PERSON
Wendell Berry
Farmer, poet, and essayist who spent six decades on the same hillside in Henry County, Kentucky, developing the most searching critique of what the industrial economy does to the relationship between the worker and the domain they tend—a critique that turns out to apply, with uncomfortable precision, to what AI does to the relationship between the builder and the code.
Wendell Berry is not a technologist, and he is not a Luddite. He is a farmer who has tended the same land long enough to understand the difference between use and exploitation—between attending to a living system in ways that leave it healthier, and extracting from it in ways that compound invisibly until the soil no longer holds. The cycle returns to him because his 1977 essay 'The Unsettling of America' contains a sentence that describes the logic of AI-assisted development in 2026 with a precision that should give pause: 'The industrial economy is based on the assumption that it is possible to take without giving back, that the creation is a sort of mining operation.' The tool is new. The logic is not. Berry's framework asks the question the productivity discourse cannot frame: not whether
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