
Amish Hackers (2009) - newswasboring
https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/
======
rkagerer
My dad spends his summers near an Amish settlement. By settlement, I mean vast
tracts of land with several farms. He buys most of his eggs, fruits,
vegetables, etc. from them. They sell goods at a local farmers market, and
when "organic" and "free range" became a fad, these guys put a giant photo in
front of their stall of their chickens frolicking in huge paddocks with the
words "FREE RANGE" below it - doesn't get more authentic than that.

He's gotten pretty friendly with them over the years. When we bring friends
along to their farms to pick up goods, they're always shocked how contemporary
these guys are.

One of them has a pretty sophisticated machine shop, with tools like drill
presses, saws, sanding belts, etc. all driven by a series of axles forming a
mechanical drivetrain that snakes throughout the barn (eventually to a very
old diesel motor).

A couple of the young men came out to frame a house he's building. Once on a
day off, they arrived by carriage and brought a pair of young Amish ladies
with them to hang out at the beach. The next day, my dad found one of the
girl's leggings left behind. He was discreet enough to return it to the girl's
younger brother, instead of her dad.

All the kids know how to use iPhones - they sometimes ask to borrow his so
they can make a call.

One of the more technically inclined gentleman even showed up one day with a
cutting-edge drone, and had a blast flying it around with my dad. He made it
very clear his wife isn't allowed to know he owns it! Last I heard that same
guy is helping plan a solar array my dad wants to install to go off-grid.

~~~
flycaliguy
Maybe the wife isn’t allowed to know about the drone because she’s currently
cleaning his dirty underwear by hand?

~~~
titanomachy
Good point, I wonder if they are also slow to adopt social trends. If they're
50 years behind in technology, does that mean they're also just starting to
consider women's liberation? The author seemed to interact only with men. Are
the bishops who decide what technology to adopt also all men?

~~~
NotSammyHagar
Great points, it's virtually guaranteed that as in many other religious groups
there is a notion of "protecting" women by taking such decisions away from
them or restricting them from various roles. The southern baptist church in
the us remains inordinately focused on limiting women's roles. Women shouldn't
be priests, in some places they allow them, other places look askance at that.

~~~
heartbeats
That is just a matter of basic theological fidelity; the matter is spelled out
very clearly in the Bible[0]. You can't just pick and mix which parts of it
you'd like to selectively ignore and claim it's 'up to interpretation'.

[0] Timothy 2:11-12

~~~
lozaning
And yet I dont know of a single Christian that follows the rules against
wearing blended material garments laid out in Leviticus 19:19.

My parents are Deacons in their local church, and believe you me, they pick
and choose which parts to interpret as allegory and which parts to interpret
literally all the time.

~~~
mattr47
That is part of the ritual law, something a follower/disciple of Jesus is not
required to do. In fact as a follower of Jesus there are no rules other than
2. Love God and love others. Everything else flows from that as far as the
instruction gave like Jesus did in his Sermon on the Mount.

Someone who has said, hey I declare that Jesus is my Lord and Savior, and
truly believes it will of course do things. Not because they have to, but
because they want to.

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rossdavidh
I am reminded of how much more difficult it would be to drive a car, if you
had no Reverse gear. Our society, generally, has only every once in a great
while successfully reversed on a technology. This means that we have to either
ban it proactively, which requires us to be able to predict its consequences,
or else adopt it and hope for the best.

The Amish subculture seems to have a functional reverse gear, allowing them to
try out a technology and then decide not to allow it after all. It would be a
good feature to have, for our society more generally.

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tapland
If you look around there are hacks and DIY solutions to problems everywhere!

No matter the hobby or location you can be sure that space had hackers and
tinkers. Some really cool hacks come out of restrictions and lack of money for
what we would consider 'proper' solutions, and each technology however
analogue will be a space with its own hackers.

