The following appeared in Volume 98, Number 2 (Spring, 1999) of the APA Newsletters

The 18th century English weavers who followed Ned Ludd in rebellion against the automation of their craft, stand as a heroic paragon for contemporary antagonists to computers and other high-technology. That the Luddite rage against the machine did not succeed is part of their charm. In contrast to the tragic-hero Luddites, stands the persistent resistance to modern technology practiced by the Amish. The wonder of the Amish approach is that it works. Despite constant pressures and challenges, Old Order Amish communities in Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and around the world survive and thrive. Their success stems partly from social strategies for selecting and adapting the technologies that enter their lives. If technology is, as Frederick Ferre defines it, "the practical implementation of intelligence,"1 then the Amish have developed a meta-technology to conduct such implementations. Some authors speculate that the Amish approach to technology provides a model that other communities or society at large might employ in making technology use decisions. That seems to me unlikely, but the way is open to apply aspects of the Amish model of innovation to the design of technology, particularly software. To make this happen we need innovative conceptual schemes to guide the software design. Philosophers are well-equipt to pursue such innovations.

Amish society is grounded in the maintenance of a community committed to a common faith and tradition. Commentators on Amish life observe that in all things, community is the top priority and there is no ambiguity as to what the community comprises. The integrity of the local community is prioritized over individual interests, economic interests, and technological development. The Old Order Amish (the traditionalist sect) live in an agrarian style without electricity, telephones, television, automobiles, military service, public education, federal government subsidy, and other amenities considered necessities in the contemporary U.S. This last claim needs qualification, however, because the Amish distinguish between using technology and living with it. Telephones in the home have been banned since 1910. Using telephones for a variety of purposes, on the other hand, is not part of the ban. Craft workers do use electricity in their workshops, but only if self-generated and not hooked into the public power grid. Farmers will use state-of-the-art farm equipment, such as hay balers, so long as they are pulled by horses and not internal combustion engines. Such juxtapositions make an odd picture for us citizens of the technopoly. Yet, such seeming contradictions are actually results of a sophisticated social strategy. As Howard Rheingold observes; "far from knee-jerk technophobes, these are very adaptive techno-selectives who devise remarkable technologies that fit within their self-imposed limits."2

Amish life deliberately imposes a framework of values on technology that determines which selections and adaptations are appropriate. Social coherence is the supreme value. What leads to local social interaction and interdependence is encouraged. Scale is an important value to community integrity. "When a church district becomes too large, it is divided into two meetings to prevent the ceremonial unit from becoming unmanageable."3 A meeting is too large when it becomes unwieldily to meet in any member’s home. Old Order Amish do not have church buildings or meeting rooms. This accords with the informal social structure in which "there are no headquarters, professionals, executive directors, or organizational charts."4 In worship, politics, and work, community involvement implies local presence. Within that communal presence, silence is another core value that pervades the lifestyle. This includes the silence of humility, patience, pacifism, forgiveness, prayer, worship service, and shunning (i.e. exclusion of adults who transgress on accepted practices). Silence is contrasted with the radically overt voice of public confession and the freedom to speak on any matter before the community. These and other core values derive from a religious faith that seeks utter consistency in practice. This consistency allows some analysis of that practice as a social strategy for technology use.

A symbolically and functionally important example of the Amish approach to technology is the telephone. In 1910 the Amish community in Pennsylvania struggled with a conflict over principles that led to schism. Central in the conflict were the community rules governing the newly available telephone technology. Other issues were at stake in the controversy, but even for present-day Amish, the telephone remains evocative of the conflict.

The telephone effectively connects us to a vast scale of potential recipients because of the constancy of time over variable distance. We can have the same 5 minute phone call with another, irrespective of where on earth (and sometimes off earth) they are. The very idea of a contemporary telephone confers values that show up in advertising, technology design, user behavior, and social practice. Among these values are choice, global scale, speed, and networking. In technopoly we regard these as virtues of information technology. Consider some ways in which they are directly antithetical to the core virtues of Amish community.

