friction, I embrace technology because it reduces my reliance on other people, and I don't value local community over global community (in fact, just the opposite). And I want to end human labor, so you can see why I have profound dislike for his philosophy.
that's a friction between your philosophy and his philosophy, not between his philosophy and his practice. He lived exactly what he preached and so I don't understand in what sense he is a "hypocritical curmudgeon". He didn't doordash his food or hate his neighbors, he spent 60 years of his life on a small homestead farming in Kentucky, as far as I know engaged with his community.
This is my biggest gripe with HN. You'll see a headline like "Norville Grub has died" and you look him up and he wrote a Unix timestamp parser in the 80's or something. This is pretty much the only time I wish we had moderators; it isn't that difficult to write "Norville Grub, original Unix timestamp parser author, has died". I pretty much skip every obit unless I recognize the name.
Why should I care about tech? As someone who grew up in a city, with a family that ran a business building mainframes back in the early computer days, there is nothing to romanticize.
That’s why your comment is not particularly well-received. I’ve had the exact opposite experience as you, I’ve seen overwhelming sadness and misery and depression spawned from a tech-filled life. I hardly can count the few crazy deep into tech who seem at peace simultaneously. So many people leave tech for something more meaningful is almost a meme at this point. The only defense I ever hear is “well if people would just…” but people DON’T just. They never just. They never have just, and they never will just.
In nature, this works out just fine, because there are many natural guardrails. Don’t piss off the tiger. Guardrail: it eats you. Don’t gorge on your fish pond. Guardrail: you deplete and starve.
In society, there are no guardrails because individuals can have massively outsized impacts. One man can start a construction project that depletes his pond, then deplete 40 other ponds refilling his own.
Because we're on a news discussion site about technology, run by a technology incubator, frequented by those who work with and use technology? More substantively, you don't have to care about technology, but if you're arguing that technological society makes people miserable, that's an empirical claim.
> As someone who grew up in a city, with a family that ran a business building mainframes back in the early computer days, there is nothing to romanticize.
I agree! Human labor should not be romanticized.
> So many people leave tech for something more meaningful is almost a meme at this point.
Anecdotes are not data. Can you actually show this?
> In society, there are no guardrails because individuals can have massively outsized impacts. One man can start a construction project that depletes his pond, then deplete 40 other ponds refilling his own.
Society has guardrails: laws, property rights, regulation, liability, prices, taxes, permits, and collective institutions. You seem to be taking an example of an externality and then twisting it into an argument that these don't guardrails don't exist, when they plainly do.
And I'm not sure “deplete your food supply and starve” is a very compelling example of nature's superior guardrails. We have built those social guardrails precisely because we'd prefer to prevent the damage rather than have starvation enforce the constraint afterward.
I’m not arguing that human labor shouldn’t be romanticized. I’m arguing that computer labor shouldn’t be romanticized MORE than the agrarian variety. Of course labor should be romanticized. Every single thing we have to show as a species is the result of labor.
And us being able to create guardrails which sometimes work if you’re caught is not the same as a force of nature. There are no good or bad outcomes in nature, there are only consequences. This is absolutely not true in civilization.
We have nearly zero guardrails to prevent the damage. Did… you see Nepal? You realize this is a direct result of us either not having, or easily ignoring those guardrails?
As it turns out, starving because you chose to overeat is not going to have the same intensity as a law requiring you to please choose to throw back a fish which is too small (ignore the story about third world countries doing bomb fishing).
Do you have an actual response to the points I made, or are you going to continue appealing to emotion instead? Yes the flooding in Nepal is bad, terrible even. Yes externalities exist. Yes things could be better. That does not mean, and you have not proven, that there are "nearly zero guardrails" or that "guardrails do not exist". And in fact, you actually seem to be arguing they don't exist but are ignored at the same time? How does that follow?
Can you not connect the ideas that “nobody pays attention to this guardrail in any meaningful sense” and “there are no guardrails”?
I can spell out every point I was making just as specifically as this one if the only thing you were able to pick up was an “appeal to emotion” (note: that’s not what I’m doing, of course, I’m simply showing that the guardrails are effectively useless… how you brought up that point and yet still somehow completely missed it is beyond me), but I’m holding out hope that you’re just being hyperbolic, and it wasn’t actually out of your grasp.
Edit: and stop with the stupid misuse of phrases, or I’ll pull out equally stupid ones. You think I’m appealing to emotion, and yet you’re Gish Galloping! You have no argument then!!! (See how dumb this looks?)
