The Amish leave school after the 8th grade and eschew the Internet. Yet their success proves that you don’t need an NBA to run an effective small business. According to Andrea Sachs in Time Magazine (4 Apr 10, p. Global 4): “There’s life in commerce for those more dedicated to the Golden Rule than the golden calf.”

“The Hadza (or Tanzania) are our past, and we are, on a technological time line, the latest advanced human society. During our travel in time from there to here, I wonder when, if ever, our ancestors had the optimal balance of health, security, comfort, and the “Hadza effect.” No doubt this effect is imprinted in all humans; it has just gotten buried in all of our schedules, time crunches, emails, etc. While modern societies have minimized what seemingly plagues the Hadza, your excellent article (and those amazing Hadza faces) illuminates those things we gave up long ago.”

The Internet was of little interest to him. He could see little use for it as it relates to Gaviotas. In fact, he indicated that the Gaviotas community was not connected. He referred to the modern-day’s “autistic society” with less and less face-to-face communications. Personal contact is important to him.

I don’t understand his reaction for a number of reasons, principally because I would think that the Internet could play an important role in education. Additionally, Paolo places a premium on creativity, and being able to search on what others have done would make for more efficient interventions and innovations.

“The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book. . . . It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhatten Project for cultural digitization. What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragment that obscure the context and authorsite of each fragment, there will be only one book. . . .”

“The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disasterously worse. As the famous line goes from “Inherit the Wind”: ‘The Bible is a book . . . but it is not the only book.” Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.”

“Last week, [textbook publisher] Macmillan announced new software to let college instructors rewrite textbooks by substituting new material for what the author wrote . . . We have to wonder about the unintended consequences of a textbook absent an author . . . Technology creates opportunities, and the genie shouldn’t go back in the bottle. Still, the integrity and authenticity that a single author provides should not be lost.”