Wendell Berry's list from 1987 is more relevant than ever before:
What do you want from new technology?
[...] Wendell Berry provided a list of nine reasonable requirements for new tech back in 1987, and they're still appropriate today.
Berry's list is actually more relevant than ever before. And the failure of tech companies to meet his modest demands is now painfully evident to everybody.
It wasn't always this bad.
[...]
- The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
- It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
- It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
- It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
- If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
- It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
- It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
- It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
- It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
[...] The curious fact is that the most up-to-date and forward-looking thing is this whole article is Berry's list from 1987. Nothing on it is obsolescent or inappropriate or dysfunctional or harmful.
TFA discusses each rule and provides examples how the opposite is what's actually happening today.
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(1)
(1)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday April 10, @10:24PM
Was that list even viable back in 1987? Perhaps more viable then today. But a lot of the points are weird. I guess they where perhaps somewhat accurate back then. Back then I wanted things to get smaller (for the most part), faster and cheaper. But some things I wanted to grow bigger (screens, storage, ram, cpu speed ...).
Anyhow I think the order is wrong. Number (3) should be at the top. I see it as a version that it should just be better then the tool it replaces. If it is better then as far as I am concerned it can be both larger and more expensive then the one it replaces. So point 3 should negate both point 1 and 2. Those two points don't matter if 3 is ok. If they are equally shitty then i'll take the small cheap one. Also it is nice if points 1, 2 and 4 are available. But it's secondary, or worse, then being better.
Also sometimes things can become to small. I like big screen and I can not lie.
Solar? Who cares? That is so far down the list. How did that even make the '87 list? I don't care where the electricity from the power socket comes from -- sun, dead dinosaur juice, rubbing two sticks together, whatever. Those solar powered (or light powered) calculators of the 1987 era sucked.
(6) is a problem. The average or ordinary intelligence person can sometimes be quite stupid. For some tasks. I think I'm above the average but there are a lot things I can't do, even with the right tools. That said back in 1987 I could repair most everything I found or came across. There was nothing some good old soldering couldn't fix.
With that in mind I think this might be the point that has been shafted the most during the last three-four decades. Replace faulty blackbox with new blackbox that does magic things costing as much as a large chunk of the entire machine cost. Also if something in there breaks the whole thing stops working. Also would you like some telemetry secretly recording everything? Sure you do. Not like you can opt out.
(7) as long as it fits in packages it's ok. That said they are delivering new machines to one of the places I work with next week. They are removing a section of the outer wall to bring it inside. So I guess it's better, but really really large. It was not cheap either.
(8) that is very specific.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Friday April 11, @12:41AM
Some of this I'd disagree with, so is odd; but it holds up pretty well for something that old and No. 9 is absolutely prescient when you consider what social media has done to us.
(1) Cheaper is not necessarily better. A computer is way more expensive than the old calculators we had, but so much more capable. Bigger costs are acceptable when the tools is more capable.
(5) is odd. Solar like your body? Huh? My body gets Vitamin-D from the sunlight, but I don't think that's what he's on about. It reads like something lost in translation.
(8) is a laudable goal, and I still like tower cases; but frankly my all-in-one PC screen was dirt cheap compared to a tower, and serves me well. The economy can't be beat. I have some old tower PCs around in case the slick little screen/PC combo dies; but it doesn't. It just keeps on ticking.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 11, @01:08AM
Maybe after the one that's coming, people will start thinking like this again.
I read http://bitsavers.org/pdf/able/O'Mohundro_-_Techniques_for_Designing_Successful_Products_197908.pdf [bitsavers.org]
and thought "how quaint" Engineers that actually VISITED their customers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 11, @01:18AM
https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality [archive.org]
Tools for Conviviality (link above) is not a short or easy read, but I find myself agreeing with almost everything Ivan wrote back in 1971, except for the parts about a "painful realignment" being required.
I mean, sure, you can get where he is describing through a painful revolution, and that has historically been how such changes are usually made, but I believe it is far from a requirement for progress.
Ilich's main thrust with "Conviviality" was right-sizing tools and institutions such that they convey maximum benefit to the people they serve, but do not grow so far that they also take advantage of the people through various types of monopoly.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ChrisMaple on Friday April 11, @03:55AM (2 children)
Size needs to be appropriate to use. Big screens for TVs are good, and big screens for computers are a delightful luxury. In many places, passenger cars need to be big enough to pass over a snowfall, and few are. Passenger cars need to be able to accommodate tall people. Family vans should be able to hold a 4x8 sheet of plywood. Advanced tech thermal underwear shouldn't end at mid-calf.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday April 11, @06:30AM (1 child)
Or, as is true in many places, the snow-clearing is efficient enough that that is not necessary. That requires good community organisation, which is lacking in some places.
