Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer [pdf] (2000)

The rebuttal contains perhaps my least favorite underhanded rhetorical tactic: Alice expresses a viewpoint, Bob disagrees, and Alice replies something along the lines of "wow, it seems I've really touched a nerve! You care so much; you're obsessed with this. You and the rest of the fanatics are zombies who unthinkingly oppose my considered ideas. The very intensity of your disagreement is proof that something is deeply wrong with the way you think about this."

Hard to disagree with his core point.

> 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.

Most of us who were around in the 80s and 90s were convinced that computers and then the internet were an express ticket to world peace. How could it not be? Turns out were were laughably naive.

A followup from 2019 (he still doesn't have one): https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2019/0418/Why-Wendell-B...

I graduated college in 1987 (when the letter was first published.) I was probably the last generation to bring a typewriter. My freshman year I typed term papers on an old Smith-Corona. By my senior year, I was writing on a Commodore64 and printing on a dot-matrix printer (at the computer lab.) I also bought my first computer (Amiga 500!) that same year. This letter hasn't aged well obviously, but it wasn't a completely unreasonable position at that very brief point in time. Reminds me of the 1998 Paul Krugman quote https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/10/26/internet-fax/ about how the internet will be as impactful as the fax machine.

It's important to realize that even while this was published in a book in 2000, it was originally published in 1987. Many, many people were still using typewriters in 1987.