Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (1987) [pdf]

Nevertheless, I go through life with the persistent unconscious belief that if I buy products-for-organizing I will become organized. :p

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.

True, however, anything not digital gets lost. And I may have many messy backups but I will find that one 15 y/o photo or doc when I need it.

i find my computer is better organised than my desk.

That's true. But at least you can do a search on a computer.

> Don't expect a computer to organize you. If you have a messy desk, you will have a messy computer.

That's why Google and GMail got so successful. Don't sort; search.

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.

I can't find/grep on my desk. My messy computer is much easier to handle!

its impressive how persieved convenience trumps all when it comes to mass adoption

Whem it comes to phones and social media apps, it's not people using computers but the other way around.

I think that was late enough that a lot of adults that were buying computers for home were buying them to run a particular application, not to get into the esoteric inner-workings of the computer. The type of people that essay were talking about wanted a computer to run a word processor that made text editing easier. Instead of having to rewrite your documents to move paragraphs around, you could instantly move them with cut and paste! Also built-in spell checker was pretty big in the era.

As for the comparison to new phones, from the people I see using them, they are all doing stuff no home computer, or really any 80's computer could do. Live video chatting, remote text communication on the go, taking pictures, listening to music, watching videos, doom scrolling generic "content".

In most ways, users are currently in the computing and communications golden age, far more so than the 80's.

Your first sentence is false in US at least. Census says that 81% of households have a desktop or laptop https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/computer...

After certain age, all school students up to university use/have a computer.

If they end up in an office job, they very likely will have/keep one around.

And even when not, people with higher education tend to like use the home computer for certain things. For example ”official stuff” like doing taxes, using government services. Maybe throw in some more detailed trip planning, hobbies, spreadsheets…

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"

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.

An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

I find it funny the old "I'm so feminist" prose thinking they're empowering women, while their actually demeaning the work the wife did. One comment from Toby Koosman directly lumps the wife in with servants.

Published work (writing) gets better with an editor helping, so she is providing valuable work, that even today computers can't engage in. Are the ideas expressed clearly? Does the piece make sense overall. Is the narrative properly built. Are their weird parts hanging around that get in the way of the intended message?

You have a couple that is engaging in each other's ideas, discussing issues that are most likely of interest to both of them. People often couple up who share a view on how to live, so it is likely that the wife is just as into the low tech lifestyle as he is. There exist women who like the rural and homesteading lifestyle.

The overall tone of the comment section is pretty disrespectful towards the wife.

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.

(As quoted by Cory Doctorow: <https://www.frankenbook.org/pub/ive-create-a-monster/release...>, also at <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams>.)

I'm also in general agreement with Berry's meta-argument: we should be mindful of what technologies we introduce into our lives.

And as much as I like typewriters, I'm typing this on a computer.

But not one of those newfangled mobile abominations.

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.

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.

Shocking that a wife might willingly want to help her husband with something important to him.

I think you'll appreciate the first response in the "Letters" section - the one that starts off with "Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative: Wife - a low-tech energy-saving device."

It got a chuckle out of me, for sure.

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.

I think this is just romanticizing the past.

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.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1669/the-art-of-po... "I made an interesting discovery about myself when I first worked for a film company. I had to write brief summaries of novels and plays to give the directors some idea of their film potential—a page or so of prose about each book or play and then my comment. That was where I began to write for the first time directly onto a typewriter. I was then about twenty-five. I realized instantly that when I composed directly onto the typewriter my sentences became three times as long, much longer. My subordinate clauses flowered and multiplied and ramified away down the length of the page, all much more eloquently than anything I would have written by hand. Recently I made another similar discovery. For about thirty years I’ve been on the judging panel of the W. H. Smith children’s writing competition. Annually there are about sixty thousand entries. These are cut down to about eight hundred. Among these our panel finds seventy prizewinners. Usually the entries are a page, two pages, three pages. That’s been the norm. Just a poem or a bit of prose, a little longer. But in the early 1980s we suddenly began to get seventy- and eighty-page works. These were usually space fiction, always very inventive and always extraordinarily fluent—a definite impression of a command of words and prose, but without exception strangely boring. It was almost impossible to read them through. After two or three years, as these became more numerous, we realized that this was a new thing. So we inquired. It turned out that these were pieces that children had composed on word processors. What’s happening is that as the actual tools for getting words onto the page become more flexible and externalized, the writer can get down almost every thought or every extension of thought. That ought to be an advantage. But in fact, in all these cases, it just extends everything slightly too much. Every sentence is too long. Everything is taken a bit too far, too attenuated. There’s always a bit too much there, and it’s too thin. Whereas when writing by hand you meet the terrible resistance of what happened your first year at it when you couldn’t write at all . . . when you were making attempts, pretending to form letters. These ancient feelings are there, wanting to be expressed. When you sit with your pen, every year of your life is right there, wired into the communication between your brain and your writing hand. There is a natural characteristic resistance that produces a certain kind of result analogous to your actual handwriting. As you force your expression against that built-in resistance, things become automatically more compressed, more summary and, perhaps, psychologically denser. I suppose if you use a word processor and deliberately prune everything back, alert to the tendencies, it should be possible to get the best of both worlds.

Maybe what I’m saying applies only to those who have gone through the long conditioning of writing only with a pen or pencil up through their mid-twenties. For those who start early on a typewriter or, these days, on a computer screen, things must be different. The wiring must be different. In handwriting the brain is mediated by the drawing hand, in typewriting by the fingers hitting the keyboard, in dictation by the idea of a vocal style, in word processing by touching the keyboard and by the screen’s feedback. The fact seems to be that each of these methods produces a different syntactic result from the same brain. Maybe the crucial element in handwriting is that the hand is simultaneously drawing. I know I’m very conscious of hidden imagery in handwriting—a subtext of a rudimentary picture language. Perhaps that tends to enforce more cooperation from the other side of the brain. And perhaps that extra load of right brain suggestions prompts a different succession of words and ideas."

I'd never heard of them before! But I'm sure some people that disapprove will come along soon enough to balance things out.

I know the author from Unsettling America.

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.

Wendell Berry is a pretty prolific activist and writer, and has been for more than half a century.

You would do well to fully understand his own stances before judging him based on how other people choose to interpret him.

You might come to the same conclusions, but they would be defensible at the very least.

It's an excessively brief way of saying that the nutrients we consume ultimately come from the sun. It caught me off guard for a moment, too.

You can buy one online. But you'll need a wife to do that for you of course.

True chad