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

https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/berry-computer.pdf

by bookofjoe • 1 year ago

201 111 1 year ago

classes.matthewjbrown.net

Jtsummers• 1 year ago

Past discussions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42636195 - 3 months ago, 10 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31808269 - 3 years ago, 169 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2108463 - 14 years ago, 11 comments

jes5199• 1 year ago

huh. I’m aware of this author for other reasons - he’s popular among some carbon-capture enthusiasts. This… colors my opinion.

tom_• 1 year ago

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

4b11b4• 1 year ago

I know the author from Unsettling America.

wwweston• 1 year ago

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.

dghlsakjg• 1 year ago

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.

analog31• 1 year ago

An amusing anecdote: I was in grad school in 1987. The university had a campus computer store, which gave out a pamphlet: "Should I get a computer?" It listed many pro's and con's, nothing surprising for the era. I already had a computer. The thing that stuck with me, was the advice: "Don't expect a computer to organize you. If you have a messy desk, you will have a messy computer."

Sure as shootin', even to this day, I still have a messy computer.

Terr_• 1 year ago

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

jaredsohn• 1 year ago

In a similar way, buying exercise equipment gets you in shape.

SV_BubbleTime2• 1 year ago

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.

bookofjoe• 1 year ago

"You know you won't win — but you might!" — Terry-Thomas on playing the lottery

teekert• 1 year ago

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.

uwagar• 1 year ago

i find my computer is better organised than my desk.

luotuoshangdui• 1 year ago

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

cjs_ac• 1 year ago

You can't grep dead trees.

0x1ceb00da• 1 year ago

After reading pdfs for a few years one day I bought a physical book. I remember looking at the corner of the page for time and thinking about CTRL-Fing for something.

rollcat2• 1 year ago

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.

apozem2• 1 year ago

I love using note-taking apps for this reason. They are a bottomless bucket into which you can throw unlimited unorganized thoughts. When you need them later, simply search.

ThrowawayTestr• 1 year ago

And there's Everything for Windows

al_borland5• 1 year ago

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.

andy99• 1 year ago

  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.

Doesn't that demonstrate the point?

ncruces• 1 year ago

We (at least I) compensate for that by having 10k photos on it, which again makes it impossible to find anything. And if you decide to cull them because it's just too much, it's a chore.

Anthony-G2• 1 year ago

My previous manual organisation of digital photos into directories on my home server was quite time consuming. I got an iPhone a few years ago and started using Apple Photos. Like you, I put no effort into organising the photos – other than adding some descriptive metadata to a few photos. Apple’s organisation and their user interface allow me to quickly find any photo that I remember taking. However, I’m curious about what you mean by “didn’t use the software effectively”.

Off Topic: one other thing I really like about Apple Photos is that I get to see my photos on the Apple TV when screensaver kicks in.

CommenterPerson• 1 year ago

I agree with you but still not using it. The challenge when I first tried Apple was, the photos all disappeared into iTunes. I wanted to pull out a jpg to do some photo editing and it was difficult. So I gave up and never went back. It must have improved in 15 years, but they will now be training their AI on my photos. So not gonna use it now either. I'll look for an open source app after I retire.

exe34• 1 year ago

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

ViktorRay• 1 year ago

It's neat how this magazine printed the essay along with the responses of people to it. Many of those response letters are quite biting (in a good way).

Sometimes I feel disheartedned when I see harsh internet comments in response to an essay. For example, sometimes Paul Graham posts essays and people on Hacker News post blistering biting responses. I guess we should remember the letters that people used to send to magazine essays like this and remember that sometimes these harsh responses are par for the course when writing essays...

dredmorbius7• 1 year ago

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.

abe_m2• 1 year ago

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.

milliams• 1 year ago

If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.

Am I missing something here?

jml7c5• 1 year ago

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.

echoangle• 1 year ago

Then basically every form of energy humanity uses except nuclear is from the sun. Oil is also plant- and animal-based if you go back far enough.

dredmorbius7• 1 year ago

Ironically, much if not most food we eat is dependent on fossil-fuel energy, largely through nitrogen fertiliser (natural-gas based), but also pesticides, mechanised agriculture, and the distribution network's transport, cold-chain, and retail elements.