Breaking down your sentences and going over them point by point is not a Gish gallop. And you're now resorting to insults instead of answering my points, so we're done here.
Yes, like every homesteader, Berry is a bit of a LARPer. Even his sparse lifestyle relies on a lot of products and services developed in technological society. He's still a good read though.
I mean, he was a career farmer (and writer and teacher) not a homesteader. He had his pet issues with technology but he never advocated for isolating oneself from society.
I wouldn't call it LARPing if someone just figures out the life he wants to live and then does it for 90 some-odd years.
I grew up on a farm about 100 miles from where this guy lived. I have never heard of him until now. The type of farming he did wasn't used on working farms since before he (1930s) was born. And there aren't any working farms along the Kentucky river. So yes, he was a LARPer.
PS Its distilleries that are along the river and the land there is far too hilly to grow row crops.
Funnily enough, in 2022 he spoke against a 25-warehouse bourbon campus being built nearby, saying the land was being sacrificed to “tourism and whiskey.” Weird way to support local industry (and his local community) in Kentucky!
He was a friend of many people in my community. I met him a few times at public lectures. But his way of thinking has had a profound impact on my life.
I rejected his rejection of technology. I think he didn't appreciate the power of information technology to support exactly the dreams he held. If people can understand each other, if they can learn from the whole world how to care for their bit of earth, surely that's a good thing? Because he rejected technology he never learned of free, open source, culture. He didn't appreciate that there is another path to liberation of humans from the machines that dominate us—that we embed them in our communities, bend them to our will, and reject exploitation. There's still hope...
I however am permanently touched by his perspective on the land as our foundation.
I was so inspired that I helped start a farm on the Kentucky River. It's a journey, but we are on our way to implement a little reflection of his vision near where he dreamed us these beautiful dreams of past and future.
As per One Hundred Years of Solitude: progress tends to destroy as much as it creates.
That's not Schumpeter?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
I read The World-Ending Fire (Wendell Berry), Hackers (Steven Levy), and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig) around the same time. I was struck by how similar Berry, Pirsig, and the early MIT hackers thought about Quality work. I gave a talk about it at an images & algorithms class I took in undergrad. It's reassuring to see Wendell Berry was an influential figure to many others in this space. RIP.
I haven’t read Berry, but he just went up on my priority list based on this.
Another link to Quality in the Pirsig sense I haven’t seen discussed much is Christopher Alexander’s work. Specifically A Timeless Way of Building which gives similar frustratingly inexact descriptions. I guess Jane Jacobs fits in with this as well but with a bit more concreteness.
Thanks for the recommendations. Horse-Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labor Saving is a very short Berry essay and particularly relevant to this conversation.
I’m not sure I’m quite ready to take on 3 books to figure this out - can you explain a little bit what you mean about quality work? Consider my interest piqued!
I'm afraid I won't do this justice, as it's been a while since I've thought deeply about these ideas, but here is an attempt!
For me, Pirsig put it best: "Quality is the goal of Art." I too struggled to understand Pirsig's full metaphysical hierarchy of Quality, but this quote gets at the core of the similarities I saw in these books.
Pirsig was concerned with teaching his students writing and maintaining his motorcycle. Berry was concerned with doing fulfilling and meaningful work on the farm. The MIT hackers were concerned with finding The Right Thing: "the unique, correct, elegant [program]." All of these individuals were concerned with some notion of Quality.
Interestingly, they all viewed what they were doing as a form of art. A colleague remarked, "Sounds like art," to Pirsig upon hearing his ideas on Quality, to which he responded, "Well, it is art." Levy identifies "You can create art and beauty on the computer." as one of the tenets of The Hacker Ethic. "[A]ll serious computer programs are expressions of an individual." This was the first clue to me that they were all talking about the same thing.
Like art, Quality is more a description of a process than product. And the Quality way of working that all three books discuss is very much the same. For me, it is exactly the defining characteristics of the artistic process. Through their work, an artist expresses themselves. They make contact with their medium, be that motorcycle, field, code, or painting. They make choices. Their medium responds. Both evolve with each other. The process is inherently experimental. Importantly, their medium imposes limitations and constraints.
I gave this talk back in 2024, two years after I took the course. At the time, I was frustrated with my lack of artistic output post-graduation. These readings made me realize my creative/artistic outlet had just changed for the time being. I took a lot of solace in that. Recently, I've been trying to understand how AI fits into my picture of Quality programming.
