I have a lot of respect for the Amish, I think they are true hackers. It's pretty amazing the things they build with the resources they have.
Of course I love technology, the internet, etc and couldn't imagine my life without all that, but yes I am addicted to my phone and being able to look up anything whenever I want. This is extremely powerful, but this quote gives me something to think about as I type this at my desk job:
“If you can just look it up on the internet, you’re not thinking,” said Levi, another woodworker. “The more people rely on technology, the more we want to sit behind a desk. But you can’t build a house sitting behind a desk.”
>>“If you can just look it up on the internet, you’re not thinking,”
I really do not see how having instant access to information precludes you from thinking. Au contraire, it probably gives us more time to think and it allows our minds to branch out into much more interesting places. I think it's fine that we can just look things up. Even Albert Einstein seemed to think so:
“Never memorize what you can look up in books”
p.s. For the picky the real quote is:
“[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. He also said, “…The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”
> I really do not see how having instant access to information precludes you from thinking. Au contraire, it probably gives us more time to think and it allows our minds to branch out into much more interesting places.
There are two ways in which writing dulls the critical faculties rather than enhances them:
First, writing is necessarily a one-way monologue, not a dialogue. The reader, the consumer of information is unable to probe the author to assess credibility and veracity of information. You also have no way to assess if you have correctly learned the information. As a result, it is all too easy to see misinformation, not information, get spread. This is not an idle concern--an awful lot of history turns out to be very old lies that have been retold so often in this manner that they have come to be treated as truth.
A second issue that readily arises is that, when information is readily available at your fingertips, you're less likely to recall the information to find relevant comparisons. A lot of productivity in science or the humanities is in being able to draw parallels and synthesize similarities between rather disparate-seeming topics.
It's hard to invest much interest in the opinion of someone on a subject they've literally devoted their lives to knowing as little about as possible, to such a degree they live a life entirely isolated from it.
It's not that they don't know about it, it's that they opt to selectively use it. The largest reason to avoid tech is because it removes from family values that they hold dear. This is why, when they go home, they probably don't bring their cell phone into the house.
Err... Many of them have a phone house, though some use a privy. They leave their phone in there, be it landline or mobile.
In fact, one of my most bizarre experiences was spending a year or two regularly conversing with a couple of Amish people. Why was that strange? It was on IRC. They were both away at college and, during that time, made free use of certain tech, because it didn't diminish their concept of family.
I kind of wonder why there aren't neo-luddite communities literally re-inventing the wheel, these days.
The Amish seem to pride themselves on their ascetic use of technology - it sounds like they believe in the discipline, patience, and lack of distractions that come with a disdain for tools which have not yet been refined by a long history of use.
Why does nobody take that attitude with the production of say, bipolar transistors instead of wood stoves? Why don't we have any community-run film deposition machines? Throw together a cruelty-free hand-milled pressure chamber, a bespoke hand-wound HV transformer, an artisanal gluten-free vacuum pump, and you've got yourself a stew!
I don't think Jeri Ellsworth counts as a prophet quite yet, but I might read that sort of holy book. The article mentions the Amish's occasional use of personal solar cells and batteries for household electricity despite a prohibition of connecting public utilities to a house; wouldn't it be more kosher to make the solar panels and batteries yourselves? We ARE getting to the point where 'electricity' is a tried-and-true, fundamental human tool. Why is say, a metal-air battery particularly different from a saw or a hammer or a match?
> The article mentions the Amish's occasional use of personal solar cells and batteries for household electricity despite a prohibition of connecting public utilities to a house
The Amish are not isolationists. They are fine with trading with non-Amish communities. They just want to preserve their communities and values, and believe that they may have trouble doing so if they become too dependent on non-Amish communities.
From what I've read, the reason most Amish communities do not connect to the public electrical grid is that they believe that would make them too dependent. In most places there is only one grid provider and so you are putting all your eggs in one basket if you become dependent on electricity and you get it from the grid.
If you use electricity but get it from solar cells or batteries or a gas/diesel/LNG/propane generator, you generally have multiple sources. It is still a dependency, but it is just a general trade dependency rather than a dependency on a single source.
> wouldn't it be more kosher to make the solar panels and batteries yourselves?
Amish generally are fine with using things that they did not make themselves. They use metal tools, but generally don't mine the metal themselves. They wear cotton clothes, but generally don't grow the cotton themselves or weave the fabric themselves.
For a good look at the Amish approach to technology, see the article "Amish Hackers" [1].
What is so special about transistors? There are many non-linear active devices that are relatively unexplored due to the local maximum of transistors. How about homemade flame triodes or magnetic amplifiers or memristor.. I think you are going to love these guys:
Just an example; film deposition is useful for all kinds of things, including producing solar cells, but a single BJT or FET seemed like a fairly simple starting point.