That's not a defence of fossil fuels so much as noting that Berry's arguments here sits a little loosely with reality.

tankenmate• 1 year ago

"Finally, it seems to me that none of my correspondents recognizes the innovativeness of my essay. If the use of a computer is a new idea, then a newer idea is not to use one."

Hardly a new idea, I'm fairly certain that Berry had heard of the Luddites, maybe he didn't realise he was hewing as close a course as he was.

roschdal• 1 year ago

The list of reasons for using new technology seems reasonable:

1. It should be cheaper than the one it replaces.

2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.

3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.

4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.

5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.

6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.

7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.

8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.

9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, including family and community relationships.

dredmorbius7• 1 year ago

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.

al_borland5• 1 year ago

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.

xandrius• 1 year ago

Please explain where I can locally fix more than a few components of either my phone or laptop.

For instance, the GPU of my gaming laptop died, what do I do to fix it from a local store?

stodor89• 1 year ago

Great article, thanks for sharing. I enjoyed hearing the author's viewpoint, and his list of criteria for buying stuff can be useful with some minor adjustments. Also, the replies regarding his wife were hilarious, if a bit nosy and presumptuous (or maybe because of that).

dredmorbius7• 1 year ago

Berry has stuck to his guns:

"Why Wendell Berry is still not going to buy a computer" (2019)

<https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2019/0418/Why-Wendell-B...>

(From an earlier HN discussion, thanks Jtsummers for linking: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43883115>.)

greenie_beans2• 1 year ago

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"

gizajob• 1 year ago

Where do I buy a wife to do my typing and grammar checking?

harvey9• 1 year ago

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

Jordan_Pelt2• 1 year ago

"My wife types my work..."

Those five words render the entire essay meaningless.

Skunkleton4• 1 year ago

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.

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

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

Jordan_Pelt2• 1 year ago

I'm sure she does, but that's beside the point. Why should we pay any attention to the opinions of a person on replacing something he doesn't use with something else he won't use. He may as well say that he won't buy a snowblower because his groundskeeper uses a shovel and does just fine.

magneticnorth• 1 year ago

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.

greenie_beans2• 1 year ago

i been filling my head with computers

knowledge i hope to delete

erehweb2• 1 year ago

Harper's (where the article was originally published) requires you to submit by snail-mail, but many places require email submissions. Guessing that computers won partly because they are a lot more convenient for publishers - if you're typing something up then the publisher has to type it again on their end.

YeGoblynQueenne• 1 year ago

In a cruel twist of fate most people today neither own, nor use a computer, not in the sense used in the essay. They instead use their phones to do a very restricted sub-set of things they could do on a computer and in a very limited manner.

I guess the forward-looking tech nerds of the '80s, the tip of the spear of the information revolution, must now be crying in their corn flakes with the irony of it all. Nowadays only nerds (really) use computers.

P.S. Obviously I own computers. I have four laptops and a bunch of small-form clamshells left over from a period when I collected them semi-enthusiastically (including a Viliv, a Zaurus and a Ben Nanonote). I recently went on the market to see if there are any new ones around and ended up buying two, which I shall not advertise. I'm a victim of tech advertisement.

qiine• 1 year ago

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

aleph_minus_one2• 1 year ago

There exist lots of definitions of "convenience". I, for example, find it deeply inconvenient to be have a device with me that basically spies on me all the time.

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

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

demaga• 1 year ago

This sounds smart and could 100% be something I would say too, but it is not true at all. People benefit greatly from phones (and in some sense, social media). The way to test it is to give up phones for some time.

