Better technological tools for illuminating the downsides of technology would, paradoxically, boost the reputation of technology. They would bring the calculation out of the unconscious and rationalize it. With proper tools, the trade-offs could be brought into science.
Finally, a true articulation of each particular technology's vices will allow us to see that our embrace of the technium is done willingly, and is neither an addiction nor a spell.
11
Lessons of Amish Hackers
In any discussion about the merits of avoiding the addictive grip of technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative. The Amish have the reputation of being Luddites, people who refuse to employ faddish new technology. It's well known that the strictest of them don't use electricity or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and drive a horse and buggy. They favor technology they can either build or repair themselves, and they are, on the whole, thrifty and relatively self-reliant. They work outside in the fresh air with their hands, which endears them to the average Dilbert working inside at a computer screen in a cubicle. Plus, their minimal lifestyle is prospering (Amish population grows at 4 percent annually) while middle-class white-collar and factory workers are increasingly unemployed and withering.
The Unabomber was not Amish, and the Amish are no collapsitarians. They have created a civilization of sorts that seems to offer valuable lessons on how to balance the blessings and ills of technology.
Yet Amish lives are anything but antitechnological. In fact, on my several visits with them, I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkerers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselfers. They are often, surprisingly, protechnology.
First, a few caveats. The Amish are not a monolithic group. Their practices vary parish by parish. What one group does in Ohio another church in New York may not do or a parish in Iowa may do more so. Also, their relationship to technology is uneven. Most Amish use a mixture of old and very new stuff, like the rest of us. It's important to note that Amish practices are ultimately driven by religious belief: The technological consequences are secondary. They often don't have logical reasons for their policies. Last, Amish practices change over time and are, at this moment, adapting to the world by embracing new technologies at their own rate. In many ways the view of the Amish as old-fashioned Luddites is an urban myth.
Like all legends, the Amish myth is based on some facts. The Amish, particularly the Old Order Amishâthe stereotypical Amish on postcardsâreally
are
reluctant to adopt new things. In contemporary society our default is set to say yes to new things, and in Old Order Amish communities the default is set to “not yet.” When new things come around, the Old Order Amish automatically react by ignoring them. Thus, many Old Order Amish never said yes when automobiles were new. Instead, they travel around in a buggy hauled by a horse, as they always have. Some orders require the buggy to be an open carriage (so ridersâteenagers, sayâare not tempted by a private place to fool around); others will permit closed carriages. Some orders allow tractors on the farm, if the tractors have steel wheels; that way a tractor can't be “cheated” to drive on the road like a car. Some groups allow farmers to power their combines or threshers with diesel engines, as long as the engine only spins the threshers and does not propel the vehicleâwhich means the whole smoking, noisy contraption is pulled by horses. Some sects allow cars, but only if they are painted entirely black (no chrome) to ease the temptation to upgrade to the latest model.
Behind all of these variations is the Amish motivation to strengthen their communities. When cars first appeared at the turn of the last century, the Amish noticed that drivers would leave the community to go picnicking or sightseeing in other towns, instead of visiting family or the sick on Sundays or patronizing local shops on Saturday. Therefore, the ban on unbridled mobility was intended to make it hard to travel far and to keep energy focused in the local community. Some parishes did this with more strictness than others.
A similar communal motivation lies behind the Old Order Amish practice of living without electricity. The Amish noticed that when their homes were electrified with wires from a generator in town, they became more tied to the rhythms, policies, and concerns of the town. Amish religious belief is founded on the principle that they should remain “in the world, not of it” and so should remain separate in as many ways as possible. Being tied to electricity tied them into the world, so they forfeited electrical benefits in order to stay outside the world. Visiting many Amish households even today, you'll see no power lines weaving toward their homes. They live off the grid. To live without electricity or cars eliminates most of what we expect from modernity. No electricity means no internet, TV, or phones, either, so suddenly the Amish life stands in stark contrast to our complex modern lives.
