Here are a couple notes on Crawford Matthew’s “Soulcraft as Shop Class: An Inquiry into the Value of Work”, that was chanced upon me by Neistat’s van.

  • Manual work engages intellectually — contrary to popular opinion. Trades are intellectually demanding; require mental flexibility — sometimes more so than office jobs.

Manual competence

  • Be a master of your own stuff. Know how your possessions work and be able to fix them. “The prideful basis for self-reliance.”
    • An essentialist/minimalist lifestyle requires being a master of your own stuff.
    • Mastering your own stuff is opposing consumerism.
      • Consumerism establishes politics of irresponsibility, mental and physical non-involvement with our possessions (“freedomism”) (× At the Existentialist Café; responsibility in the small things; with freedom comes responsibility); the flip-side of “throwing money at it” (Naval) — where you can just buy a replacement instead of having to learn how to fix things. Hence the non-handiness of our current generation.
      • A fortiori, craftsmanship is opposed to consumerism. The craftsman cherishes what they built, as opposed to the consumer who keeps on buying and throwing away.
        • Repairmen are politically engaged, opposing throwaway culture.
  • Government-managed public spaces externalize the responsibility to fix things, thereby suppressing proactivity (as opposed to community spaces, e.g. Sering). For example, a leaking faucet.
    • Community-managed spaces invite you to fix things in your realm, though you might not be their appointed custodian (× Non-ownership vs Communal ownership vs Single-point accountability (The Toyota Way) — e.g. public space vs community space vs a specific area within this community space)
      • Hierarchical ownership (realms of ownership as concentric circles); or alternatively ownership as a spectrum (within a community space): from things you are explicitly responsible for, all the way to things for which you have no relation to at all (× “the blood of people conveniently far away”).
    • Just as one can be a master of one’s own stuff, one can be a master of one’s own space (e.g. one’s own house, terrain).
  • Over-protection makes people less resilient and dumber. Fool-proofing can be infantilizing (× The Design of Everyday Things: striking the balance between fool-proofing and counterproductive dumbing down): by preventing us from making mistakes, fool-proofing mechanisms teach us less about how to correctly do things, and give us less responsibility (e.g. plug-and-play, modern appliances, “black boxes” ≠ Linux, etc.)
  • Intuitive to use is not intuitive to service. (e.g. Mac, smartphones, etc.)
  • Disruptions reveal dependency. Disruptions to our world (e.g. infrastructure) reveal our dependence and lack of self-sufficiency ; reveal the fragility of things taken for granted (× A Paradise Built In Hell) (disruptions: × the call to adventure, Hero of a Thousand Faces)
    • Infrastructure is a leveller. Wealthy and poor share a common dependence to physical infrastructure. Infrastructure is relied on by everybody, indiscriminately.
    • Machines serve our needs, until they break — at which point the tables are turned, and we have to serve the needs of the machine, ask it what it needs. Using is self-interested, while repairing is selfless: attending to the needs of the appliance.
      • Machines breaking are an affront to our self-absorption. (“When the fabric of reality breaks”).
      • Repairing requires getting out of our self-absorption and instead to be attentive, to listen, carefully. Repairing is a practice of active listening, requires an open mind (× Never Split the Difference (understand your counterpart); Improvise (focus on the scene)).
      • Servicing is being in service of the world — requires listening to the world and striving to understand it with an open mind. Servicing an appliance is being in service of it, in service of the world — having to attend to the world, upholding one’s responsibility. Similarly, repairmen are in service of others, as they fix things others depend on.
        • Repairing vs buying is just like traditional vs industrial farming (listening and being an object, vs imposing and being a subject — either seeing reality as external, in charge; or as pliable)

