more low tech, please
Have you seen the price of functioning used typewriters lately? Noticed the comeback of vinyl records and turntables? The popularity of independent used book bookstores? All this is fulfilling a basic human need.
“Low technology is more than a sentimental pleasure—though God knows it’s that.
It’s a kind of salvation for people.
We live in a time when most of us, in our work, are servants of machines (and a handful, of course, are masters). In terms of the gross national product, that has worked out very nicely. In terms of the process of daily living, it has been a good deal less satisfactory.
The more things there can be where simple and easily understood techniques can compete in the marketplace with automation, the more sense of ourselves as valuable and needed beings we will be able to keep. And that’s a sense every human being ought to have.”
That’s from the essay titled “Low Technology in the Sugarbush” by Noel Perrin (1927-2004) published thirty years ago in 1996 in Late Harvest: Rural American Writing (ed. David Pichaske, pub. by Smithmark).
Perrin understood the redemptive value of work vs. sad things like farms without farmers—machines disrupting the natural order of the temporal sphere—and its only gotten more disruptive in the three decades since Perrin’s essay, so yes, more low tech, please.
“Too late,” you say?
Well, there’s always hope—look: typewriters, turntables, and paperbacks are in demand. It’s a start.
Yes!! Letter writing on stationary or a card, sent through the mail; a pen-and-ink day planner (how I loathe Google Calendar) (which my phone just auto-capitalized); books made of paper, not pixels…these hands-on ways allow, among other things, for a sense of dash and style. We can make them our own…
...and a car that comes equipped with a gear shift lever, ignition key and a road map or two.