I really enjoy writeups like this of ingenious solutions to problems I will
never face. Growing up having friends living on old farms far away from
villages or towns I got to see some crazy contraptions, my favorites of which
were probably various uses of streams (of water) for mechanical work.

~~~
elliekelly
I traveled to Cuba in 2012 as part of a research trip and seeing all the ways
people have managed to hack together fixes for everything was perhaps the most
incredible part of the experience. The embargo makes it difficult for Cubans
to get a lot of things we take for granted but the Cuban people are perhaps
the most inventive I've ever met. Living under the sanctions for decades has
made creative problem solving a part of their culture.

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roland35
Amish are certainly an interesting group and I have a lot of respect for their
work ethic! I recently had an Amish crew reside my house and they showed up
every day with their driver at 6am! I am not sure how long the commute was but
we live about an hour from Amish country.

They also had a young boy, maybe 12-14 years old, apprenticing with them. I
believe Amish only need to do K-8 school and then they start their careers.

~~~
not_buying_it
The Amish are extremely honest people in my experience. The ones I have met
selling homemade goods and foods are fastidious about not charging for old
food (e.g. 2 day old bread is free) regardless of whether it is still good and
could be sold. I think the work ethic ties in with this, they see hard work as
the only honest path in some way I think. In either case, it makes them some
of the best handymen and construction workers:)

~~~
starpilot
Except for stuff like this
[https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a30284631/amish-
sexua...](https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a30284631/amish-sexual-abuse-
incest-me-too/)

~~~
NotSammyHagar
Oh my god, that's so horrifying. If you are in an insular community the idea
that you want to hide abuse because it makes the group look bad, that's the
same thinking that lead to decades of widespread abuse by priests in the
catholic church. In america especially we have a blind eye toward the behavior
of religious groups. There are other religious groups in america that have
these self-reinforcing "the only way to be in the world is with us" behaviors.
I'm sure there are also lots of decent people who are Amish too (probably
doesn't need to be stated, there are decent people everywhere and in every
group).

Blind allegiance to a group leads to endemic corruption, always has, always
will.

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tewarbit
"They often don’t have logical reasons for their policies" ...goes on to
explain the logical reasons for why certain Amish communities refuse to use
automobiles, closed carriages, etc.

~~~
yboris
I have read that the Amish make explicit decisions about whether to accept a
certain technology into their communities.

A specific example was about technology that saved many hours of simple/light
mechanical work for women: as a result, it eliminated the communal practice
for women to be together in a large room talking while doing it. The
technology was tried but then removed, as the result was less communal
engagement.

To oversimplify: we default to using whatever comes up (Facebook, etc),
whereas their approach is to evaluate the new thing as a community and decide.

~~~
pandesmos
That is really interesting and echoes some of what Camille Paglia has to say
about washing in Italian immigrant communities. Do you have the source handy?
I’d love to check it out.

~~~
yboris
It was _The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being_ by
Daniel M. Haybron

[https://books.google.com/books?id=jAEBzgqniMAC&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=jAEBzgqniMAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=philosophy+of+unhappiness&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjbpZLvudHnAhVRvFkKHXETDlAQ6AEwAHoECAgQAg#v=onepage&q=amish&f=false)

I read numerous books on topic of Positive Psychology ... a really good
academic one, tying together the field into a unifying framework is: _The Good
Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being_ by Michael A.
Bishop

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krm01
It's unfortunate that somehow, I just read an awesome article on (amish)
hackers and technology, but leave the page only remembering the spambot
comments at the bottom. Kevin (and other bloggers who have the same problem),
if you read this, please disable comments in your posts. They provide hardly
any value and just ruin the experience.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
You should have kept reading. Right after the initial spambot comments, there
were some really deep and useful comments from members/neighbors of Amish and
Mennonite communities.

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laszlokorte
Would be cool to see a whole free open source digital computing/communication
platform of selfmade hardware and software built be the amish.

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cat199
Every time I think about Amish & technology I'm reminded of the Capability
Maturity Model:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model#Leve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model#Levels)

1) Initial (chaotic, ad hoc, individual heroics) - the starting point for use
of a new or undocumented repeat process.

2) Repeatable - the process is at least documented sufficiently such that
repeating the same steps may be attempted.

3) Defined - the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process

4) Capable - the process is quantitatively managed in accordance with agreed-
upon metrics.

5) Efficient - process management includes deliberate process
optimization/improvement.

Amish tech processes seem to me higher up the chain than most people, so from
this point of view, they are actually more advanced..

