Wendell Berry died this week, and the Atlantic's obituary lands on the sentence that explains everything: forget tomorrow, and work toward what is good today. Berry spent decades writing about the violence of abstraction, the way systems, agricultural, economic, technological, extract value from specific places and specific people by refusing to see them as particular. He wrote about farms. He was writing about everything.
Wendell Berry's Warning and the Creator Economy
The Greg Chism story running on Google this week is the vernacular version of Berry's thesis. Chism was YouTube's first lawn care influencer, a man who built a genuine audience around a specific, useful, place-bound practice. Then YouTube changed its algorithm, its recommendation logic, its monetization rules. He optimized. He chased. He went into hiding for ten years after the platform he had built his livelihood on restructured itself around him. Berry would have recognized the story immediately: a person attached to a particular practice got extracted by a system that only valued their output as long as it served the system's own growth. The land, in this case, belonged to YouTube.
The Anti-A.I.-Ad Ad Campaign running in New York, comedians putting up fake tech product posters including a wearable grandpa and underwear with feelings, is doing something Berry would have approved of, though not necessarily in the way the comedians intend. It is using the form of the system, the poster, the product ad, the tech brand language, to expose the abstraction underneath. The grandpa is wearable because care has been converted into a product category. The joke is that this is not really a joke.
The Platform as Absentee Landlord
The Fast Company piece about the couple who paid $470,000 for a laundromat and watched everything go wrong within days completes the triangle. They thought they were buying a stable, place-bound business. What they discovered was that the business was embedded in systems, supply chains, equipment networks, local regulations, AI-disrupted service economics, they had not priced. Berry's clarifying idea was precisely this: the things that look boring and local and slow are the things that are actually real. The things that promise abstraction and scale and tomorrow are the things that eat you. Nicolas Cevallos's essay on buying for forever in an age of disposable goods is the consumer culture version of the same argument: what we own is increasingly not ours, and what we build on is increasingly not land.