You know how it’s sometimes kinda neat to look at pictures of people’s desks or workspaces? It’s strangely revealing and I always end up looking at posts like that, even if I have no idea who the people are I’m peeking into.
Over the years I remember none of those “what’s on my desk” posts individually. But I remember a lot of trends.
It’s rare that anyone we could all handily agree are “top performers” in their field have some pristine workspace, free of clutter and with a chic, minimal aesthetic. Top performers, it seems to me, have a lot of stuff going on. Stacks of paper. Piles of books and magazines. Notepads galore, all in a relatively cramped space. Others, like woodworkers, often have tools in places but the collection of it all together is kind of an organized chaos. In modern times, there’s a computer there, somewhere, but it’s not the center of their space.
I’m also struck by how many of our best thinkers and top-performers have consistently worked to go slower. Historian David McCullough once remarked in an interview, “People ask me all the time how I do it. They tell me I could go faster with a computer. And I tell them I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I want to go slower.” Robert Caro echoes this with his “turn every page” mantra.
McCullough died a few years ago having never used a computer. He used a typewriter and a pen, and, frankly, I’m flabbergasted by that. Someone has to type this stuff into a computer eventually just to publish the dang book. Apparently, that job was hoisted on to some intern at Simon & Schuster. But it also surely produced yet another set of eyes on every piece.
The one person in history I can think of that really stands apart from the doctrine of efficiency is Henry Ford. Seems Ford was certainly all about speeding things up. I think we’re all worse for it in a lot of ways. More on this in a moment.
There are tech-forward people that would claim they’re all about progress. Certainly Elon Musk and his ilk. But on the whole, the people I look at and think, “There’s a level-headed person doing great things” hasn’t been afraid to slow themselves down.
This is starting to seem familiar
As the machinery of the world marches forward, much of which is powered by fossil fuels burning inside Henry Ford’s engines, I keep wondering if maybe the Luddites and the Amish are the only sane people. Mark Twain once quipped “The suicides” are the only sane people, so maybe I’m just not far enough long in my thinking yet.
Every day more people who were skeptics of recent “progress”, like in AI, come around to say, “Actually, this is pretty great.” And I’m sure it is. I sometimes use ChatGPT to do some chore of a task and while it’s never great, it’s at least faster.
In Great by Choice, Jim Collins and Morten Hansen wrote:
On the one hand, 10Xers understand that they face continuous uncertainty and that they cannot control, and cannot accurately predict, significant aspects of the world around them. On the other hand, 10Xers reject the idea that forces outside their control or chance events will determine their results; they accept full responsibility for their own fate.
I, like a lot of people in tech, live like a brown squirrel in winter, always fidgeting and living in panic that something’s going to come along and annihilate me. AI certainly has that aura about it. “It’s not great, but I guess I have to use this now.” I have to accept some fate here somewhere.
Still, something about being pushed along by the progress of the machine is deeply unsettling. “Well, this is what we do now for efficiency,” seems like a fool’s errand. I’m reminded of Harry Truman’s remark “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” And Twain’s, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.”
Agriculture’s AI moment is rhyming
Farming certainly had its AI moment in the 1930s into the 50s and onward. The sheer increase in power tractors had over horses enabled farmers to crop enormous acreages. The government heralded this efficiency and encouraged farmers to farm more and more land. “We can feed the world” was the thought, and, it was largely true. America did feed the world — certainly in the aftermath of WWII. In many ways, we continue to do so despite some recent setbacks.
Wendell Berry wrote in 1978:
“At the peak of their development, the old horse tools were excellent. The coming of the tractor made it possible for a farmer to do more work, but not better. And there comes a point, as we know, when more begins to imply worse. The mechanization of farming passed that point long ago — probably…when it passed from horse power to tractor power.”
He goes on to say “The coming of a tool, then, can be a cultural event of great influence and power. Once that is understood, it is no longer possible to be simpleminded about technological progress. It is no longer possible to ask, What is a good tool? without asking at the same time, How well does it work? and What is its influence?
This feels familiar.
In Berry’s experience way back in 1978, everything in agriculture was about speed and efficiency. Do twice as much with half as much. Do it twice as fast. You can imagine all sorts of farmers standing around, noticing their neighbor with the new tractor planting a row of seeds before the horse can even get out of the barn, then thinking, “Jiminy, I need to get one of those.” This led to the dust bowl, though. Oops.