If you've come this far, you might be interested to see some of my image & algorithm work [1]. The decluttering, exaptation exhibition was the culmination of the class and an independent study.
I should also mention Shop Class as Soulcraft (Matthew B. Crawford) as another book that influenced my thinking.
[1] https://henryrobbins.com/artwork/
I read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance years ago and I still think "what IS quality?"
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig's_Metaphysics_of_Qualit...
lol
Stephen Levy's Artificial Life ended up being my first and only religious experience.
I can't believe I haven't read this already. Can't wait.
I was assigned to read some of his work in high school. Among (many) other things, he wrote a fair amount of criticism of technology and computers.
https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/be...
I was always struck that one of the letters in opposition to Berry's view was written by Nathaniel Borenstein, the co-inventor of MIME.
It was an odd experience for me because it was coming from such a different worldview that I generally felt I couldn't relate to what Berry was saying at all. (I could contrast that with some of Cliff Stoll's writings about his skepticism of computers, which are always coming from a culturally familiar place and are at least readily comprehensible for me.)
I also have a book Berry wrote as a rejoinder to E. O. Wilson's Consilience (called Life is a Miracle). I put the two next to each other on my bookshelf!
rip, sad day for my homestate, he's a giant here. and for me too, as he's one of those rabbit hole authors, revealing a Truth (capital T).
berry is in the same lineage as somebody like muir, and it really pains me to say, but i really wonder how relevant those individualist back to nature (and i dont say this necessarily dismissively, just dont know how to put it) imperatives really are. the world is technological, the necessities of life are commoditized, production and markets are global. how can there be any turning away from it, apart from it being a fetishistic practice, or just eccentric affectation. just think, portable nuclear reactors next to every data center soon. the march goes on.
i had similar feeling with kaczinsky, who had similar views on sanctity of nature and impact of modernity, in a way the diagnosis is incredibly correct, but the regimen ~ a return to a more anarchic, hyperlocal, individualistic relation with it ~ completely misplaced.
the terroir, does it even exist, has it ever even existed in america?
> the terroir, does it even exist, has it ever even existed in america?
Not in the romantic sense and I'd imagine mostly ending in an Into the Wild kind of fate if at all.
That said, if you're living in a more rural area, it's not terribly difficult to cultivate a little patch of that experience for yourself.
It will never be picture perfect, but you can selectively engage with technology (and society) to an extent that you protect—at the very least—the little allotment you find yourself responsible for stewarding.
It requires a reorientation away from a default validation of a highly technical society (both in the literal sense and the Jacques Ellul [1] sense). But until they replace all of the countryside with data centers, it's still within reach. May require some creativity and sweat but it's still out there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society
You might find Albert Borgmann a helpful voice here. He describes 'focal things and practices' which push back against the commodification of nearly everything. So, for example, making a meal and eating it with others at a table, reading a book with a friend, singing or playing an instrument, etc. Much more actionable about what can be done, reclaiming agency in a world that feels completely inevitable.
thanks, will look him up.
This is really sad to see. I didn't agree with him on much but his viewpoints and arguments definitely made me consider my assumptions about technology. It helped me reconsider whether it was always good for us as humans to make things easier and more convenient via technology. He helped me realize that sometimes to be human is to go through the process to see the fruit of your labor.
I've been carrying one of his poems around in my pocket recently. I'll leave it here for y'all. Maybe it'll find someone else as it found me when I needed it most:
> To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
> To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
> and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
> and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Do yourself a favor and read Jayber Crow -- One of my all time favorite books and really the book that got me back into fiction after a long time away
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1582431604?lv=shuf&channelId=500&p...
> “If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line - starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King's Highway past the appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will.”
Reminds me of Andre Malraux’s remark that an unfortunate aspect of death is that it makes a life look like a journey to a known destination.
Totally agreed. My copy has been through the ringer.
I have only read a handful of Berry's books, mostly novels and short story collections, but several of them are among of my all-time favorites: thoughtful, moving, humane, and surprisingly funny. They're especially enjoyable when read aloud.
Berry was one of the few celebrities I hoped to one day meet in person.
I think he'd be offended by the title of celebrity, but I know exactly what you mean. There was a documentary done on him several years ago, in part driven by Nick Offerman, in which Berry agreed to participate only if they didn't show his face.
I learned of Berry just this last year. His book 'The Unsettling of America' really had an impact on me. He was a leader who lived what he preached. RIP.
> We must address ourselves seriously, and not a little fearfully, to the problem of human scale. What is it? How do we stay within it? What sort of technology enhances our humanity? What sort reduces it? The reason is simply that we cannot live except within limits, and these limits are of many kinds: spatial, material, moral, spiritual. The world has room for many people who are content to live as humans, but only for a relative few intent upon living as giants or as gods
-- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.
https://archive.today/rAr8f
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry
Over on Substack it feels like the whole platform is in mourning and the tributes are beautiful. RIP.
"So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute"
RIP.
The last dude is scared of nuclear tech despite it fitting neatly into Berry’s rules except for him being anti-big-tech.
A life well lived.
https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/be...
Adjacent to the noble savage myth, the good ol' days illusion meets the grass is greener on the other side. Just 4 generations ago, when people worked a low tech, hand-to-mouth agrarian existence without powered equipment, proper nutrition, or antibiotics, they were at constant risk of starvation from a single low yield harvest. It's a very hard life.
This is a misrepresentation of Berry's thought. Like many traditional Amish or Mennonite communities, he wasn't at all adverse to mechanized agriculture, he simply believed that technology be used considerately, and that people seeing agriculture up close made for a rooting in local community that he believed beneficial. Even Berry's critics (and he had his share, me included) did not dismiss his ideas so readily as your post.
I grew up in rural Texas, descended from sharecroppers. He's romanticizing a kind of farming that hasn't existed in the US in 70+ years, one that would make it impossible to feed the country.
Not only that, but I know from my parents generation that small hold farm work is brutal an naturally leads to certain dynamics that contemporary Americans would find quite objectionable. When a bad harvest could starve your family directions are never polite requests and norms are very strictly enforced.
> norms are very strictly enforced
And now norms are not enforced at all, and look at who we have in the white house. This is why we can't have nice things.
I think he romanticized the old ways of farming, but I think the overall point was to question what was good about the past and question the line we are fed that all technology is for the general good of all people.
I think it is possible to say that subsistence farming leading to disease and starvation is bad, and a gigantic corporate oligopoly run monoculture farm is also bad. One of his biggest points is really that life should be human scale and speed with human relationships as a priority, the idealized farm was just a way to show what that life looked like in the past.
Reading McCullough bio of Truman and Caro bio of LBJ lead me to the same conclusion. It was brutal, and most who saw any means of escape seized it
I’m compelled by the romantic nostalgia, but I know I personally couldn’t cut the mustard
My grandfather nearly starved to death on his parent's farm a couple of times during the Dustbowl and he contracted a disease while in an immunocompromised state due to malnutrition that left its mark throughout his bones. Later, he helped his mother buy a combination general store and house to support herself.
Surely there is an agreeable third option between life-and-death subsistence farming and spiritually/ecologically/gustatorily desolate conglomerate monocrop agriculture.
Food literally grows on trees.
Pay 2x for organic vegetables at the fancy grocery store
Organic vegetables are still monocrops grown by large companies, which I don’t think is a bad thing. Large scale agriculture has made food plentiful and cheap, that’s a good thing. We’ve eliminated famines in every nation with a stable government and market access outside or war zones.
>Just 4 generations ago, when people worked a low tech, hand-to-mouth agrarian existence without powered equipment, proper nutrition, or antibiotics, they were at constant risk of starvation from a single low yield harvest. It's a very hard life.
That's why we like it. The people in chairs in Wall-e don't.
https://jonnegroni.com/2015/04/15/the-humans-of-wall-e-were-...
I was shocked to notice the date in the URL. I think I understand where the LLMs are getting it from now
I was a bit surprised by WALL-E and its premise; here was a space movie with a large corporation at the center, but it wasn't "evil" in the mold of Weyland-Yutani. BnL's CEO, Shelby Forthright, lived up to his name and generally meant well. The tragedies of the film lay entirely in unintended consequences.
Which is even darker in a sense, because it seems to try to tell us we're going to gum up the Earth even without the usual motives of greed and a lust for power, just a desire for the best life for everyone.
Yeah, hard disagree.
Easy to say when you never had to live that life.
Wendell Berry is practically unknown in the UK, and I tried to introduce his work to a book group a couple of years ago. Unfortunately due to the nature of the book group, we had new members who hadn't read it and another who seemed more interested reading George Monbiot than Wendell Berry (a shame since Monbiot is overexposed and has little personal experience of working the land).
