Odds and ends: The Amish response to technocentrism

Sex in the future will need to incorporate overt elements of mindfulness and meaning-making, and this will resemble the Amish approach to technology in their culture.

When most people think of the Amish, they think of horse-drawn buggies and handmade furniture. There is so much more to the Amish people than that, but I didn't learn about any of it until I was in grad school. Now that we’ve talked about AI and the pitfalls of technological overexuberance, it’s time to bring it down and discuss mindful self-restraint. I'll open with brief overviews of sociotechnical systems and technocentrism, and then I'll be talking about how the Amish way of life is a direct response to problematic aspects of these topics, before finally bringing it back around to sex.

What are sociotechnical systems?

“Sociotechnical systems,” as I briefly mentioned last month, describe any situation where you have a social system and a technical system which interact. Importantly, this is not the “predictive model” kind of theory, but the “interpretive framework” kind of theory. It doesn’t tell you what will happen, but it gives you a lens through which to examine what has already happened.

Cell phones, and the ways we do and don’t use them, are a sociotechnical system. AI, and the moment we are having about it, is a sociotechnical system. All of our culture around email etiquette? Sociotechnical system. Doomscrolling, and our discourse about it, are also a sociotechnical system. We interact with these technologies, and life goes on, changing and adapting to it—then, the people making and using the technology modify it in response to those experiences. The cycle repeats, and over iterations, we see humans shaping technology, and technology shaping humans back in turn.

My advisor in grad school liked to talk about carpentry tools when he discussed technology. He would bring in a set of tools he made himself at the culmination of his apprenticeship, using the tools of his master before him. He pointed out clear physical differences between his hands, and the hands of those present who had not used such tools for years and years. At the physical level, it's obvious—but at the psychological level, not so much. The point was clear as crystal: we shape our tools, but those tools also subtly shape us back.

At the sociological macro level, it makes all kinds of sense to talk about human-technology interactions this way, because we are doing so as outside observers of situations we cannot control or participate in. But at the individual personal level, each of us is an agent making choices in a constantly-evolving technological landscape. It is easy to say Phones Are Bad, but harder to be mindful of our rectangle time—especially when the pocket rectangle tries so damnably hard to grab our attention, every moment of every day.

Enter: Technocentrism

Except… the phone doesn’t “try” to do anything at all. It’s an inanimate object without agency. The savvy among you have already been down this rabbit hole: yes, technological objects are mere objects, they have no agency, of course. The language we use, when speaking of our objects doing things, is mere language of convenience. It doesn’t mean the object has a mind of its own.

But speaking of the machine as if it has a mind of its own serves to minimize and obscure the involvement and agency of the human beings designing, programming, and selling the machine. The rectangle doesn't try to capture your attention; the people who program your rectangle try to capture your attention. Medication doesn't cure your disease; a doctor prescribes (and you take) the medication to cure your disease. Laws don't force you to do things; people use laws to force you to do things. A pen does not write; a person writes by using a pen.

Crutches do not walk; people use crutches for assistive walking. Airplanes do not fly on their own; people use airplanes for assistive flying. And computers do not think on their own; people use computers for assistive thinking.

In this way, language itself is also a tool, and it intimately shapes our thoughts. George Orwell understood this when he wrote about Newspeak in 1984: it was designed intentionally as a constrained language, for the function of constraining thought. Words both shape and constrain thoughts, they channel them in a robust way, and figures of speech entrench those channels, reinforcing thought-patterns.

And so, the way we use language to talk about technology constitutes us participating in the programming of our own thoughts about technology.

Technocentrism on display (in 4KHD where available)

With this in mind—that technology is “agentically inert,” it does not take actions or make decisions, it has no will of its own but is only a force multiplier for pre-existing human will—let us examine Microsoft’s Superbowl commercial from 2014:

This was clearly intended as a wholesome feel-good bit of inspiration. It’s literally titled “Empowerment”—but through the lens of sociotechnical systems, we see an unapologetically technocentrist viewpoint on display. Technology does these things to us and for us, because we cannot do them ourselves. By eliding the fact that we humans use technology to do these things, and linguistically placing the agency within the technology itself, we are placing this transformative power firmly in the hands of the Tech Bro priesthood, which then hands down blessings to us lowly mortals.

What about the Amish, then?

The first Amish anecdote I heard from my grad advisor was a description of how they use smartphones, embedded in a discussion of technocriticism: thinking critically about not only how we will use a technology, but whether or not to use it at all.

I was surprised to find out that Amish folks (sometimes) use smartphones, but then, I never knew why the Amish appear so resistant to technology. As my advisor explained, the Amish do not “resist” technology in all its forms, but they do criticize technology in all its forms. Like Schumacher’s distinction between person-enhancing tools and person-diminishing machines, the Amish consider how a new technology might be used before deciding whether to incorporate it into their culture (as opposed to us uncritical Philistines who eagerly embrace every shiny new gadget to fall off the assembly line).

In Amish communities where smartphones are used, they tend to be used by families rather than individuals. And they tend to be kept in a small outbuilding, basically a shack with a charger, so that you go to “the phone place” to do your business privately, and then get back to your daily life—much like an outhouse.

What this reminded me of more than anything was the most successful method of quitting nicotine that I’ve ever heard, described to me by a doctor of personal acquaintance some years ago. The idea is that you can follow three simple rules to extinguish the addiction over time, to wit:

1. Smoke as much as you need, not as much as you want. (This is where most people lose it.)
2. Smoke alone, under open sky. (No social smoking, no avoiding the weather.)
3. Keep your cigarettes somewhere inconvenient so you have to physically go somewhere else to get them. (Such as the trunk of your car.)

That’s the whole method. If you follow those three rules scrupulously, then over time it will simply not be worth it to interrupt what you’re doing just to go to your stupid car, open the stupid trunk, and have a stupid cigarette in the stupid rain. Everyone who has “failed” this method has, according to my doctor friend, broken the rules and therefore not actually used them. This isn’t wrongful patient-blaming. The entire point of the rules is to purposefully break the pleasant associations and replace them with unpleasant ones, so if you’re breaking the rules then you’re not breaking the positive associations, and it can’t work the way it’s supposed to. The “rules” aren’t moral commands, they’re functional requirements.

This reminds me of the Amish approach to smartphones, because in this use case, there legitimately are times when it is entirely worth it to go to the stupid phone shack, put in the stupid password, boot up a stupid app, and post an update (or text your friends, or call someone). Big news, hilarious anecdotes, important reminders—Amish people can use smartphones for all these things, they just don’t keep the stupid rectangle in their stupid pockets all stupid day long. And that's how they avoid phone addiction and all the other pitfalls of our pocket rectangles: by scrupulously adhering to rules that functionally prevent addiction from taking root.

I promise this applies to sex

This kind of mindful self-restraint is sorely needed in our hyper-individualist, socially atomized, Late-Stage Capitalist culture. I’ve been talking about ethical sluttery, about queering the culture, about re-writing sex scripts, and about polyamorous breeders being a vector for queer acceptance writ large.

But in all this, I haven’t addressed the “mindless pleasure and meaningless sex” angle. This has mostly been on account of the fact that there's nothing wrong with doing that, as long as you're not doing it in a disordered way that ruins your life. But some people think “mindless pleasure and meaningless sex” is inevitably all that’s left after a certain point on the path of the ethical slut.

That's not true, and I'm living walking breathing proof, because I have sexual anhedonia. That means I can’t feel sexual pleasure at all (don’t worry, I can still feel every other kind), which has forced me to adopt an attitude of equanimity towards my own hypersexuality and Big City Dyke lifestyle. I like my pleasure mindful, and my sex meaningful, and I also want lots of both, and I want them in the context of a life I authentically enjoy living (rather than separate from the rest of my life).

I have no doubt in my mind that if sexual anhedonia could be deliberately induced in the population at large, then the Moral Guardians of our purity-obsessed and increasingly fascist culture would pull that trigger in a heartbeat. They famously don’t care who is marginalized, harmed, or even destroyed in pursuit of building their Shining City On The Hill—the late Charlie Kirk even described gun deaths as a necessary evil for us to have the Second Amendment. Frankly, I’m inclined to take him at his word, given the circumstances of his lateness.

But I’m living proof that even if you take the pleasure entirely out of it, then the drive is still there, and decidedly not for purely rational and procreative reasons. I just have to be a lot more thoughtful about it, since I can’t feel the thing that usually drives out thought. That thoughtfulness is largely owed to my special interest, but also to fact that sex is about more than “just babies” or “just pleasure.”

Sex is about love, and lust, and bonding, and respect, and tension reduction, and joyful affirmation, and cleansing release, and emotional processing, and comfort, and acceptance, and politics, and goodwill, and aggression, and access, and making statements, and self-care, and transcendence, and grounding, and and and… everything. Sex is about everything.

Take away the babies, take away the pleasure, and there’s still everything else. We have to take away the babies to talk about queer folks and our right to authentically exist. And we have to take away the pleasure to talk about everything else being elided by the objection that us committed sluts are just giving ourselves over to mindless pleasure. The former will queer our culture, as I wrote in The Feminist Future of Straight Sex; and the latter will move the conversation beyond that thought-terminating cliche (about mindless pleasure) into actual new territory.

But for it to be sustainable, we’re going to have to display some self-control, we have to follow our rules, and we have to think hard about how we are situating these things in our lives. And in doing this, whether intentionally or not, we will be taking a page from the Amish playbook and applying those principles to our sex lives.