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humility, self-sufficiency, and creative expression, which they believed they could only cultivate by working with "outdated" technology.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. 

Erik Baker is Lecturer on the History of Science at Harvard University and Senior Editor of The Drift. His first book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, was published in 2025 by Harvard University Press. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Nation, and elsewhere.