Wendell Berry wrote about the problems he saw with big agriculture in the 1970s. He criticized the idea that bigger was better or that new ways needed to be invented and used over old ways of farming. But despite talking about farming, his work is still extremely relevant to all other areas of life including AI.
Check out this substack post to read more.
https://open.substack.com/pub/oldbooksfornow/p/the-ungenerating-of-american-tech?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
by gummi_worms
6 Comments
*Small is beautiful* was a kind of mantra for the green / environmental movement back in those days. A book by that name, published in the early 70s, by E. F. Schumacher was also widely read then.
He wrote one of my favorite poems.
For The Future
by Wendell Berry
Planting trees early in spring,
we make a place for birds to sing
in time to come. How do we know?
They are singing here now.
There is no other guarantee
that singing will ever be.
What strikes me about Berry (and also Schumacher) is how much the critique isn’t really about technology itself, but about scale, speed, and detachment.Reading them now, it feels less like a warning against progress and more like a reminder to ask what kind of progress we’re choosing, and at what cost to attention, care, and responsibility.
I wonder if our relationship with AI will end up reflecting the same question agriculture faced: not “can we do this more efficiently?” but “what does this way of doing things make invisible?”
It’s very funny that this is the Wendell Berry book they use to make this argument, and not “Why I Wont Buy a Computer” where he talks a bunch about how he thinks computers and the general consumerism associated with the next big thing is destroying the human experience.
Like most of the silent gen (dude was actually born in 1934) he’s obsessed with clinging to a past that no longer exists and chasing a stability that is illusory.
Plus, of course, being a hereditary farmer his view is, let’s just say, not unbiased on the topic of agriculture. If you aren’t growing green beans to sell at the farmers market just like his grandpappy did, you’re a capitalist piece of shit, amirite!?
>Berry’s problem with the conglomeration of farming and quest for ever bigger and more efficient farms is a cultural one because there is no separating culture from agriculture . . . Berry sees the push for larger and larger machinery and for efficient farms making “agridollars” as being directly detrimental to not only us and our culture, but even the very land itself.
This pretty much describes my attitude towards smart phones, which I stubbornly have refused to adopt.
I resent attempts at being made to feel “I have to” use this technology because smart phones are indispensable. No, I don’t, and no, they aren’t.
My problem with it is that I see it is a cultural problem because there is no separating culture from the technology we use to communicate. The relentless, profit-driven push for us to carry more technology in our pocket has detrimentally changed the way we communicate and interact with each other (and our environment) from in-person experience to having interactions filtered through the lens of technology.