Marx's Theory of Alienation argued that individuals in modern, mechanistic, specialized and capitalist societies see people become estranged from the fruits of their labor. He argued that they lose connection between ones own self worth, and what one produces. In his mind this dehumanized people and society.
Personally, I'm not a Marxist, but I think he was right about this.
Whatever that intangible human aspect it is he was talking about -- At some point tech and science is probably sufficiently abstracted from normal human experience such that this concept is no longer relevant.
Also, on this topic I really recommend reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a thought-provoking book on quality of life in our age of human interaction with technology.
What about people like RMS who refuses to use non-Free(Libre) software and hardware? Aren't they somewhat like digital Amish, albeit with a focus on a different set of moral values?
> A disdain for tools which have not yet been refined by a long history of use.
An uncharitable person might call that disdain parasitic, inasmuch as technological advances in the last couple of centuries have proceeded to a large extent through consumerism. The Amish feel free to use the resulting innovations, but because they themselves refuse to be a consumerist society they do not contribute to the process that sustains and brings forth those innovations.
Northern Indiana actually has relatively high penetration rates for residential solar installations largely thanks to the Amish/Old Order Mennonite communities in the area. In comparison to lighting your home with gas, solar and battery systems can look pretty cheap.
As others have pointed out, technology more likely to be accepted so long as it doesn't threaten the cohesion of the community.
When I was a teenager, I thought folks like the Amish were "crazy."
After growing up in the modern world under constant surveillance, housing prices out of reach, taxes for wars abroad I don't want, and "Equihacks" I find myself yearning for the days of old.
I'm not convinced the Amish could survive without the rest of the US. For one thing, they refuse to serve in the military.
For another, they don't pay much in taxes. My relatives in PA get red in the face whenever you bring up the Amish, because in that area the county relies heavily on taxes levied on your electric bill. The first thing the Amish do when they move into the neighborhood is rip out the electric.
The other thing is there are dozens of sects people lump together as The Amish, and they all have different doctrine. Sometimes very different.
The idea that the Amish survive off others' electric bill tax sounds more like a urban legend than fact. Let's be optimistic and assume the average household pays $500 / month in electricity and has a 10% tax rate; that's $50/ month / household divided by the entire state of Pennsylvania. Even if Pennsylvania is 50% Amish that's $25 / month in 'free' money for each Amish household. Hardly enough money to run a community off of.
A country completely populated by pacifists wouldn't last a generation. The US isn't under threat of invasion because non-Amish people are willing to join the military.
That's still relying on a service that they refuse to be part of. Im not saying it's a bad position for them to take, but they are not willing to garuntee their own freedom
Yet as all this tech and progress marches on at an incredible pace as things get better and better, the results are we've just hit a 30-year high in suicide rates in the US.
I think that could work. Most of our great leaps of medicine spring not from cutting-edge tech, but from the germ theory of disease. Vaccines, antibiotics, sterile drinking water, proper sewage disposal. These have saved billions of lives. Along with a decent understanding of how the human body works (no four humors) to guide us, that suffices for most stuff.
I imagine that plays a big part, but it is definitely a multifaceted issue. A few other reasons:
* Farmland saw the perfect storm of record high food prices and record low interest rates around the end of the 2000s, so people went spend-crazy, resulting in as much as 500% growth in price in the last decade. They haven't yet come back down from that.
* That, of course, also brings out the speculators, so it is not just farmers who are buying.
* Certain types of farmers are given special market advantages by my country's government, so they tend to make more money than most other farmers, providing them with more money to put into land.
It is tough for the Amish to compete with any of that.
People want to convince themselves that there life choices are the only valid choices and realistic options. So if some other group lives a kind of idylic life- a search for the dark, evil spots of that lifestyle begins, to restore the damaged worldview.
I keep hearing about this version of the singularity future where people lead intentional lives and eschew technology to produce handmade goods, as a way to find meaning in a world in which everything is automated. It seems the Amish are already there.
Sometimes I look at the objects my father bought for me before he died - a toy train, a film camera - stuff I can get for $10 at a store, but they mean a lot more to me than that.
I roughly frame mobile PC's as libraries, letter carriers and proof assistants saving trees in books and car hours. I live in DC near the National Cathedral, don't drive and cook my food at home from scratch. These guys are smart. I admire the Anabaptist "Punk" DIY ethic. The music Punks were too loud. Live music is not Lo-Fi.
Of course I love technology, the internet, etc and couldn't imagine my life without all that, but yes I am addicted to my phone and being able to look up anything whenever I want. This is extremely powerful, but this quote gives me something to think about as I type this at my desk job:
“If you can just look it up on the internet, you’re not thinking,” said Levi, another woodworker. “The more people rely on technology, the more we want to sit behind a desk. But you can’t build a house sitting behind a desk.”