A while back I read an interesting interview on Quartz titled “The Amish understand a life-changing truth about technology the rest of us don’t”. In it, Jameson Wetmore, a researcher who has observed the Amish extensively, talks about the way they negotiate which modern technologies they admit into their society. One excerpt made me wonder about the positive connotation we give the word “progress” and if we wouldn’t be better off thinking about it in neutral terms. I don’t have a good answer, but I’m sure smarter people than me have taken a stab a similar questions before.
“One thing it’s taken me awhile to understand is that I don’t think the Amish believe in progress. I don’t think the Amish believe there is a perfect world in the future. I think that is something that drives a lot of our society: the idea there must be progress and there is a place we need to get to.”
Values in technology
Another idea that I’ve always found very interesting is that of the values that get coded in technologies and products by their creators, even if they think that their creations are value agnostic. The Amish don’t accept outside technology without running it against their values and deciding if they are compatible. A piece of technology fits in their lives if it shares their values.
“There has been a concerted effort to say that technologies are value-free. That they are simply piles of metal and wire and computer chips, and really the only thing that matters is the people who use them. This is sort of debunked. When any technology is designed, it is usually designed with purpose and goals. Values underlie those purposes and goals.”
Wetmore recommends a short story titled “The Machine Stops”, saying:
“In the story, basically everyone is online 24 hours a day, and everyone lives underground in their own little caves. Nobody interacts physically with anyone anymore. It’s the story of one young man who wants to break out of this.”
I read the story, and will comment on it in a minute. In the society described in the story, one of the things that happened is that people started prioritizing the needs of the machine that ran their cave entertainment systems over the needs of people. It is tempting to think about this as an ethical discussion for the future, but he also presents an example that shows that we’ve definitely done that before.
“At the beginning of the age of the automobile, nobody said, All right: 30,000 people a year are going to die. Is that a decision we want to make? What did happen is a very intense discussion about whether a car should be allowed on the road and who should be at fault when a car drives over a four-year-old in the street. In the 1930s, we ended up as a society deciding that four-year-olds should be the one to blame. We began to train people even before they began to speak about how to cross the street and how to avoid it in the street. We redesigned our world to be safe for automobiles and dangerous for children.”
The short story was a fascinating read. It is uncanny, especially for something written in 1908. The world described is lonely and people rarely communicate in person but most of them don’t seem to mind. In fact, physical interaction is no longer a basic need. It has fallen so out of fashion that it’s considered uncivilized. All communications are electronic and all their basic need are met in their small caves. The story asks us to imagine this world, and I think it might be a lot easier for us to imagine it today than it was back then.
“For a moment Vashti felt lonely. Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.”
Like I said, uncanny.
Coren, M. J. (2018, May 18). The Amish understand a life-changing truth about technology the rest of us don’t. Retrieved June 6, 2018, from https://qz.com/1275194/the-amish-understand-a-life-changing-truth-about-technology-the-rest-of-us-dont/
Forster, E. M. (n.d.). The Machine Stops. Retrieved June 6, 2018, from http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
Amanda Cuello S 