The Wendell Berry Moment

In the late ‘80s, Wendell Berry declared war on the computer age with a short but controversial essay in Harper’s Magazine. When I read it as a senior in college, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” seemed like the odd ravings of a crank. My father was a computer engineer for Bell Laboratories, and we were the first house in our neighborhood to own a personal computer in the late 1970s. My uncle was a mechanical engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. We were a technology-forward family living in the halo of 1960s techno-utopianism. Computers were the future. Why would anyone not want to buy a computer in 1987?

Berry opens his essay with this declaration: “Like everybody else, I am hooked to the energy corporations. I hope to become less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible. As a farmer, I do all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or pen and a piece of paper.” Berry composes his manuscripts in pencil, then hands them off to his wife, who types them on a 1956 Royal typewriter, making suggestions and edits along the way. He is proud of this method because it does not require any electricity, which would implicate him even more deeply in the energy corporations that were strip mining mountaintops for coal in his home state of Kentucky. Computers are costly, he complains, and he does not believe they will make him a better writer. “When somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s,” he writes, “and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.”

And then Berry issues a broader challenge: “That computers are expected to become as common as TV sets in ‘the future’ does not impress me or matter to me,” he writes. “I do not own a TV set. 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.”

I went looking for this essay recently because I was writing a craft piece and wanted to say something about the human relationship with the typewriter. It was shorter than I remembered, and I was surprised by how relevant and compelling it felt. Berry poses such a simple, clear question: Can we honestly say that computers have made our lives better? Artificial intelligence is in the news every day now—the latest Great Leap Forward in computer tech, the word on every tongue, with salvific promises of cancer cured and climate change solved in one breath, and reports of protests and predictions of apocalypse in the next. If ever there was a time to pose this question, it is now.

Was Berry right all along about computers? The iPad Pro with which I am composing this essay is roughly 2,000–5,000 times faster than my first computer, the Dell PC I bought in 1995, with 1,000 times the memory. It is a quantum leap forward in computer technology, relatively speaking. It might be tempting to assume that the life lived with so much more computing power is a better life. Isn’t more power and more speed an absolute good? But that has not been the case. My life is not demonstrably better because computers are faster and more human-like.

When the iPad was first released in 2010, I remember debating with friends about whether these devices would be used primarily for creating content or consuming it. The iPad presented a dynamic tension: It seemed obvious that this technology was the perfect vehicle for mainlining entertainment, but it was also clear that artists, filmmakers, photographers, writers, and other creators could make effective use of it for their work. Which purpose would win in the end?

Fifteen years later, that debate seems quaint. I did not anticipate how the distinction between creating content and consuming it would be erased by daily use of these tablets. The iPad is a productivity tool—I write with it and use it extensively in my teaching—but time spent on the iPad is also a blur of activity, a sometimes-frenetic toggling between apps in a mostly unconscious hunt for dopamine hits. In the pre-iPad, pre-iPhone world, boredom would lead me to stand up and do something different in the world of flesh and blood. Now my finger deftly searches out another app, and I dive into the next digital thing without having moved my body an inch. My iPad usage is a hopscotch through available apps and activities. Creating. Consuming. It is all part of the same digital slipstream.

Has the iPad made me a better teacher? No, not really. I can do some things more efficiently because of it, but for all of its power relative to that ancient Dell that powered my first teaching job, it hasn’t made me objectively better at my work. I can now walk around the classroom with my handheld computer, which has a seamless connection to the internet—that has its advantages. Are student outcomes improved because I am walking around the room with an iPad and the students all have smartphones in their pockets and laptops open in front of them? I don’t think so.

Has the iPad made me a better writer? Here, I will give the same answer Berry did, and for the same reasons.

