Just wanted to say that this is a great piece of writing, Paul. Really appreciate your arguments. I am someone who is absolutely not a craftsperson, but I "teach animation" and I am extremely interested in craft and the handmade. The reason I put "teach animation" in scare quotes is because I am really a film/media studies guy, who teaches theory and history...and, as I say, has great interest in craft and craft traditions. I am supervising a PhD student at the moment whose research is on animators' relationships with tools and objects (she is a stop motion animator). You'd have a great conversation 😀 best wishes, Paul (Ward)
Thank you Paul, I really appreciate this thoughtful comment.
What’s especially encouraging to me is hearing from people outside traditional workshop trades who still recognise something important in these questions around craft, tools, objects, and material culture.
Your mention of animation is fascinating as well because I suspect there are strong parallels there. Even though the materials and outputs are different, there is still a relationship between hand, eye, judgement, repetition, patience, and the gradual shaping of something through practice.
I’d probably have a great conversation with your PhD student because I increasingly think many different disciplines are circling similar questions about embodiment, meaning, and what gets lost when human beings become detached from direct engagement with materials and processes.
I wanted to respond to this, but couldn't find the right hook to begin writing (I'm not a natural writer ...). The article in The Economist linked below provided a hook. And then I saw a very short summary of this that you posted as a comment on Grace Blakely's substack and responded with the following there:
I can appreciate there are some (like yourself) that prefer working with your hands. But you have to admit that mechanization etc. has propelled civilization farther forward than otherwise.
Working with your head also produces judgement, confidence, responsibility and belonging and can utilize alternating cooperative work terms allowing students to work alongside adults in real work settings. University of Waterloo in Canada was a pioneer in this form of education in the 70s.
As this piece from The Economist notes (paywalled, but I think you can read it for a one-time sign-up) "The villains of the Industrial Revolution were politicians, not machines."
I think the discussion often gets framed as though this is an either/or choice between technological progress and craft, but that isn’t really my argument.
Industrialisation and mechanisation clearly brought enormous benefits in many areas of life. My concern is more that modern societies increasingly organise themselves around forms of abstract and highly credentialled labour while undervaluing other forms of human intelligence and participation.
Not everyone primarily engages with the world through abstract or symbolic work. Some people think through materials, repair, observation, movement, and making. Historically there were far more visible pathways for those people through apprenticeships, workshops, engineering trades, and practical craft cultures.
And I don’t think making things is merely “toil” for many people. For a lot of us, it is where we feel most alive.
That’s partly why I used the bicycle industry as an example. The bicycle is already one of humanity’s great sustainable technologies. A well-made steel bicycle can last decades, be repaired repeatedly, adapted, repainted, and passed between people. Yet the industry still massively overproduces bicycles because industrial business models depend upon continual growth, churn, and replacement cycles.
The same question can be extended more broadly. Do we really need endless quantities of globally standardised consumer goods in every area of life? Or might some things be better served through more local production, repair culture, durability, and smaller-scale economies?
That does not mean abandoning industry altogether. Obviously some things benefit enormously from industrial scale. But I do think we have spent decades assuming bigger, faster, and more centralised automatically means more advanced, while paying far less attention to sustainability, local resilience, meaningful work, and what kinds of human lives our economies actually encourage.
Well, that perspective certainly makes a world of difference for me because I can agree completely with those points. I'm sorry if I had missed/forgotten that from your earlier posts.
I too prefer durable and repairable goods and loathe modern consumerism. While I'm not really handy, I enjoy the satisfaction of being able to repair something myself, but sometimes it simply becomes economically and practically advantageous to replace with newer, more feature rich versions. A case in point is my current bike, a Montegue Navigator which I bought about seven years ago - it's a folding bike that I can fit in the car trunk/boot and obviously doesn't take up much space at home either. It's only my third bike in six and a half decades, so I don't feel too bad about buying it!
I completely sympathise with that example actually, and I think folding bikes are a good case where newer designs can genuinely solve practical problems for people.
But I also think oversupply and overproduction distort the economics around repair and longevity.
If bicycles were produced in lower quantities, designed more consistently around long-term maintenance, and supported by stronger repair cultures, then many bikes would retain far more value over time and repairing them would make much more economic sense.
Part of the problem now is that industrial overproduction floods the market with cheap replacement bikes and components, which pushes older bikes towards disposability even when they are fundamentally still usable machines.
Historically, bicycle shops often survived not just by selling new bikes, but by maintaining and repairing them for decades afterwards. A well-made steel frame was expected to live a very long life and adapt with its owner over time.
That culture still exists in fragments, but modern consumer capitalism tends to reward churn rather than continuity. It often becomes economically irrational to repair things not because repair itself is irrational, but because the wider system has been organised around constant replacement and oversupply.
So I think we broadly agree. I’m not arguing that innovation or newer products are inherently bad. More that we have perhaps drifted too far towards a system where perfectly serviceable objects are constantly devalued in order to sustain industrial growth models.
