What Do I Believe In?

2026-08-29T00:00:00Z

"What do I believe in?”. We all ask ourselves this question at some point in our lives. In the late Wendell Berry’s ¹ essay “Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer” ² he outlined his own beliefs and, throughout the essay, why they mattered to him:

[...] peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.

I think most people would align with these beliefs, myself included. What I would add or expand on is:

The natural world, conservation, and ecological morality
Culture and art
Family, friendship, and community

Like Berry, I do not see that AI is bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me. It is well established that AI data centres consume and pollute, the industries they power are innately political, and—speaking from a design perspective—the work is no longer good.

But I’m not naive, I know AI has some fantastic applications. I think being anti-AI because of ecological reasons is in many ways hypocritical (see: water use in dairy farming, powering Meta’s servers, using contactless payments)

Like almost everybody else, I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire. I hope to become less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible.

It could read: “Like almost everybody else, I am hooked to the AI corporations, which I do not admire[...]”

“Wendell Berry, US Author, Dead at 92.” (The Guardian), 2026. ↩
Wendell Berry, “Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer” (PDF), 1987. ↩

Tony

2026-08-16T00:00:00Z

Matt Johnson's Tony was perfect for a Saturday afternoon.

Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann

2026-08-10T00:00:00Z

The Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann has been universally praised, and rightly so. It was a fantastic week of music and culture, of shared interested, and of community. Notable highlights for me were Ispíní na hÉireann and Sean McKenna.

Aaron Gilmore

What Do I Believe In?

Tony

Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann