The Virtues of Technological Obsolescence: Day, Berry, Lo-fi

The Virtues of Technological Obsolescence: Day, Berry, Lo-fi

Audio recording of a lecture given by Erik Baker on December 12, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “People who are concerned about technological change, or who resist the adoption of new technologies, are often depicted as motivated by either an irrational fear of novelty or a purely material concern for their livelihoods. In this lecture, however, I show that many people in the modern U.S. who’ve sought to live and work with technical methods deemed obsolete have instead been animated by their desire to pursue a set of virtues they feel they could not achieve utilizing state-of-the-art technologies. I focus on three distinctive cultural milieus: the Catholic Worker movement led by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the 1930s and 1940s; the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s, whose ideals were eloquently expressed by the poet and farmer Wendell Berry; and the ‘lo-fi’ music movement of the 1990s, exemplified by artists such as Pavement, Guided by Voices, and the Mountain Goats. To a surprising extent, these movements all prized a common set of virtues, including humility, self-sufficiency, and creative expression, which they believed they could only cultivate by working with ‘outdated’ technology. But they differed in their assessment of the extent to which it was possible for individuals to fully perform these virtues without broader changes to the political and economic structures of modern society.”

Santa Fe, NM

2025-12-12

Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.

sound

mp3

English

SF_BakerE_The_Virtues_of_Technological_Obsolescence_2025-12-12

M4A

00:58:29