Quote from Wendell Berry on big business and big government: 'The corporate mind at work overthrows all the virtues of the personal mind, or it throws them out of account. The corporate mind knows no affection, no desire that is not greedy, no local or personal loyalty, no sympathy or reverence or gratitude, no temperance or thrift or self-restraint. It does not observe the first responsibility of intelligence, which is to know when you don't know or when you are being unintelligent. Try to imagine an official standing up in the high councils of a global corporation or a great public institution to say "We have grown too big," or "We now have more power or money than we can responsibly use," . . . -- and you will see what I mean. . . .'
Perhaps Tir by Carwyn Graves would engage the interest of the Monbiot generation and lead them into a slightly different framing (and introduce some Welsh)?
(Your quote reminded me of Thomas Hobbes)
this one hit me hard! why do i work in technology
Quiet desperation?
Why would I care about some anti-tech person? As someone who grew up in a rural area, with family that ran a hobby farm, descended from sharecroppers, there's nothing to romanticize.
Edit: but really, I can't see any possible reason to read this person's writing over, say, something about Norman Borlaug. Never heard of this person before now, HN never contextualizes obits, didn't come here just to fight.
I'm actually with you. Having read some of Wendell Berry's work, he comes across to me as an impractical dreamer. Not only do his ideals not scale to support humanity, but he refuses to acknowledge the external impact of his decisions.
Henry David Thoreau's writings about self-reliance are harder to tolerate once you learn that he was supported by family. Yes he lived in the woods, but his mother literally brought him food. In the same vein, Wendell Berry's writings about technology are harder to tolerate once you learn that he made his wife type up his manuscripts for him to be sent on to publishers.
It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.
> It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.
Yes! Making informed decisions about technology is vital, but when his writings appear to boil down to "technology bad, old things good", well, why bother to even engage when there are better thinkers out there?
You have never heard of him before now, but feel confident in boiling down his large body of writing and laying judgment on the quality of his thought?
Yes, and I have seen nothing in this thread, nor on Wikipedia, to change my mind
>Wendell Berry's writings about technology are harder to tolerate once you learn that he made his wife type up his manuscripts for him to be sent on to publishers.
Why is that? In his essay (that's linked above) him writing with his wife is one of the reasons he explicitly names as to why he didn't use a computer. As he says, it would have not just replaced something, but someone. He valued working his wife, and she in all likelihood did too.
There's no hypocrisy, dependence on other people was why he shunned technology. It's very telling that we now have a generation of people grown up on machines who think having to rely on another person, in other words community, is some offense to what he argued for.
Therein lies the friction, I embrace technology because it reduces my reliance on other people, and I don't value local community over global community (in fact, just the opposite). And I want to end human labor, so you can see why I have profound dislike for his philosophy.
that's a friction between your philosophy and his philosophy, not between his philosophy and his practice. He lived exactly what he preached and so I don't understand in what sense he is a "hypocritical curmudgeon". He didn't doordash his food or hate his neighbors, he spent 60 years of his life on a small homestead farming in Kentucky, as far as I know engaged with his community.
> He lived exactly what he preached
“He lived exactly what he preached” is an empirical claim, not an interpretation. Can you substantiate “exactly”?
> HN never contextualizes obits
This is my biggest gripe with HN. You'll see a headline like "Norville Grub has died" and you look him up and he wrote a Unix timestamp parser in the 80's or something. This is pretty much the only time I wish we had moderators; it isn't that difficult to write "Norville Grub, original Unix timestamp parser author, has died". I pretty much skip every obit unless I recognize the name.
It's good for HN readers to have to work a little.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
1. That link is blocked on my office network, so not sure how to respond.
2. I have enough attention thieves in my life to have to "work" to determine if I should read it.
Might I request adding that to the FAQ as well? I do understand the reason, while disagreeing :P
What would the question be? We'd have to make the scope broader than just "X has died".
I also have the same gripe with the CHM's youtube channel for the same reason. Not everyone they interview is known by name, in fact, most are not.
Why should I care about tech? As someone who grew up in a city, with a family that ran a business building mainframes back in the early computer days, there is nothing to romanticize.
That’s why your comment is not particularly well-received. I’ve had the exact opposite experience as you, I’ve seen overwhelming sadness and misery and depression spawned from a tech-filled life. I hardly can count the few crazy deep into tech who seem at peace simultaneously. So many people leave tech for something more meaningful is almost a meme at this point. The only defense I ever hear is “well if people would just…” but people DON’T just. They never just. They never have just, and they never will just.