In American society, computers are never required to prove their worth. They exist within a cult-like ideological bubble, assumed to be always the right tool for the job, or at least a worthy assistant in some way. Computer chips find their way into every nook and cranny, however unhelpful and ludicrous—in toasters, mattresses, water bottles, car door handles, toothbrushes, and the $400 juicer with a built-in WiFi connection. New drugs or new civil engineering projects must undergo a rigorous review process before they are approved, but potentially disruptive tech products sail into the public arena with little resistance. It is simply assumed that any collateral damage can be swept up later (ChatGPT proves the point: an extremely powerful and disruptive computer application was simply released to the public, web-only for the first six months, and then made available as a free app that could be downloaded onto a smartphone). The drive to computerize everything is followed without evidence that it adds value, with investors and entrepreneurs banking on the hope that the “productivity paradox” will eventually give way to a real return on investment. This seems to be the business logic behind the new generative AI companies that are bankrolling a huge giveaway of AI services in anticipation of a big payout down the line.

Why do we simply assume that computers can solve big problems, increase productivity, and generally make the world a better place? Why are we so uncritical about the value they will add to our lives, or the damage they might cause? Perhaps it is because computer power appears weightless to us, free from the grittier, more earthbound realities of other forms of power (though it certainly is not), or because computers carry powerful suggestions of expanding intelligence. Or maybe we are still living in the halo of techno-utopian propaganda about how computers will flatten hierarchies and democratize everything.

Computers are also objectively better than they were—faster, smaller, with greater processing power and larger memory capacity—and this upward trend line has been consistent for fifty years. When viewed through a technical lens, the progress of computing power seems magical, and it seems reasonable to conclude that social progress should be an inevitable outcome of such a sweeping technological revolution, until you look closer. I have owned seven desktop computers in my lifetime, along with four tablets, at least five laptop computers, and approximately seven cell phones. Nearly all of them have been more powerful than the Dell PC with its Intel Pentium 75 MHz CPU and dial-up modem. This parade of digital devices tells a story of runaway consumerism, planned obsolescence, and long-term environmental damage. It does not necessarily translate into a better life for me or anyone else.

We should know better than to conflate increased computing power with progress, right? This is nearly 2027—post-Twitter, post-Cambridge Analytica, post-metaverse, post-The Anxious Generation. We’ve all seen a familiar narrative unfold repeatedly: new tech is rolled out with triumphalist rhetoric and then, eventually, the bills come due—the loss of privacy, the disruption of electoral politics, the assault on societal norms, the teen suicides.

Consider the cell phone: Twenty years ago, predictions of the liberatory potential of cell phones were coming fast and furious. In a 2005 PBS interview, author Thomas Friedman channeled Marc Andreessen to predict that “The next great breakthrough in bioscience…could well come from a fifteen-year-old in Romania who downloads the human genome on his $25 Motorola cell phone connected to Google.” That same year, while the rock band U2 was on its Vertigo tour, lead singer Bono would regularly urge audiences to “Take out your cell phones, make this place into a Christmas tree.” He would then direct them to text their names to a special number that would sign them up for the ONE Campaign to fight poverty and preventable diseases in Africa—a stunt that was meant to demonstrate the cell phone’s supposedly unlimited potential as an instrument of social justice reform. Two years later, the iPhone was released, and I would regularly hear people say that it “has as much computing power as NASA when the U.S. landed a man on the moon,” as if to suggest that smartphones would usher in the next great breakthroughs in science and technology.

Jump ahead to the present. What do most people do with this moonshot-sized computer in their pockets? I was on vacation in Sarasota, Florida, recently and saw four young men crowded into the back of a jeep, all headed to the beach on Siesta Key as we were. They were all in their early twenties, tanned and lean and in the prime of life—and every one of them with a cell phone in hand grinning at a tiny screen. Yes, each of them was holding a supercomputer in their hands, but so what? Smartphone use has doubled from about two hours per day in the early 2010s to almost five hours today, and about half of that time is spent streaming entertainment (YouTube, TikTok, gaming, music, etc.). The potential harms are now well known. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has documented the rise in depression, self-harm, and anxiety among teenagers who use social media apps on smartphones, a trend that is especially impactful on girls. Smartphones have been an important vector for the circulation of misinformation and disinformation, an increase in passive screen time, and a rise in attention fragmentation.