Define 'tall'. That will vary by region of the world. The designers probably take some value for deviations from mean height for the markets the vehicle is targetted at. A long time ago, I knew someone who could not drive Italian mass-produced cars because they literally could not sit in the driver's seat without having to bend their head to the side to 'fit' in. Couldn't recline the seat back, because if it were far enough, they could not reach the steering wheel. German cars, designed for taller people, were fine. I know people laugh, but being tall more than a certain number of standard deviations from the mean is a disability. If you look at London taxis, they are designed to accommodate tall passengers. Not everyone wants a car that shape.
I think most are designed to be able to hold a standard shipping pallet for the local market [cargoson.com]
American large is 48"x48" or 4'x4'
If you are talking about flatbed trucks, often used by builders, then yes, being able to carry a local market full-size pieces of plywood or drywall is an advantage.
That'll depend on how far your legs deviate from the mean, and some people want the thermal wear to terminate just below mid-calf. It's relatively easily remedied by long socks or 1980's style leg-warmers. The hairstyle and shoulder-pads are optional.
(Score: 4, Funny) by ElizabethGreene on Friday April 11, @12:35PM
My nephew is just shy of 7' and built like a tank. It was something of a gas to discover how comfortable he was in a VW Beetle (new).
I'm >6' and rotund. Driving my other nephew's geo metro was an exercise in contortion and will.
(Score: 2, Funny) by pTamok on Friday April 11, @06:02AM (3 children)
The list is fine. Obviously one can quibble over the details, but that misses the main thing, as far as I can see.
How can these things be enforced? The current lightly-regulated market-based capitalist approach isn't working.
(Score: 4, Touché) by mhajicek on Friday April 11, @06:11AM (1 child)
I'd say the list is rather narrow sighted. There are many cases where you want the opposite of these. A bigger, more powerful anything, for example. Fusion generator, particle accelerator, heavy lift launch vehicle, you name it. I'd say the spirit can be better distilled as "A new technology should accomplish more per unit of resources consumed, or accomplish that which could not previously have been accomplished."
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 11, @02:09PM
>A new technology should accomplish more per unit of resources consumed, or accomplish that which could not previously have been accomplished.
That's a simple view of the economics. Some questions aren't addressed by the simple view:
1) Do we really need all that the new technology is accomplishing?
If a new electrical energy production tech can make eleventy-million Gigawatts for 1/3 the price per watt of contemporary tech and all it needs is 200 square miles of land... do we really need that much power anywhere with that much available land to devote to power generation? Would conventional generators, at 3x the cost per watt, actually be more economical than this "efficient" surplus producer? Will the new users that spring up near the low cost energy production site be net positive, or net negative for the rest of the world? (Does the world really benefit in any tangible way if Bitcoin mining costs drop by 70% at this new low cost site?)
2) What externalized costs aren't being accounted?
What will the power transmission costs be to get that cheap power from its remote generation site out to the cities that might use its potential? For the nearby cities that do get super-cheap power, if they start running excessive heat-pumps with all that cheap power what happens to the external temperatures where the heat pumps are dumping their 'waste heat'? How much additional refrigerant will be produced and leaked into the atmosphere?
Also to be considered: are the proponents of the new technology simply lying about the cost-benefit ratio of their great new thing? Transparency is crucial. Low cost leaders are a time honored trick.
3) What value is lost in the displaced technology?
Eleventy-million low cost Gigawatts will obsolete hundreds of existing power generation facilities. Right on the face of it, that becomes a single point of failure vs 100s of separate systems that can cover for each other when they individually need down time.
On a different tack, it has become fashionable for US churches to collect shoes "for the poor" in third world countries (Africa, South America, South-East Asia)... so containers full of free shoes arrive, periodically on unpredictable schedules. With massive dumps of free shoes, local shoe producers - who were obviously making shoes tailored for local needs - simply give up shoe making to pursue another vocation that isn't periodically swamped with zero-cost competition. So, these poor people who get free shoes, now get ill fitting shoes in weird styles ill suited for their environment and uses on unpredictable schedules where they must drop everything else in their lives and scramble to the free shoe distribution points when the free shoes arrive because: they have no alternatives, their dignified, skilled local shoemaker who used to provide good shoes to them as needed now makes and sells fry-bread instead.
Even in the US (with it's massive and presumably massively efficient shoe-fashion production global industry supply chain), I feel like I have fewer choices in actual shoes I want to wear than we used to have - there's a nauseating variety of shoes to choose from, but so many are poorly made fast fashion (not to mention: overpriced), or specialized for uses I don't use them for. When I do find a brand & style that suits me, if it's of decent quality the shoes will last for a couple of years, and by the time I need new ones that style is no longer made, or the quality of it has been noticeably degraded - the price rarely falls. I find that my favorite styles seem to spin-off Chinese knockoffs at very affordable prices, but the Chinese shoemakers rarely supply size 11.5W US men's shoes, and of course the knock-offs - while comfortable - tend not to last even 1/3 as long as the originals I liked. I end up occasionally purchasing shoes that I only wear once or twice before growing to absolutely loathe them, and so they become free pre-loathed shoes donated to the church for distribution to the poor, putting good shoe makers out of business.
4) Will the lower costs be shared with society, or concentrated as wealth for the owners?
Single source, they can name their price - even if they are producing energy for less cost, once the competing generators are out of business what stops them from arbitrarily raising prices through all sorts of methods?
The enshittification of popular web services is an all too obvious example.
I'll plug Illich here again: https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality [archive.org] not an easy read, but he's there in 1973 proposing that keeping technology accessible to the people it serves as a net benefit to society as a whole. Do you want to evolve into Han Solo / Malcom Reynolds / Inara Serra, space cowboys roaming the galaxy in ships you can maintain mostly yourself with a small team of people you know (and trust), or Woody Allen as AntZ - member of the colony, living life for the good of the colony?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 11, @02:38PM
Of course current changes in US government are screaming in the other direction, but...
I would propose that businesses that employ and sell technologies on Berry's list be granted tax relief - not full exemption, but significant acknowledgement of their more direct serving of the interests of their customers (citizens). Like DEI, for technology. The more they meet the list, the more tax relief they get.
Some things, like say a Raspberry Pi 5, are made from components that are basically unobtanium for ordinary mortals without multi-million dollar factories, but there should still be acknowledgement of the fact that a Raspberry Pi 5 is a much more owner-user accessible device than, say, an Apple Watch.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Friday April 11, @11:29AM (1 child)
What survives isn't always what should. I would rather see a breakdown of what does survive, including the underhanded, and especially the failures that should have worked. I guess I am just too much of a realist to read a consumer manifesto and nod my head.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday April 11, @01:39PM
Once upon a time, I thought I'd heard about pretty much everything there is concerning physical media formats. Then I saw a YouTube video on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc [wikipedia.org]
Yes, I've heard of records / record players. However, I'd never heard of video playback using similar technology. That said, I've never done a research paper on physical media either. It's an interesting thing that died a relatively quick death for relatively good reasons.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Friday April 11, @11:56AM (3 children)
"If possible, it should use some form of solar energy"
Any piece of technology can be connected to and powered by an array of solar cells if one is so inclined. Was Berry implying that it needs to be built into the device? Did the inefficiency of such a design not occur to him?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday April 11, @01:44PM (1 child)
The short answer is yes. However, the most common device that was powered by solar energy was the humble calculator. It may still be the most common device to be powered by solar energy. I for one would be happy, if I could set a power bank out and have it charge enough throughout the day for me to do a quick charge on my phone when I need it. Yes, this is doable. However, none of the "solar powered" power banks that I have work well. You need a "small" / much larger than the average power bank to get enough power to charge said power bank at a reasonable rate. I also live in a relatively sunny area.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 11, @02:53PM
I bought a power bank "on sale" for $699, normal price $1099. It advertises that its cells are good for 3000 cycles. If I were to spend an additional $200 or so, I could hook it up to a reasonably sized solar panel to "charge it for free" but...
When you work out how many kWh that power bank can deliver per charge (1.2), multiply by 3000 and divide the $725 on-sale price (delivered, not including solar panel) by the product (3600 kWh), what you get is a touch over $0.20 per kWh, which is on the high side of what my electric utility charges.
Now, this power bank has many uses where an extension cord is undesirable, including during power interruptions... so it's not a bad value, but even with "free solar" charging, it's still costing more than power from an outlet. And, in my life experience, when a manufacturer advertises 3000 cycle lifetime, frequently you are lucky to get to 1000 before something "unexpected, unfortunate, oh if that had happened last week you would have been covered by warranty" happens.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 11, @02:44PM
>Any piece of technology can be connected to and powered by an array of solar cells if one is so inclined.
Yeah, that works really well for gasoline powered tools, like chainsaws, lawn mowers, etc.
Now, I do have a battery powered lawn mower (and chain saw), but if I were to provide my own solar cells for charging the mower batteries it becomes catch 22: I would need more solar panels than I have lawn space, so when the solar panels sufficient to charge the mower batteries are out there intercepting the solar power, then the grass can't get it and it doesn't need cutting...
Of course our particular yard isn't typical, we actually let wildflowers grow for several month a year, but the point stands: when it is time to mow the field I would have to deploy the additional solar cells, reducing the solar input to the yard, reducing the need for mowing...
The chain saw is an even trickier situation with no use for months to years then a sudden need for rapid recharging of the battery several times to clear a tree-fall... if the solar panels are pre-deployed for the need, the tree may well fall on them...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]