I think it’s arguably true that the state of our agriculture systems, at least in the United States in 2026, are not great. Large, industrial confined animal feed lots, the sheer pain animals are in, the pressure to grow them fatter and faster, the scale of industrial dairy operations, the pollution and run-off, the methane, the water consumption in places that can’t support it, the soil erosion, the compaction of the land, the abandonment of any land that doesn’t support large flat tracks of tractor-ready track, and the constant slaps and swipes at the earth.
“Good work and craftsmanship cannot be accomplished by “slaps” and “swipes”. Such language seems to be devised from the he-man vocabulary of TV western, not from any known principles of good agriculture,” writes Berry.
This feels familiar.
And then there’s the economic impact. In the 1970s, American farmers were about 4% of the population. Today they’re less than 1%. The cost of this efficiency is staggering in its environmental impact, the debt these “small” farmers carry for mortgages on land, homes, tractors, feed, and equipment. There’s the monopolizing of seeds and the constant use of chemical treatments and additives to the soil that farmers are forced to use either by contract or default after their soil is depleted. Or, worse, a farmer who tries to resist and ends up with squandered land from seeds, chemicals, or additives that blow or wash over from a neighboring farm or stream.
The obvious counter to all this is “Well how would everyone eat?” And that’s fair. Certainly no one ever ate chicken before Tyson and Perdue came along.
Suppose, then, that in 1945 we decided in the face of all this mechanization that we valued the human, animal, and plant life more than we valued “economic growth” and sheer technological progress for the sake of progress. Suppose we decided as a nation that we valued healthy local communities, farmers, homesteads, and cities with the same resolve for which we built the military-industrial complex. Suppose that we lived like we said we wanted to: that we really did value the traditions and values we’ve long given lip service.
In that alternative history, we’d probably have accepted some ecological and economical limits. There wouldn’t be avocados and strawberries in the grocery stores every day of the year. We might have continued to use horse-drawn tools on small farms to farm hillsides and uneven land in New England or the south that we’ve long since abandoned due to the needs of the tractor. We’d probably have more farmers, as kids and grandkids continued to operate generationally, which would also mean fewer people in cities. Small towns would have benefited. We’d have less debt. Our country would be more resilient in many ways. We’d probably have settled into less income, but inflation would be lower. And there would probably be fewer people in some respects as birth rates might have settled (or, maybe not, maybe we’d all have more kids to help on the farms). And that labor would be used in the same place where we saved it. And we’d probably have healthier soil and ecology as farmers did what they always did, alternating crops and letting the soil maintain itself.
This feels familiar.
The AI mechanization
I know that technological determinists will view this all as wishful thinking or some bygone past that was never going to continue to exist. I’m not arguing we should all “go back to plowing with horses”. AI has all the same force of progress, government backing, and wind at its sails as the tractor. But it does seem like we had a moment in the 1940s where we could make a choice. We could have made choices that didn’t just pay lip service to the Jeffersonian values of local towns and homesteads that were self-supporting.
I know that some people hear all this and think this sounds terrible. They like the fact they can swipe at their phone and text photos of memes and don’t like going outside and love that Doordash and Amazon exist as they do today.
But what did we lose in all this progress? Millions of people lost financial independence. They lost a sense of scale and the democratic ideals of small communities and neighbors. They lost seasons. Farmers used to slow down in winter. No one slows down at all anytime, ever, now!
We gave up a chance to sustain the earth. We foreclosed on the idea of preserving water and other conservation. We abandoned husbandry and good stewardship of the earth, the very thing the Bible preaches us to do straight from the word of God. We gave up our health in favor of poisoned water and monocrops. We decided it was fine to be reliant upon commerce for everything from chairs to lettuce. We literally just plowed ahead with fossil fuels and abandoned all the things John Adams thought life was worth living for like the crafts of metalwork, woodwork, pottery, clothes making, and even educating our children to the needs of the broader machine.
I know this is all arguably “man’s destiny”, social Darwinism, or just the laws of economics. I just happen to think maybe it would have been nice to at least be able to make my own choice that the machines should adapt to me, not the other way around.
This all feels familiar. I feel like the farmer standing in his field who knew his land and respected the place as my neighbor rips into the earth with the force of a thousand horses. And somehow this is just how it has to be.
