For those who find the notion of rejecting a computer in favour of a typewriter (or even the typewriter-spouse combo set), maybe pitch the essay in terms of cur

For those who find the notion of rejecting a computer in favour of a typewriter (or even the typewriter-spouse combo set), maybe pitch the essay in terms of current consumer options, such as WiFi-enabled, Internet-connected refrigerators, cookers, clothes-washers, driers, and the like. Or the trajectory of always-connected devices such as Nest thermostats (first editions now EoL'd and abandonware), Ring doorbells (part of state surveillance), or the question of mobile and/or smartphones by students in schools. Berry's arguments and philosophy can be translated to other domains. I'd also strongly suggest you consider that what he was writing about were computers in 1987. The IBM PS/2 was released that year, and featured Intel processors (8086, 80286, or 80386, depending on the model), 512KiB to 64MiB RAM (most shipped with 512KiB -- 4MiB AFAIU), a floppy drive if you were lucky (720 KiB to 1.4 MiB), hard drives were optional, and ranged from about 20 MiB to 400 MiB (again, mostly smaller). There was no networking absent a very rare modem, to which there were few options to connect to, and no public Internet access. Printing was dot-matrix or daisy-wheel. Displays were typically 640x480 pixels, at 256 colours of any (though monochrome displays were common as well). Even the "cruel twist of fate" pseudo-computers most people carry today (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43887109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43887109>) have vastly greater raw performance and interactivity options. They definitely have their negatives, and I'm not convinced of their net usefulness. But used with intention they can in fact be quite useful. (The fact that marketing and design teams deploy billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of engineers to frustrate such intentional use is a major argument against such devices, of course.) I'm cognisant and sympathetic to Berry's arguments, but don't share his outright rejection of much technology, and find several of his arguments and principles unconvincing (see earlier comments in this thread for examples). But even as someone who finds computers generally useful now, I didn't find it persuasive to purchase one of my own until the latter half of the 1990s, and even then what was available as a mid-market personal system was just teetering on the threshold of usability. I'll also note that Berry's argument wasn't that the computers of his time simply weren't very useful. His case is far more fundamental than that. But the combined case would be pretty persuasive, and was: computer owners in 1987 were the overwhelming minority even within quite wealthy nations. And that wouldn't change for at least another decade.