Why I Will Not...

The wisdom of Wendell Berry's essay on computers for the age of AI

Photo by Daniel Salgado on Unsplash

I have been thinking about why Wendell Berry would not buy a computer. His essay on the reasons, a short piece first published in 1987, is one of his most famous, or perhaps infamous. It is an essay that has caused many to dismiss Berry as a reactionary Luddite, and others, like myself, to admire him as one. At the time it was republished in Harper’s Magazine, it generated a storm of letters and prompted Berry’s even better follow-up essay, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.” Now, facing a new technology promising to change the world and make us, to quote Radiohead, “fitter, happier, more productive,” I could not help but think that Berry was right all along and has much to teach us about the choices ahead.

Take Berry’s essay and replace “computer” with AI, and it works pretty well. “I do not admire the computer AI manufacturers a great deal more than I admire the energy industries,” is a good statement to start with. Or try Berry’s pointed question: “What would a computer AI cost me?” It’s a question he begins to answer by noting that “the cost would not just be monetary.” A truth every bit as true of AI, especially when, as Berry notes, the technology would cost a human relationship: “What would be superseded would be not only something, but somebody.”

The most important lesson that Berry provides in his essay, however, isn’t simply the problems of the technology itself, but it’s destruction of the earth’s systems of life. It is easy to critique AI and focus only on its manifestation on the screen—the slop spreading through the internet, the learned dependency of students, the Promethean shame of people whose miracle of a mind is measured only by the standards of a computer. Instead of starting there, however, Berry begins with the energy required by a computer. Energy that would turn his low input work with hand, pencil, and paper into a high input work that would depend on the polluting and extractive energy industry. “How could I write conscientiously against the rape of nature if I were, in the act of writing, implicated in the rape?” Berry asks.

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Through this and other questions Berry pushes us back toward the reality that for all the seeming ether of cyberspace, it is grounded in the world and requires energy extracted from it. To put a query into the blinking box of a chatbot is to burn carbon and release CO2 into the atmosphere, driving climate catastrophe. That is the truth of AI now, just as it was the truth of computers in 1987, and it is true of me typing this on a screen and you reading on one.

Our connection and responsibility for the damage we do to the world through our work and entertainments is something in which I have long been schooled by reading Berry. But its manifestation in terms of AI came home to me when it was announced that Google had purchased 400 acres, including a wetland that it plans to drain in order to build a hyperscale data center in my community. This is a place I know well, a place full of wildlife where I often go to watch birds. I cannot use a chatbot without knowing that this place, and others like it, are being destroyed for the sake of my use, use which would be frivilous and unnecessary.

This is true, of course, of any computing. Though I wrote this essay by hand on scraps of paper, mostly in the unairconditioned air, I eventually typed it and placed it here, on the internet, where it is housed somewhere in the world, housing that surely cost something to the place my data dwells. I cannot say that I would have a good response for the charge of hypocrisy. I am a part of the world into which I was raised, a destructive world, and though I try to be less destructive, I still do much harm.

But when it comes to the use of generative AI, I do have a choice. I’ve never used a chatbot. I’ve never asked for the assistance of Copilot or Grok or ChatGPT or Claude or any other standard generative AI tool. And though it is infiltrating most everything, online and off, I am committed to resisting however and wherever I can. I will do all in my power not use AI, just as Wendell Berry never did buy a computer.

This does not mean that I will be able to be free of what I dislike, entangled in the energy industries that I despise, the tech companies I distrust. I am and will continue to be caught up in them. Berry is still entangled with computers even if he doesn’t own one, or make direct use of one. The same will be true for me with AI. I participate in Zoom meetings that have AI transcription. There are places, coming soon, where to obtain basic services I will have to interact with a chatbot. Like the streets that were cleared for cars, with the old ways of travel upended to make way, the tech industry will force us off the road unless we submit to their modes of transportation. And yet, there have always been paths cut through lawns, pedestrians refusing to cooperate with the paved world or the laws dictating it. I plan to do as much walking on the median as I can safely manage.

Beyond the dependency on wrongness, another of the reasons Berry gives for his resistance to computers is his certainty that they will not improve his writing. Berry is a writer. That is his craft, and it has certainly been his living over these last decades. No writer could argue with his level of productivity, his creative output, nor with the quality of the writing. Berry won the National Humanities Medal, his writing continues to be published in the best literary journals and read widely. When he sheds doubt on a computer’s ability to help him write better, we should listen.

Berry wrote his essay at a time when it went against the tide of widespread tech optimism, a future that was garnering embrace in most households and businesses. One difference with the dawn of computers and AI is the backlash AI has generated from the start. While many think it is inevitable, and some are gleeful about its possibilities, the majority in America are uncertain of its value, and opposed to its infrastructure. This may be, in part, because of the technology itself, but I think there is also a tinge of buyers remorse on the whole world of digital technology. Many now wish they’d been as perceptive as Berry and never become addicted to the glowing screen.

This is especially true of writing. Perhaps it is my own bias, but everywhere I look, the best writers are working hard to resist what computers do to their work. Or, I should add, computers and the internet. Writing by hand, using a computer with the internet disabled, and utilizing app blocking programs like Freedom and Self-control are some of the tools writers from Jonathan Franzen to Zadie Smith employ to get the work of writing done. Writers know that computers, for whatever gifts they offer, hinder the real work of thinking and putting words together with care and craft.

Oliver Burkeman recently offered a process he’s found helpful in his writing that involves printing a portion of an essay, deleting the original, and retyping the printed portion, editing along the way. This is essentially what happened pre-computer, when writers had to recopy earlier drafts whether by hand or on a typewriter. The best way to write on a computer, it seems, is to act like it isn’t a computer.

The computer, true to Berry’s insight, didn’t improve anyone’s writing. It instead created a dependency that those of us who grew up with it are busy trying to undo. And so it will be with AI. It will not improve writing, or any product of culture, but it is likely to so infect the production of literature that we will be going to ever more extreme measures to free ourselves from it. For me, I think it best not to start. Like Berry, I want to make the choice I won’t have to undo or regret.

Still, there is a part of me that remembers the advent of the cell phone, and a friend who told me, in no uncertain terms, that she would never, ever get one. Of course, she did. Has it improved her life? No. Has it become necessary for living as a neighbor in the average, everyday world? Yes, mostly. But it need not be so with AI. The choice is up to us, whatever the tech trillionaires want us to think, the technology is only as ubiquitous as its adoption. If you could go back to 1999 and never pick up a cell phone, would you? If you could go back to 1987 and refuse to buy a computer, how would it have changed your life and the life of those around you? These are good questions to ask and hard questions to answer, but one answer I am certain of is the one where Berry began his short essay: the living systems of the earth would be better off without the waste, extraction, and pollution that computers and cell phones have caused.

Now, after years of work to reduce our energy use, we are undoing all of that work for the sake of chatbots. However more productive it might make us, however it might “improve” aspects of our lives, the cost will be born by the given world of creation, now and well into the future. The ability to see this, and its direct connection to our use of the technology, is the gift Berry gave us in his essay. It is a gift we should put to use while we have the chance to follow its good advice.