:. e-mail this article :. print this article :. comment on this article

Suffering From Technophobia

When our fathers wanted to hear bad music, they either had to make it themselves or go to the place where it was being made; when they wished to smoke a cigar, they had to light a match. Today we sit in our armchairs and merely press buttons. What a manifest sign of our superiority!
— Aldous Huxley

Just as the 19th century's industrial revolution brought on an inevitable backlash -- led by back-to-Nature activists like Ned Ludd, and later, Leo Tolstoy and William Morris -- the wide-ranging cultural exploits of today's Wired-influenced school of hyper-capitalist techno-geeks has given rise to a contemporary minimalist-geek counter-revolution: from the anarcho-primitivist Unabomber Manifesto, to Kirkpatrick Sale's New Luddite writings, to PBS' pop-historical House series, namely the recent Colonial House offshoot. Amazingly, this phenomenon has infiltrated prime-time TV, with The Simple Life. Millions of us now get sadistic pleasure from watching some dingbat heiress ineptly perform manual labor on a farm. Well, replace airhead heiress with bumbling academic, and you might have Eric Brende's Better Off, an admirable, but ultimately unconvincing study on how to prosper sans the numbing technological trappings of the Dilbert Age.

Better Off is marketed as a quasi-scientific study out to prove that most modern "timesaving" technology is frivolous, and often leads to more inconvenience and less efficiency. Yet the book reads like a haphazardly scribbled diary-the text, at best, yielding a few thought-provoking hypotheses, a few keen observations, and loads of conjecture. By no means is Brende presenting a point-by-point exposition or a gathering of empirical truths leading to some irrefutable conclusion.

As a real-life extension of a MIT master's thesis, Brende and his wife Mary relocate to a remote, undisclosed location outside of Lancaster County, PA. Here they rent a small farmhouse and garden from the Millers, a strict neo-Mennonite family. Brende's expectations for this rural "expedition" as he calls it, seem to constantly shift in the face of this borrowed life as a modern-day vassal. They've actually settled in what's actually referred to as a "Minimite" society, a sub-sect of Mennonites who live off the land, preach Gelassenheit ("self-surrender") and also "cheat" in the sense that they sometimes avail themselves of certain modern conveniences: use of communal pay phones and motor vehicles is allowed in emergencies. Even so, Brende insists "going motorless was critical."

However, in a portentous early scene, Miller assigns greenhorn Brende the initially daunting task of mowing the lawn with a push-mower. In Minimite land, lawn mowing is a chore usually reserved for nine-year-old girls. The overeducated boob doesn't seem to grasp the irony of this sly gesture until much later. In fact, even the cattle seem to smell a displaced blueblood in their midst, as Brende is chased by a frisky herd of baby steers. Such unintentionally funny moments prove to be the book's only consistent appeal.

Brende and wife do win a few victories over technological dependence. Most of these victories are won via mind over muscle: using kerosene lamps, creating natural air conditioning (by redirecting existing air currents), and refrigerating perishable goods using a shed, sawdust and pond ice. Brende and wife also discover the joys of canning, cow-milking, bean-picking, pumpkin-harvesting, using simple hydraulics; they're also introduced to the conversational camaraderie forged through collective effort. These small successes inspire much romantic musing on the "exotic" qualities of manual labor. Behold, Brende's Keatsian ode to weed-pulling: "Each new weed, staunch and muscular in its defiance posed a new mental knot to untangle." Brende also discovers that physical labor burns calories and brings on "ravenous hunger." Egad!

And for our painfully unhip technophobe couple, certain "exotic" menial tasks have inexplicable aphrodisiac qualities. Brende gets an erotic charge from Mary's use of the hand-cranked washing machine: "I sensed more than willingness in her movements; I sensed zest." Often they'll interrupt their work-study program to make the Beast with Two Backs in sexy agricultural settings--sometimes doing it in the cornfields, or in the pumpkin patch. "It was as if the field were there to harvest us," he writes, "... At the stroke of midnight we shed our mortal shells and became prince and princess of creation... ceremoniously joined with nature... in a feast of love." So when Mary's pregnant by page 75, you're not exactly shocked.

Several months pass and Brende's fascination with physical exertion dwindles considerably, especially when confronted with the excruciating task of threshing wheat in hot weather. Now when he's not suffering from heatstroke, sneezing fits, dropsy, or general muscle fatigue, he's making clumsy attempts at chopping wood and beheading chickens. He's also forced into selling canned sorghum molasses outside the local strip mall. Meanwhile, back on the farm, the Millers and other fellow field hands begin to openly mock him, rather than couching their criticisms in Pinter-esque innuendo as before. Yes, what once seemed a noble academic study has devolved into a nightmarish struggle with mundane bucolic reality: "with the throbbing headache, it was hard to work up enthusiasm for life without motors," laments our demoralized hero.

During the latter stages of his wife's pregnancy, an increasingly hysterical Brende finds himself embracing previously unthinkable measures-i.e. speeding Bullitt-like around the community in his automobile, fetching baby supplies from the nearest K-Mart. Ironically, the final crushing defeat comes when the couple trades their car for a horse and buggy. While navigating his horse-drawn carriage, Brende observes, "the wagon was like a moving front porch, and we became temporary neighbors to every household we passed." This just after a shifting wind sprinkles his face with a certain pungent, shall we say, equine cologne. Then we learn that his poor wife is violently allergic to horse dander.

So after twelve long months of trial-and-error experimentation, the shaken Brendes finally bolt from Amish country. They buy a modest house in the Midwest, and set up a Bed and Breakfast. Brende begins making soap (a considerably less taxing avocation than wheat threshing). He also secures a job driving a non-fuel consuming rickshaw. He admits that his B&B's success can be attributed to his ability to advertise on the Internet. And his rickshaw taxi business is well served by a computer and cell phone. He now confesses to being an occasional "tele-voyeur" and that, in fact, "too little (technology) is no better than too much."

Overall, the Brendes' experiment finds very limited success. They do finally manage to achieve a livable happy medium between abject deprivation and total subservience to technology. Unfortunately, however, one senses the book becoming more of a lame apologia for the moderate use of technology, rather than emphasizing the merits of "flipping the switch" on all things electric. And it wouldn't be completely unfair to conclude that the Brendes' life on the Minimite farm ends up being the very "test of endurance" they once feared.