For the Old Order Amish, the very idea that a call may interrupt a family conversation or even moment of quiet, is sufficient to keep the telephone out of the home. Much less compatible with Amish values are commonplaces of contemporary life such as telemarketing calls and backgrounding.5

The telephone, of course, is very useful even when it conflicts with other values. It is in such dilemmas that Amish innovation becomes remarkably apparent. Rather than categorically ban the telephone, the Amish constructed a compromise of locating community phones outside of the home in small uni-purpose shantys. The reasoning for this practice was two-fold: 1) to prevent the separating influence of the phone on the family and 2) to promote the integrating affect of community ownership. Krayhill observes; "The inconvenience of walking a half-mile to use a phone or taking messages from an answering service is a daily reminder that membership in an ethnic community exacts a price—a reminder that things that are too handy and too convenient lead to sloth and pride."6 This negotiated settlement with the telephone is typical of the Amish approach to new technology.

It is this meta-technical innovation, the invention of social practices and adaptations of a technology to promote core values, that is so valuable to the potential of the philosophy of technology. Computer programming opens a potential for informed users to custom innovate the software that produces their information technology environment. We may, in a spirit analogous to the Amish, construct negotiated settlements with communities of potential users and embed those decisions into the technology. This approach will take advantage of a distinguishing characteristic of computer programming: software plasticity. Richard Field provides an example of software plasticity in his article "Web-Based Quizzes Produced by Hot Potatoes" in this issue of the newsletter.7 Field notes that an otherwise useful software does not provide some values important to his teaching; "however, for those who do know JavaScript, and wish to customize the source code, an ‘Edit Raw HTML’ option provides editable access to this code." Thus, Field makes the revisions and produces the needed values. Such direct intervention is possible with much software, if software developers really designed with the user/producer in mind (such as the Hot Potatoes designers have). The programming knowledge and effort is merely the price one pays for being a part of a virtual community. Learning some javascript is not a huge price; the functional equivalent of the daily trek to the phone shanty (tackling Java may be more on the order of living without electricity and a car.)

Rhiengold and Brende propose employing the Amish approach to technology as a model for contemporary high-tech society.8 This is not a viable hope. The value of an intelligent communal approach to technology selection and implementation is clear. Yet, the core values that give the Amish a foundation for such an approach are antithetical to mainstream U.S. and much of the high-tech world. The blistering pace, overwhelming complexity, and increasing specialization of contemporary technology is entirely consistent with the core capitalist values of the autonomous market and consumerism. To affect an intelligent strategy for development and implementation would conflict directly with those values. We cannot appropriate the Amish sensibility for our own technopoly.

It is viable to apply the Amish sensibility to the software design process. We cannot hope to manage which technologies come into market or how they are adopted. We may be able to influence how the software technology being produced behaves. Software designs do contain implicit values. The programming presuppositions of search engines can affect the scope and direction of knowledge (see Heim and Beavers in this issue). Assumptions about the users of courseware may shape the basic conception that learners have about the role of study and intellectual discourse in their lives. Communications programs (e.g. email, threaded discussion, etc.) pre-set the context in which conventions of use develop. The Amish took the inherent values of both the technology and community into account when devising a telephone policy. Philosophers should be engaged in analysis of our current technologies and community values in order to provide goals for software design. If we make a strong case for the desired values, then we will have some influence on future software design, hence our collective technological community.

1. Frederick Ferre. 1995. Philosophy of Technology. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. p.26.

2. Rheingold, Howard. 1999. "Look Who’s Talking," Wired, January, v7.01, p.131.

3. Hostetler, John A. 1993. Amish Society, 4th edition. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, p.394.

4. Kraybill, Donald, B. 1989. The Riddle of Amish Culture. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, p.82

5. "Backgrounding" is current office jargon for the practice of doing multiple tasks while on the phone. Conversants will doodle, sort papers, make coffee, surf the web, drive the car, and whatever else while on the phone. The lack of total engagement in the exchange is, perhaps, typical of telephone communication. Listen for absent pauses (note how silence is a negative value on the phone) and soft typing in the background.

6. Kraybill, Donald, B. Op. cit. p.149.

7. Richard Field. 1999." Web-Based Quizzes Produced by Hot Potatoes," APA Newletter on Philosophy and Computers, Spring 1999.