Use Technology Like the Amish

submitted by [deleted] from (artofmanliness.com)

all 5 comments
sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun

[–]la_cues 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/

https://www.notechmagazine.com/

See also: Ted Kaczyn-.. uh nevermind.

[–]Node 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Ted made some mistakes, but wasn't wrong.

[–]la_cues 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Well, if he really was killing people, then he was wrong in that regard.

[–]Node 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

One could view selecting targets at random, and only killing 3 out of 20, as mistakes. For him in particular, with his 167 IQ, attempting to kill in the most manual and inefficient way possible was a mistake.

Given the obvious correctness of his views, diminishing his credibility through attempts to kill was probably his biggest mistake. Although more have probably been exposed to his viewpoint through his self-sacrifice than would have happened otherwise.

In a world gone so awry that we regularly kill 50 million, or 100 million, can we really say that killing people is wrong?

This necessary and regular slaughter is a symptom of overbreeding so excessively that we have 5 to 7 extra billion people consuming our limited resources, and driving our societies insane with the overcrowding. We're in the boom phase of the boom/bust cycle found in mammal populations, and ours has been propped up and extended so egregiously that our bust phase will be one for the history books.

[–]thefirststone 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

While strange to an outsider, all of these usage modifications have one thing in common: they allow the Amish to employ technology in a manner that doesn’t disrupt their way of life.

Hackers could put together some of those devices from chips and discrete components, but without the culture for that -- and I doubt fixing pneumatic tools and diesel generators translates fully to word processors -- they will never develop their own rugged electronics with intuitive, unobtrusive interfaces.

It's not that they're intentional about technology, because the implementation details don't matter after a certain point. They're intentional about workflows, interfaces, and dependencies. There are parallels there to high-tech programming cultures, too.