Just wanted to say that this is a great piece of writing, Paul. Really appreciate your arguments. I am someone who is absolutely not a craftsperson, but I "teach animation" and I am extremely interested in craft and the handmade. The reason I put "teach animation" in scare quotes is because I am really a film/media studies guy, who teaches theory and history...and, as I say, has great interest in craft and craft traditions. I am supervising a PhD student at the moment whose research is on animators' relationships with tools and objects (she is a stop motion animator). You'd have a great conversation 😀 best wishes, Paul (Ward)
Thank you Paul, I really appreciate this thoughtful comment.
What’s especially encouraging to me is hearing from people outside traditional workshop trades who still recognise something important in these questions around craft, tools, objects, and material culture.
Your mention of animation is fascinating as well because I suspect there are strong parallels there. Even though the materials and outputs are different, there is still a relationship between hand, eye, judgement, repetition, patience, and the gradual shaping of something through practice.
I’d probably have a great conversation with your PhD student because I increasingly think many different disciplines are circling similar questions about embodiment, meaning, and what gets lost when human beings become detached from direct engagement with materials and processes.
I wanted to respond to this, but couldn't find the right hook to begin writing (I'm not a natural writer ...). The article in The Economist linked below provided a hook. And then I saw a very short summary of this that you posted as a comment on Grace Blakely's substack and responded with the following there:
I can appreciate there are some (like yourself) that prefer working with your hands. But you have to admit that mechanization etc. has propelled civilization farther forward than otherwise.
Working with your head also produces judgement, confidence, responsibility and belonging and can utilize alternating cooperative work terms allowing students to work alongside adults in real work settings. University of Waterloo in Canada was a pioneer in this form of education in the 70s.
As this piece from The Economist notes (paywalled, but I think you can read it for a one-time sign-up) "The villains of the Industrial Revolution were politicians, not machines."
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/05/14/the-jobs-apocalypse-a-very-short-history
I think the discussion often gets framed as though this is an either/or choice between technological progress and craft, but that isn’t really my argument.
Industrialisation and mechanisation clearly brought enormous benefits in many areas of life. My concern is more that modern societies increasingly organise themselves around forms of abstract and highly credentialled labour while undervaluing other forms of human intelligence and participation.
Not everyone primarily engages with the world through abstract or symbolic work. Some people think through materials, repair, observation, movement, and making. Historically there were far more visible pathways for those people through apprenticeships, workshops, engineering trades, and practical craft cultures.
And I don’t think making things is merely “toil” for many people. For a lot of us, it is where we feel most alive.
That’s partly why I used the bicycle industry as an example. The bicycle is already one of humanity’s great sustainable technologies. A well-made steel bicycle can last decades, be repaired repeatedly, adapted, repainted, and passed between people. Yet the industry still massively overproduces bicycles because industrial business models depend upon continual growth, churn, and replacement cycles.
The same question can be extended more broadly. Do we really need endless quantities of globally standardised consumer goods in every area of life? Or might some things be better served through more local production, repair culture, durability, and smaller-scale economies?
That does not mean abandoning industry altogether. Obviously some things benefit enormously from industrial scale. But I do think we have spent decades assuming bigger, faster, and more centralised automatically means more advanced, while paying far less attention to sustainability, local resilience, meaningful work, and what kinds of human lives our economies actually encourage.
Well, that perspective certainly makes a world of difference for me because I can agree completely with those points. I'm sorry if I had missed/forgotten that from your earlier posts.
I too prefer durable and repairable goods and loathe modern consumerism. While I'm not really handy, I enjoy the satisfaction of being able to repair something myself, but sometimes it simply becomes economically and practically advantageous to replace with newer, more feature rich versions. A case in point is my current bike, a Montegue Navigator which I bought about seven years ago - it's a folding bike that I can fit in the car trunk/boot and obviously doesn't take up much space at home either. It's only my third bike in six and a half decades, so I don't feel too bad about buying it!
I completely sympathise with that example actually, and I think folding bikes are a good case where newer designs can genuinely solve practical problems for people.
But I also think oversupply and overproduction distort the economics around repair and longevity.
If bicycles were produced in lower quantities, designed more consistently around long-term maintenance, and supported by stronger repair cultures, then many bikes would retain far more value over time and repairing them would make much more economic sense.
Part of the problem now is that industrial overproduction floods the market with cheap replacement bikes and components, which pushes older bikes towards disposability even when they are fundamentally still usable machines.
Historically, bicycle shops often survived not just by selling new bikes, but by maintaining and repairing them for decades afterwards. A well-made steel frame was expected to live a very long life and adapt with its owner over time.
That culture still exists in fragments, but modern consumer capitalism tends to reward churn rather than continuity. It often becomes economically irrational to repair things not because repair itself is irrational, but because the wider system has been organised around constant replacement and oversupply.
So I think we broadly agree. I’m not arguing that innovation or newer products are inherently bad. More that we have perhaps drifted too far towards a system where perfectly serviceable objects are constantly devalued in order to sustain industrial growth models.