I spent 3 months without smart phone, and it was inconvenient as hell. Not having maps, calculator, or wikipedia at all times sucks. So almost everyone I know definitely does use computers, in all meanings.

abe_m2• 1 year ago

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.

erehweb2• 1 year ago

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...

karhuton• 1 year ago

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…

reilly3000• 1 year ago

This article makes me consider how the medium of production affects the final content. There is a certain cost of writing a sentence on paper, typewriter, computer, and phone. The higher the cost of forming words, the more cognition it invites. The greater the cost of revision (especially with typewriters), the more likely one tends towards precision. It leads me towards a belief that better writing must start on paper.

For my ADHD brain, handwriting is difficult. As I progress through an idea I can watch my handwriting degrade into illegibility and the marginalia increase markedly. Crafting a cogent essay isn’t easy in any medium, but I seem to get along ok with a Doc these days. Perhaps there is something meaningful in the act of preparing a handwritten essay for broader publication that refines the work more critically than if it were ready to distribute instantly. At the risk of being too romantic it seems like handwriting may take on the quality of hand-thrown pottery, imbued with some spirit that is void in mass production.

As I peck this comment out with my thumbs I wonder how that constraint impacts the words that reach you. Next time I’ll write it on a legal pad first, but maybe you’ll not hear from me in a while.

spongebobstoes• 1 year ago

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.

wjnc• 1 year ago

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.

_rpxpx• 1 year ago

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."

waynenilsen• 1 year ago

Also potentially interesting thoughts along a similar line

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...

nuancebydefault• 1 year ago

Writing with pencil on paper is very very slow and takes much more space per letter. If you write a lot, chances are high of developing RSI. I'm not even thinking about editing.

I don't see how the author advocates 'the tool should be better than the one it replaces' and then chooses not to buy a computer. I got my Atari ST around '87 and i loved it.

yuhong• 1 year ago

For a long time using a computer means dealing with spinning rust, and while SSDs exist nowadays...

KingOfCoders• 1 year ago

"I'm not going to buy a computer, because I have a wife, and I bought her a typewriter, and doing all the tedious work, and she's fine."

wolvesechoes• 1 year ago

True chad

dredmorbius7• 1 year ago

For those who find the notion of rejecting a computer in favour of a typewriter (or even the typewriter-spouse combo set), maybe pitch the essay in terms of current consumer options, such as WiFi-enabled, Internet-connected refrigerators, cookers, clothes-washers, driers, and the like.

Or the trajectory of always-connected devices such as Nest thermostats (first editions now EoL'd and abandonware), Ring doorbells (part of state surveillance), or the question of mobile and/or smartphones by students in schools.

Berry's arguments and philosophy can be translated to other domains.

I'd also strongly suggest you consider that what he was writing about were computers in 1987.

The IBM PS/2 was released that year, and featured Intel processors (8086, 80286, or 80386, depending on the model), 512KiB to 64MiB RAM (most shipped with 512KiB -- 4MiB AFAIU), a floppy drive if you were lucky (720 KiB to 1.4 MiB), hard drives were optional, and ranged from about 20 MiB to 400 MiB (again, mostly smaller). There was no networking absent a very rare modem, to which there were few options to connect to, and no public Internet access. Printing was dot-matrix or daisy-wheel. Displays were typically 640x480 pixels, at 256 colours of any (though monochrome displays were common as well).

Even the "cruel twist of fate" pseudo-computers most people carry today (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43887109>) have vastly greater raw performance and interactivity options. They definitely have their negatives, and I'm not convinced of their net usefulness. But used with intention they can in fact be quite useful. (The fact that marketing and design teams deploy billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of engineers to frustrate such intentional use is a major argument against such devices, of course.)

I'm cognisant and sympathetic to Berry's arguments, but don't share his outright rejection of much technology, and find several of his arguments and principles unconvincing (see earlier comments in this thread for examples). But even as someone who finds computers generally useful now, I didn't find it persuasive to purchase one of my own until the latter half of the 1990s, and even then what was available as a mid-market personal system was just teetering on the threshold of usability.

I'll also note that Berry's argument wasn't that the computers of his time simply weren't very useful. His case is far more fundamental than that. But the combined case would be pretty persuasive, and was: computer owners in 1987 were the overwhelming minority even within quite wealthy nations. And that wouldn't change for at least another decade.

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

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