Of course, there are many healthy, positive things that one can do with a cell phone, but earlier predictions that these devices would lead to a positive net outcome for the human race were quite naive. A person who spends more than four hours a day staring at algorithmically fed content on a small screen is certainly not a liberated person.

Berry seems to have understood decades ago that computers would be arrayed against us by governments and big corporations, even as they were being sold to us as tools of efficiency and productivity. He has a keen eye for hucksters. “I have seen their advertisements, attempting to seduce struggling or failing farmers into the belief that they can solve their problems by buying yet another piece of expensive equipment,” he complains. “I am familiar with their propaganda campaigns that have put computers into public schools in need of books.” Prove to me that your technology will improve my life—our lives—he demands. Prove to me that computers will do more good than harm.

Berry’s skepticism seems less cranky—less fringe—than it did in 1987. For one thing, the generative AI boom has accelerated the energy demands of computing power, and new concerns about how to power these systems and where to build the data centers to support them are now being litigated in public. And Berry’s sardonic listing of problems that computers can’t solve reads like a very modern accounting of issues caused or exacerbated by them. With governments eagerly racing to build fully autonomous killing machines and deploy AI systems for massive surveillance operations, no one speaks of computers facilitating peace with a straight face. Have smartphones with social media apps improved family and community stability? It seems likely that the answer is “no.” Ecological health? Is anyone willing to argue that computers have been a net gain for the environment, as landfills overflow with computer trash leaching poisons into the earth? And political honesty? Our politics is riven with disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda, pulsing through digital channels that did not exist in the Watergate era.

In 1987, Berry’s skepticism was aimed at the computer-as-device, the consumer product that would sit on his desk if he chose to buy it (which he did not). That is where our skepticism should begin as well. Do we really need an iWatch, the newest model phone or tablet, Ray-Ban Meta glasses, or a Jony Ive-designed wearable AI device, whenever those are available? The transhumanism-pilled billionaires keep shoveling new devices at us, all of it destined for the landfill eventually, because that is their broken, planet-destroying business model—the neoliberal status quo, with an individual consumer at the end of every thought, scheme, marketing plan, and government policy.

Berry asks us to consider a different idea of the human: not the atomized consumer who will buy more tech trash if you push it on him, but the individual as a fully integrated member of a community. Where do we fit into that community, into a set of relationships and responsibilities tied to a particular place and time? Speaking at a 1994 conference on healing and spirituality, Berry said, “I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.” In his worldview, humans are essentially communal creatures, as Aristotle said, bound to each other in community and to the larger stream of life on this planet.

I am not as instinctually anti-computer as Berry claims to be, but I prefer his definition of the human over the tech bro vision of humanity as infinitely upgradable and optimizable through technology. Peter Thiel’s faith that technology can overcome death. Elon Musk’s claim that humans will eventually merge with machines. Mark Zuckerberg’s happy talk about how AI will continually improve our lives. All of it feels like weird, cultish hucksterism now that the mood music has changed around computer power—weird, and disconnected from the daily reality experienced by most of us. It is interesting to me that the growing AI backlash is expressing itself in public, in the flesh world rather than online—the college graduates booing commencement speakers, the angry citizens who show up by the hundreds to protest the new data center project in their town, the teenagers joining Luddite clubs where they leave their phones at home to play chess and hacky sack in the park, free from the buzzing and pinging. It is as if the resistance is also simultaneously waking up in the real world and trying to find the community that our technology of choice has helped destroy over the past three decades.

Humans have a remarkable capacity to continually return to our default setting of community, fraternity, connection to nature, and strong sense of place. As the current technology revolution continues to falter, we will no doubt rediscover these qualities again.

Image Credit: HPCwire