But when you visit an Amish farm, that simplicity vanishes. Indeed, the simplicity vanishes even before you get to the farm. Cruising down the road you may see an Amish kid in a straw hat and suspenders zipping by on Rollerblades. In front of one schoolhouse I spied a flock of parked push-scooters, which is how the kids had arrived there. But on the same street a constant stream of grimy minivans paraded past the school. Each was packed with full-bearded Amish men sitting in the back. What was that about?
Turns out the Amish make a distinction between using something and owning it. The Old Order won't own a pickup truck, but they will ride in one. They won't get a license, purchase an automobile, pay insurance, and become dependent on the automobile and the industrial-car complex, but they will call a taxi. Since there are more Amish men than farms, many men work at small factories, and these guys will hire vans driven by outsiders to take them to and from work. So even the horse-and-buggy folk will use carsâon their own terms. (Very thrifty, too.)
The Amish also make a distinction between technology they have at work and technology they have at home. I remember an early visit to an Amish man who ran a woodworking shop near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Let's call him Amos, although Amos was not his real name: The Amish prefer not to call attention to themselves, thus their reluctance to be photographed or have their names in the press. I followed Amos into a grubby concrete building. Most of the interior was dimly lit naturally from windows, but hanging over the wooden meeting table in a very cluttered room was a single electrical lightbulb. The host saw me staring at it, and when I looked at him, he just shrugged and said that it was for the benefit of visitors like me.
While the rest of his large workshop lacked electricity beyond that naked bulb, it did not lack power machines. The place was vibrating with an ear-cracking racket of power sanders, power saws, power planers, power drills, and so on. Everywhere I turned there were bearded men covered in sawdust pushing wood through screaming machines. This was not a circle of Renaissance craftsman hand-tooling master-pieces. This was a small-time factory cranking out wooden furniture with machine power. But where was the power coming from? Not from windmills.
Amos took me around to the back where a huge SUV-sized diesel generator sat. It was massive. In addition to a gas engine there was a very large tank, which, I learned, stored compressed air. The diesel engine burned petroleum fuel to drive the compressor that filled the reservoir with pressure. From the tank, a series of high-pressure pipes snaked off toward every corner of the factory. A hard rubber flexible hose connected each tool to a pipe. The entire shop ran on compressed air. Every piece of machinery was running on pneumatic power. Amos even showed me a pneumatic switch, which he could flick like a light switch to turn on some paint-drying fans running on air.
The Amish call this pneumatic system “Amish electricity.” At first, pneumatics were devised for Amish workshops, but air power was seen as so useful that it migrated to Amish households. In fact, there is an entire cottage industry in retrofitting tools and appliances to run on Amish electricity. The retrofitters buy a heavy-duty blender, say, and yank out the electrical motor. They then substitute an air-powered motor of appropriate size, add pneumatic connectors, and bingo, your Amish mom now has a blender in her electricity-less kitchen. You can get a pneumatic sewing machine and a pneumatic washer/dryer (with propane heat). In a display of pure steam-punk (air-punk?) nerdiness, Amish hackers try to outdo one another in building pneumatic versions of electrified contraptions. Their mechanical skill is quite impressive, particularly since none went to school beyond the eighth grade. They love to show off their geekiest hacks. And every tinkerer I met claimed that pneumatics were superior to electrical devices because air was more powerful and durable, outlasting motors that burned out after a few years of hard labor. I don't know if this claim of superiority is true or merely a justification, but it was a constant refrain.
I visited one retrofitted workshop run by a strict Mennonite. Marlin was a short, beardless man (no beards for the Mennonites). He used a horse and buggy and had no phone, but electricity ran in the shop behind his home. They used electricity to make pneumatic parts. As was the case in most of his community, his kids worked alongside him. A few of his boys, in Plain Folk clothes, used a propane-powered forklift with metal wheels (no rubber so you can't drive it on the road) to cart around stacks of heavy metal as they manufactured very precise milled metal parts for pneumatic motors and for kerosene cooking stoves, an Amish favorite. The tolerances needed are a thousandth of an inch. So a few years ago they installed a $400,000 computer-controlled milling machine in his backyard, behind the horse stable. This massive tool was about the size of a delivery truck. It was operated by Marlin's 14-year-old daughter, in a bonnet and long dress. With this computer-controlled machine she made parts for grid-free horse-and-buggy living.