~~~
blaser-waffle
I think it's more like they're willing to outsource / be late adopters, so
that when they're seriously thinking about a technology it's already on Stage
4 or 5

------
flyinghamster
To some extent, I have a similar attitude about technology, though I draw the
lines far differently than the Amish. I was a latecomer to smartphones, and
even though I use one for a variety of purposes, I don't spend all day with my
face buried in it - and I'm very picky about what apps I'll install. Facebook?
Instagram? Hell no.

Back in my twenties, I started noticing that there really wasn't much on TV
that I wanted to watch, and so never got around to subscribing to cable. To
me, in the intervening years, TV has only become worse. My TV set spends most
of its time as a large monitor.

~~~
LeonM
> Back in my twenties, I started noticing that there really wasn't much on TV
> that I wanted to watch, and so never got around to subscribing to cable. To
> me, in the intervening years, TV has only become worse. My TV set spends
> most of its time as a large monitor.

Same here. I grew up with television, but once I got my first own apartment I
never bothered to get a cable subscription. I have a TV in my living room, but
I consider it as a monitor for my game console and chromecast.

The first thing people ask me when they hear I don't have a cable subscription
is usually: how do you watch the news then? The answer is simple: Except for
stuff that interests me (tech mostly) I do not read, watch or listen the
generic news. Most news is depressing anyways, and you really don't miss out
on anything imo.

~~~
bluGill
What I miss the most is local news. If something happens in Italy (pick a
random country that is far away from my US home) that matters to me I will
hear about it. However if something happens on my block I am unlikely to hear
about it because things that close to home matter even when they are well
below insignificant on the scale of national (or even state level) news.

Note that news shows cover a much larger area than my neighborhood and
wouldn't give me that anyway. What I need most is a local newspaper with a
small circulation.

~~~
jermaustin1
This is why I pay for a couple of my local "papers". Thankfully I live in a
section of New York (Halfway between Poughkeepsie and Peekskill) with loads of
them. I'm sure a lot of mediumly populated places have at least one. Even my
town of 600 has it's own paper - that I don't subscribe to because they
distribute them to most of the shops in town.

Even if they have a political slant (which (a lot|most|all) of them do), it's
easy to ignore that coverage and focus on the truly local news. Also, tons of
local gossip.

------
dang
A thread from 2013:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6317761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6317761)

2010:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046378)

Discussed (barely) at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476454)

------
heartbeats
> My impression is that the Amish are living about 50 years behind us. They
> don’t adopt everything new but what new technology they do embrace, they
> take up about half a century after everyone else does. By that time, the
> benefits and costs are clear, the technology stable, and it is cheap.

Yeah, this is definitely a sensible approach to doing things. They get most of
the benefits of modernity, but few of the downsides. I wish our regulators
would do the same.

quasi-relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/606/](https://xkcd.com/606/)

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zwieback
Nice - learned something today. Before reading this article everything I knew
about the Amish was from the movie Witness.

~~~
hackbinary
Not Kingpin?

;)

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durpleDrank
The comment section of the article is filled with funny bot spam, worth a
glance for a chuckle. Guys advertising "whatsapp hacking" services with a
"customer" replying to the ad vouching for them.

~~~
rhoyerboat
those people are abusing disqus across practically every site that uses it
which ive visited in recent memory. wish they could get a handle on it, its a
pretty useful plugin except for the apparent shitpot security. maybe its up to
site moderators and they don't do the work, maybe the disqus audience is
particularly vulnerable to soc.eng .. w/e, bummer.

~~~
KajMagnus
Seems as if unapproved comments got auto hidden after a few days or a week,
all that spam would disappear?

There are _real_ comments too, though, starting from 8 years ago: _" I can't
say that I would ever manage to live like this, but I applaud their
motivations behind it. // ... Why they don’t use automobiles ... // Actually,
some do. ... Local church elders basically determine what is acceptable ..."_

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PaulDavisThe1st
Title should note that the article is from 2009.

~~~
dang
Added. Thanks!

