Comment by ChickeNES
11 hours ago
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?
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>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.
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> 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
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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).
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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.
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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?