How the Amish Let Technology in Without Letting It Take Over

In 2012, Big Tech was beginning to feel less like a burgeoning industry and more like a fact of daily life. Facebook had hit one billion monthly users, about half of America was regularly using smartphones, and the country was collectively spending about 120 billion minutes a month on social media. From directions to dating to deliveries, the most intimate and mundane routines of American life had suddenly become intermediated by apps that increasingly blurred the lines between convenience and dependence.

Yet, it was at this inflection point — when everyone seemed to be emphatically saying yes to technology — that I began to seriously investigate why a certain community preferred to say no.

I first began studying the Amish in 2012 as a doctoral researcher of media studies at Indiana University, located within a few hours of settlements in Elkhart, LaGrange, and Daviess counties. Going into the project, I knew what most everyone else did: that the Amish prized simple living, communal values, and religious discipline, while resisting certain technologies such as cars, TV, and electricity. In my initial conversations with Amish leaders, they told me that they were worried that new technology might diminish the sense of purpose people in their communities feel. They worried that new communication tools, such as smartphones and social media, would disrupt rituals, traditions, and their established communication patterns. Above all, they wanted to preserve their shared culture in which each person felt spiritually connected to their neighbors and the natural world.

But the more time I spent in these communities — three years total — the more I realized that my original frame on their world was too myopic: It wasn’t the metaphorical fish I was interested in; it was the water. Which is to say that I became less intrigued by Amish restrictions on technology than by the social world they sought to preserve and protect with those restrictions. In the end, I came to realize that the Amish are, in fact, technology-agnostic. They do not care much about what a new technology is or how it works; they care about what its adoption would mean for the surrounding community.

Suffice it to say, this is a vastly different approach from the one that has guided most of the modern world. For example, we adopted smartphones and social media, largely because of their immediate affordances — advances in connectivity, efficiency, convenience — without thinking all that much about what they might take away. In contrast, the Amish approach has always allowed innovation and adaptation insofar as they do not undermine aspects of communal life they care about most.

Few devices demonstrate the Amish’s unique perspective on technology better than the “black-box phone.” On my first day of fieldwork, I interviewed an Amish business owner, Joe, who told me that the contraption was the source of much debate within his Amish settlement. This device is a landline phone with an attachment (a “black box”) that connects the phone to the local cellular network. It is powered by plugging it into an automobile’s cigarette lighter, effectively making it a mobile telephone. Joe showed me a prototype of the mobile version; in his case, the black box and the landline phone were placed in a plywood box for transport, so construction crews could use them on the road.

In Joe’s settlement, the black-box phone was developed in response to a very specific social problem: Roughly 100 crews left the settlement daily for their construction jobs and needed a way to communicate while away from home. At the same time, several ministers believed that the cell phones already adopted by many community members should be abandoned. They worried that private text messages could facilitate extramarital relationships. And smartphones, they feared, tempted users to access unfiltered, immoral content such as pornography, which could undermine human intimacy.

The black-box phone, by contrast, was a happy medium that posed threats to community members’ social and spiritual health. Its design reflects that: The phone is an intentionally bulked-up contraption that enables mobile communications from a vehicle but is highly inconvenient to carry. It only allows public, audible conversations — no texting or internet access. It is also shared among the crew members. Ministers in the settlement hoped that adopting these devices would make individual cell phone ownership among their constituents unnecessary.

As a substitute for cell phones, the black-box phone is a distinctively Amish modification of an existing technology that better aligns with their values. It forces public communicative arrangements, allowing peers to hold each other accountable for their actions. Additionally, this device enables the Amish to achieve their goals and adhere to their social norms without submitting to the individualizing, privatizing, and attention-fragmenting logic of Big Tech.

Another device in the same vein is the “plain computer.” The first plain computer, the “Classic Word Processor,” was created by “horse and buggy” Mennonite Allen Hoover for use by fellow Anabaptists in 2005. It was made, as one early ad puts it, for “plain people by the plain people.” The Classic Word Processor set the bar for later community-led development by allowing users to perform typical 21st-century work functions while omitting features that the Amish might find objectionable. Plain computers such as the Classic allow an individual to write up, edit, and save documents in programs like Microsoft Office, including text-based documents, spreadsheets, and invoices; many are also capable of drawing and printing electronically. They appeal to Amish customers in that they have “no modem, no phone port or internet connection, no outside programs, no sound, no photographs, no games or gimmicks,” according to an ad: “Nothing fancy. Just a workhorse for your business.”