In nature, this works out just fine, because there are many natural guardrails. Don’t piss off the tiger. Guardrail: it eats you. Don’t gorge on your fish pond. Guardrail: you deplete and starve.
In society, there are no guardrails because individuals can have massively outsized impacts. One man can start a construction project that depletes his pond, then deplete 40 other ponds refilling his own.
> Why should I care about tech?
Because we're on a news discussion site about technology, run by a technology incubator, frequented by those who work with and use technology? More substantively, you don't have to care about technology, but if you're arguing that technological society makes people miserable, that's an empirical claim.
> As someone who grew up in a city, with a family that ran a business building mainframes back in the early computer days, there is nothing to romanticize.
I agree! Human labor should not be romanticized.
> So many people leave tech for something more meaningful is almost a meme at this point.
Anecdotes are not data. Can you actually show this?
> In society, there are no guardrails because individuals can have massively outsized impacts. One man can start a construction project that depletes his pond, then deplete 40 other ponds refilling his own.
Society has guardrails: laws, property rights, regulation, liability, prices, taxes, permits, and collective institutions. You seem to be taking an example of an externality and then twisting it into an argument that these don't guardrails don't exist, when they plainly do.
And I'm not sure “deplete your food supply and starve” is a very compelling example of nature's superior guardrails. We have built those social guardrails precisely because we'd prefer to prevent the damage rather than have starvation enforce the constraint afterward.
I’m not arguing that human labor shouldn’t be romanticized. I’m arguing that computer labor shouldn’t be romanticized MORE than the agrarian variety. Of course labor should be romanticized. Every single thing we have to show as a species is the result of labor.
And us being able to create guardrails which sometimes work if you’re caught is not the same as a force of nature. There are no good or bad outcomes in nature, there are only consequences. This is absolutely not true in civilization.
We have nearly zero guardrails to prevent the damage. Did… you see Nepal? You realize this is a direct result of us either not having, or easily ignoring those guardrails?
As it turns out, starving because you chose to overeat is not going to have the same intensity as a law requiring you to please choose to throw back a fish which is too small (ignore the story about third world countries doing bomb fishing).
Do you have an actual response to the points I made, or are you going to continue appealing to emotion instead? Yes the flooding in Nepal is bad, terrible even. Yes externalities exist. Yes things could be better. That does not mean, and you have not proven, that there are "nearly zero guardrails" or that "guardrails do not exist". And in fact, you actually seem to be arguing they don't exist but are ignored at the same time? How does that follow?
Can you not connect the ideas that “nobody pays attention to this guardrail in any meaningful sense” and “there are no guardrails”?
I can spell out every point I was making just as specifically as this one if the only thing you were able to pick up was an “appeal to emotion” (note: that’s not what I’m doing, of course, I’m simply showing that the guardrails are effectively useless… how you brought up that point and yet still somehow completely missed it is beyond me), but I’m holding out hope that you’re just being hyperbolic, and it wasn’t actually out of your grasp.
Edit: and stop with the stupid misuse of phrases, or I’ll pull out equally stupid ones. You think I’m appealing to emotion, and yet you’re Gish Galloping! You have no argument then!!! (See how dumb this looks?)
Breaking down your sentences and going over them point by point is not a Gish gallop. And you're now resorting to insults instead of answering my points, so we're done here.
Yes, like every homesteader, Berry is a bit of a LARPer. Even his sparse lifestyle relies on a lot of products and services developed in technological society. He's still a good read though.
I mean, he was a career farmer (and writer and teacher) not a homesteader. He had his pet issues with technology but he never advocated for isolating oneself from society.
I wouldn't call it LARPing if someone just figures out the life he wants to live and then does it for 90 some-odd years.
I grew up on a farm about 100 miles from where this guy lived. I have never heard of him until now. The type of farming he did wasn't used on working farms since before he (1930s) was born. And there aren't any working farms along the Kentucky river. So yes, he was a LARPer.
PS Its distilleries that are along the river and the land there is far too hilly to grow row crops.
Funnily enough, in 2022 he spoke against a 25-warehouse bourbon campus being built nearby, saying the land was being sacrificed to “tourism and whiskey.” Weird way to support local industry (and his local community) in Kentucky!
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I thought HN discourages canned responses like yours? Do you have a response to the actual dependency argument?
I hate people, but I love gatherings. Ironic, isn't it?