Refusal as discipline: communities that govern tools by rule — fasting from technologies that would dissolve the goods the community exists to keep.
Techno-asceticism treats the refusal or strict rule-bound limitation of technologies as a spiritual discipline: as fasting governs food, so a community may govern tools, accepting inconvenience as the price of goods that convenience would dissolve. The Amish Ordnung is its most developed form — a communal rule, revised in council, that admits technologies which strengthen the community and refuses those which dissolve it (the car, the grid connection) while often accepting the same technology in a bounded form (the hired driver, the battery, the phone shanty at the lane’s end).
The model also appears inside majority cultures: monastic rules for media, Sabbath movements against the phone, and secular digital minimalism all borrow its logic. Its claim is empirical as much as theological — that some goods exist only under restraint — and its test is whether the community that practices it flourishes on terms it can recognize as its own.
References
- Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner & Steven M. Nolt, The Amish (2013)
- Wendell Berry, ‘Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer’ (1987)