A similar logic inspired Daniel, a furniture maker I met, whose business contacts — primarily non-Amish individuals — had gradually moved all their ordering functions online. Daniel did not use the internet or email, which put his business at risk. But one day, while reading The Plain Communities Business Exchange, a monthly Amish business paper that provided workarounds and tech solutions for the community, he discovered a service called PcFreeMail.

PcFreeMail, popular among the Amish, allows users to exchange emails via a fax machine or a word processor without the internet. Daniel can now print his correspondence with customers and receive their orders via the fax machine in his office. To be sure, this process is a whole lot slower and more cumbersome than a modern customer-management system like Salesforce — but deliberately so: It allows Daniel to preserve the integrity of his business without compromising his values.

Unusual socio-technical arrangements, such as the black-box phone, the plain computer, and PcFreeMail, abound in Amish life. These arrangements often signal both a deep deference to Amish authorities and resistance to non-Amish ways. Still, questions about “proper usage” are never settled once and for all; they are constantly being negotiated by members and leaders.

One of my closest Amish contacts was Noah, a 57-year-old entrepreneur and self-described “technology buff.” Noah himself was a minister yet used a smartphone, email, and text messages, and even had a Facebook account. His usage was animated by the three C’s: conviction (modeling the right behavior), confession (asking others to hold you accountable), and contrition (being willing to own up to your mistakes). “Whether or not you use a technology is less important than how you use it,” he told me. Noah embodied a more progressive approach that puts more emphasis on intentionality than on blanket rules, and he was hardly an outlier: Time and again in my fieldwork, I spoke with Amish people who belonged to a church that had a rule against owning a cell phone, yet they owned one.

At a cynical first glance, one might simply read this as blatant hypocrisy. But my interviews with Amish leaders suggest that such inconsistencies are not evidence of people exploiting loopholes in the Ordnung (i.e., the church rules). Instead, they reveal that community members have the freedom to adapt, choosing tools precisely tailored to their work, fulfilling their values, and maintaining community. These individual decisions are made through sustained conversation within families and church communities but are not inscribed in the Ordnung.

I observed three types of informal mechanisms that work alongside formal rules to constrain and tailor tools to desired ends: (1) teaching the “proper use” of a technology, (2) relying on old arrangements to guide future action, and (3) presenting proper use as a symbol of group identity.

Those most responsible for teaching the “proper use” of technology were moral authorities such as bishops, ministers, and deacons. Their role was not just to execute institutionalized processes but also to understand how members feel about issues surrounding technology adoption or rejection. Often, it is in these interpersonal interactions that church leaders have more power to influence and regulate social change. Thus, the rule-making process involves holding, curating, and provoking informal (sometimes public, sometimes private) conversations with church members that can sway public opinion within the close-knit social network in one direction or another.

Sam, a businessman I met, said this kind of teaching is especially important, particularly for children entering adolescence: “We must teach young people ‘the why’ of what we [cannot] do as Amish.” From this viewpoint, technology use is not a space where actions become divorced from values, nor is it separate from other ways of acting in the world. It is simply seen as another annex of social life where deeply ingrained Amish values are enacted.

After interviewing approximately 30 Amish thought leaders, I found that they were diligent in configuring their social world so that technology remains at the margins of what is important to them. They see technology as a means to an end. Holistically, their socio-technical arrangements prioritize deference to Amish authorities, a desire to live in accordance with spiritual directives, and making their dependence on nature and each other tangible. When adopted, technology often includes intentional friction that limits and inconveniences users while allowing users to sustain themselves financially in a fast-paced capitalistic economy.

Make no mistake, I am not suggesting Amish society is some kind of utopia. Children receive relatively little formal education, medicine is limited, gender roles are strictly enforced, and the shunning of the excommunicated can be devastating. Nor am I arguing that the Amish model of technological adoption, with all its idiosyncrasies, can be simply transplanted wholesale onto modern life.

I am simply pointing out that there are useful nuggets of wisdom in the Amish approach. Technology can be greatly empowering, but it’s important to remember that the social arrangements — that is, the white space around new tech — should always take at least equal focus. A collective approach to determining how things like smartphones, social media, and AI should be used is a step toward resisting their deleterious effects on our mental and social well-being, which we often only appreciate after the fact. We should strive — perhaps not unlike the Amish — to accept only the advances that meaningfully improve our lives, while negotiating those that erode the practices, beliefs, and relationships that make life worth living.

Lindsay Ems is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Butler University. She is the author of “Virtually Amish.” An open-access version of the book can be found here.