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I'm actually with you. Having read some of Wendell Berry's work, he comes across to me as an impractical dreamer. Not only do his ideals not scale to support humanity, but he refuses to acknowledge the external impact of his decisions.

Henry David Thoreau's writings about self-reliance are harder to tolerate once you learn that he was supported by family. Yes he lived in the woods, but his mother literally brought him food. In the same vein, Wendell Berry's writings about technology are harder to tolerate once you learn that he made his wife type up his manuscripts for him to be sent on to publishers.

It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.

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>Wendell Berry's writings about technology are harder to tolerate once you learn that he made his wife type up his manuscripts for him to be sent on to publishers.

Why is that? In his essay (that's linked above) him writing with his wife is one of the reasons he explicitly names as to why he didn't use a computer. As he says, it would have not just replaced something, but someone. He valued working his wife, and she in all likelihood did too.

There's no hypocrisy, dependence on other people was why he shunned technology. It's very telling that we now have a generation of people grown up on machines who think having to rely on another person, in other words community, is some offense to what he argued for.

Therein lies the friction, I embrace technology because it reduces my reliance on other people, and I don't value local community over global community (in fact, just the opposite). And I want to end human labor, so you can see why I have profound dislike for his philosophy.

that's a friction between your philosophy and his philosophy, not between his philosophy and his practice. He lived exactly what he preached and so I don't understand in what sense he is a "hypocritical curmudgeon". He didn't doordash his food or hate his neighbors, he spent 60 years of his life on a small homestead farming in Kentucky, as far as I know engaged with his community.

> He lived exactly what he preached

“He lived exactly what he preached” is an empirical claim, not an interpretation. Can you substantiate “exactly”?

The point is that there's no evidence Berry was a hypocrite

That's a different and much weaker claim than “he lived exactly what he preached.” I challenged the latter.

There's no reducing reliance on "other people", especially when embracing digital technology; in every realistic scenario you become tethered to the people in charge of Big Tech and all that entails, in Stallman-esque fantasy-land you're still relying on other open source maintainers.

In both cases you're reliant on other people's supply chains to get the hardware all of this stuff relies on.

As far as valuing some abstract ideal (global community) over the people actually in your life right now (local community), I guess all I can say is I can't see that working out well long-term, and hope you can find at least a few people to connect with now.

> It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.

Yes! Making informed decisions about technology is vital, but when his writings appear to boil down to "technology bad, old things good", well, why bother to even engage when there are better thinkers out there?

You have never heard of him before now, but feel confident in boiling down his large body of writing and laying judgment on the quality of his thought?

Yes, and I have seen nothing in this thread, nor on Wikipedia, to change my mind

The point of this thread/discussion is not simply to render a snap uninformed judgement on the (made-up, reductionist) premise of "technology bad, old things good".

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