How computers and cellphones are impacting modern Amish communities: helping business owners and craftspeople increase efficiency, anxiety about social effects
sometimes unwillingly — into the 21st century http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Amish have long practiced selective technology adoption, and this piece documents the current frontier: business owners and craftspeople bringing in computers and cellphones for efficiency while the community weighs the social cost. The tension is not unique to them — when the Marubo in the Amazon got Starlink service, the same trade-off surfaced within nine months, with addiction worries and fears of losing cultural identity.
The story also lands amid a broader shift in how outsiders talk about technology: by late 2017, popular anxiety had moved from earlier-era fears toward unease about dominant platforms, as covered in the year-end look at changing tech anxieties. Against that backdrop, a community deliberately negotiating its own terms of adoption reads less like an anomaly and more like an early version of a question everyone else is now asking.
First-order effects
- Amish business owners and craftspeople gain direct efficiency gains from computers and cellphones, improving their competitiveness while remaining inside community norms.
- Community members who object to the devices face a live dispute over where the line sits, since the same tools that help workshops also carry the social effects driving the anxiety.
Second-order effects
- Customers and trading partners of Amish businesses get faster, more connected suppliers, which raises expectations for other small craft producers who still operate without digital tools.
- Neighboring or affiliated Amish settlements face pressure to set their own rules on the same devices, since divergent adoption decisions create competitive asymmetries between otherwise similar communities.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, offline and traditional communities will increasingly adopt technology conditionally — permitting tools for work while restricting them socially — making each community's rulebook a live experiment in managing connectivity.
- The Marubo-Starlink experience suggests the Amish case generalizes: as connectivity reaches previously disconnected groups, the binding constraint shifts from access to governance of use.
The trend: Connectivity is reaching previously offline communities worldwide, forcing each to negotiate explicitly what earlier adopters never had to: which technologies serve livelihoods and which erode the culture they were meant to sustain.