I say “grid-free” rather than “electricity-free” because I kept finding electricity in Amish homes. Once you have a huge diesel generator running behind your barn to power the refrigeration units that store the milk (the main cash crop for the Amish), it's a small thing to stick on a small electrical generator. For recharging batteries, say. You can find battery-powered calculators, flashlights, and electric fences and generator-powered electric welders on Amish farms. The Amish also use batteries to run a radio or phone (outside in the barn or shop), or to power the required headlights and turn signals on their horse buggies. One clever Amish fellow spent a half hour explaining to me the ingenious way he had hacked up a mechanism to make a buggy turn signal automatically shut off when the turn was finished, just as it does in your car.
Nowadays solar panels are becoming popular among the Amish. With these they can get electricity without being tied to the grid, which was their main worry. Solar is used primarily for utilitarian chores like pumping water, but it will slowly leak into the household. As do most innovations.
The Amish use disposable diapers (why not?), chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, and they are big boosters of genetically modified corn. In Europe this corn is called Frankenfood. I asked a few of the Amish elders about that last one. Why do they plant GMOs? Well, they reply, corn is susceptible to the corn borer, which nibbles away at the bottom of the stem and occasionally topples the stalk. Modern 500-horsepower harvesters don't notice this fall; they just suck up all the material and spit out the corn into a bin. The Amish harvest their corn semimanually. It's cut by a chopper device and then pitched into a thresher. But if there are a lot of stalks that are broken, they have to be pitched by hand. That is a lot of very hard, sweaty work. So they plant Bt corn. This genetic mutant carries the genes of the corn borer's enemy,
Bacillus thuringiensis,
which produces a toxin deadly to the corn borer. Fewer stalks are broken and the harvest can be aided with machines, so yields are up. One elder Amish man whose sons run his farm said he was too old to be pitching heavy, broken cornstalks, and he told his sons that he'd only help them with the harvest if they planted Bt corn. The alternative was to purchase expensive, modern harvesting equipment, which none of them wanted. So the technology of genetically modified crops allowed the Amish to continue using old, well-proven, debt-free equipment, which accomplished their main goal of keeping the family farm together. They did not use these words, but they made it clear that they considered genetically modified crops appropriate technology for family farms.
Artificial insemination, solar power, and the web are technologies that Amish are still debating. They use the web at libraries (using but not owning). In fact, from cubicles in public libraries Amish sometimes set up a website for their business. So while an “Amish website” sounds like the punch line to a joke, there are actually quite a few of them. What about postmodern innovations like credit cards? A few Amish did get them, presumably for their businesses at first. But over time local Amish bishops noticed problems of overspending and the resultant crippling interest rates. Farmers got into debt, which impacted not only them but also their community, since their families had to help them recover (that's what community and families are for). So after a trial period, the elders ruled against credit cards.
One Amish man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, BlackBerrys, and iPhones (yes, he knew about them) was that “you got messages rather than conversations.” That's about as accurate a summary of our times as any. Henry, his long white beard contrasting with his young bright eyes, told me, “If I had a TV, I'd watch it.” What could be simpler?
No looming decision is riveting the Amish themselves as much as the question of whether they should accept cell phones. Previously, the Amish would build a shanty at the end of their driveway that housed an answering machine and phone to be shared by neighbors. The shanty sheltered the caller from rain and cold and kept the grid away from the house, and the long walk outside reduced phone use to essential calls rather than gossip and chatting. Cell phones are a new twist. You get a phone without wires, off the grid. As one Amish guy told me, “What is the difference if I stand in my phone booth with a wireless phone or stand outside with a cell phone? There's no difference.” Further, cell phones have been embraced by women, who can keep in touch with their far-flung families, since they don't drive. And the bishops have noticed that the cell phone is so small it can be kept hidden, which is a concern for a people dedicated to discouraging individualism. The Amish have still not decided on the cell phone. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say they have decided “maybe.”