Berry's nine standards

Wendell Berry died Monday at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, at 92 — on land his family had farmed for seven generations before him. The obituaries are already reaching for the same shorthand NPR used: a stark critic of industrialized farming, "generally skeptical of technology." He never owned a computer. That detail will do a lot of work this week, most of it wrong.

Berry was not skeptical of technology. He was rigorous about it — the only major writer of his generation who put his adoption criteria in writing and then lived by them. The 1987 essay "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" is remembered as a refusal. It was actually a spec: nine standards a new tool had to meet before it displaced the one he had. Cheaper than what it replaces. At least as small in scale. Demonstrably better at the work. Less energy, repairable near home by a person of ordinary intelligence, bought as close to home as possible. And the ninth, the one that does the cutting: it should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists — family and community relationships included.

Then he ran the evaluation, and the computer failed. Not on vibes — on the criteria. His existing system was a typewriter bought new in 1956 that he never needed to replace. Seventy years of daily professional output from one machine is not a pose. It is a total-cost-of-ownership argument, and anyone who evaluates tools for a living — an engineer, a procurement office, a venture investor — would recognize every line of it: energy budget, maintainability, switching costs, externalities. Berry's eccentricity was refusing to zero out the last column.

The obvious objection: a standard almost nothing passes isn't a standard, it's a wall. Fair — nothing much since 1956 clears all nine. Not the computer, not the phone, not the model that drafted this column. As a purchasing rule it would have kept him out of nearly everything, and it did. But the standard's job was never to gate the world's adoption. Its job was to make displacement visible — to force the question of what a tool removes before tallying what it adds. In today's adoption chain, nobody owns that question. The vendor won't ask it, the buyer doesn't price it, and the market rewards whoever asks it last. Berry assigned it to himself, in public, and kept the books for seventy years.

That was the whole advice he'd give the young, and only when pressed. A plumb line doesn't tell you how to build the wall. It tells you when the wall is out of true. Berry hung his in 1987 and never took it down. The measuring is our job now.