Scientific management

  • Division of labour yields alienated labour — switching from workers possessing integral knowledge to workers possessing fragmented knowledge. (≠ Sering, etc.) Whereas before, one would be involved with a product from design to delivery, nowadays people’s work gets confined to a specific section of the life of a product — rendering the work itself meaningless (Though: The Toyota Way, where people still are engaged, through striving to improve one’s part of the process.) Workers used to have complete knowledge; it then got split into management and workers (stratification of knowledge).
    • Taylorism manages the workers’ labour and motions abstractly, detached from the craft; disembodies them.
    • Division of labour historically reserves thinking to top management, and doing to workers (contrary to e.g. The Toyota Way, where managers do the physical work as well, and workers think in order to improve processes); separates planning from doing.
      • Taylorism robotizes, by bringing knowledge to the top management and breaking down tasks into simple, rule-based, unskilled work (to be meted out to unskilled workers).
      • “Extraordinary human ingenuity has been used to eliminate the need for human ingenuity” — or responsibility (≠ The Toyota Way).
        • (e.g. renting a police (externalizing authority) rather than neighbourhood watches)
        • Politics of irresponsibility: authority gets centralized as individuals are not entrusted with it — feedback loop.
  • Division of labour doesn’t make labour more efficient; it just makes it cheaper. (× The Toyota Way on making labour more efficient, e.g. by reducing waste)
    • Focussing on one aspect (paradigm) creates an imbalance, damages the other aspects: cheaper labour at a human/cognitive/spiritual cost. (× Money: reducing everything to a single dimension)
  • Strict sentencing guidelines prevent a judge from judging. You have to give responsibility (× Naval; × single-point accountability, OKR) and freedom to find solutions (× from the gemba, The Toyota Way) to teach your workers to think (The Toyota Way) and let them be “the most flexible resource you can have” (The Toyota Way), critical thinking agents.
  • Proximity to the output of one’s work prevents alienation. A maker’s (or fixer’s) activity should be situated within a community of use, and he should have constant contact with and feedback from the people he serves. Alienation happens when the result of your work gets “lost” (far away).
    • Keep things small and at a human scale (cf. “You don’t have to grow”, Degrowth), embedded within a community of use and anchored in face-to-face interactions — as a remedy to alienating globalization.
  • Thankless industrial Fordist work was made viable by increased wages and playing into consumerist systems. The increased meniality of industrial Fordist work had to be compensated by increased wages.
    • Using levers within a system to compensate for its bad parts. Workers accepted the compensation — and so stayed within the game (and perpetuated it). (× Debt (Graeber): pooling (e.g. among friends) instead of gift economies — which are covert debt systems; “not playing into the game”) (× Jenny Hval, That Battle is Over: illusory wins, where you’re actually still in the game; consumerism: the right to choose what to consume)
    • Managers stimulate productivity by rewarding it with the ability to acquire objects workers have been deliberately manipulated into desiring.
      • Consumerism (marketing): the management of desire.
        • Some marketers were calling themselves “consumption engineers” (× The Fear), using the latest findings of experimental psychology to boost sales.
          • Experimental psychology as a “neutral tool” (× technology, the Internet, encryption) that can be used for good or bad — to manipulate others (by knowing them) or to protect yourself from manipulation (by knowing yourself) — Knowing how you are programmed to be able to re-program yourself. (× Psycho-Cybernetics)
        • Shopping entices because of feelings of power and agency. Shopping is one of the ways we can change our world, act on it, have agency over it – hence its allure. “Shopping is for individuals a confirmation of their power to make things happen in the world.”
    • In parallel, workers become dependent on their work due to consumer debt.
      • Consumer debt: the manipulation of desire into enslavement to the work line. (× Debt)
        • Workers enslaved to the line: the normalization of consumer debt allowed people to make big purchases (to live above their means) and thereby be dependent on their wage/job over a long period of time.
    • Production/Consumption loop. Managers stimulate production by rewarding it with the ability to consume more, consumption in turn demands increased production — it’s a self-sustaining system, feeds itself (× Degrowth).
  • Revolt is only possible if one is aware of alternatives (aware of the injustice) — whether knowing of them or imagining and envisioning them (× At the Existentialist Café, Second Sex, LGBTQ+ rights, oppressive religions). Assembly-line work could inspire revulsion only if one was familiar with more satisfying ways of working — which was a memory that was getting lost throughout generations. (As in assembly-line work, so for some of today’s blue-collar work, with knowledge flowing to the top, keeping menial office tasks at the bottom)
  • Topple the system, or live in the cracks.
    • The Revolutionary vs the Stoic: “The revolutionary entertains an exaggerated fantasy of world changing. A heady vision of the progressive hereafter in which economic antagonism has been overcome may stand in for, and distract him from, the smaller but harder work of living well in this life. The alternative to revolution, which I want to call Stoic, is resolutely this-worldly. It insists on the permanent, local viability of what is best in human beings. In practice, this means seeking out the cracks where individual agency and the love of knowledge can be realized today, in one’s own life.”

Modern workplace / Office jobs / Cognitive stratification

  • Abstractness of work is not intelligence. “Trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking.”
  • Relationships trump abilities in the modern workplace – not in the shop. Relations to colleagues (superiors and subordinates) tend to trump objective assessment in the modern workplace, as the criteria for the latter is often ambiguous. In a repair shop, your position tends to reflect your knowledge.
  • In the modern workplace, team-building and cohesion goes from being a means to an end; to being an end in and of itself.
    • In machine shops, things get done with concrete, tangible results; in modern workplaces, relationships between colleagues tend to be more important (hence HR and political correctness being more prevalent in these contexts). The Crew vs the Team.
    • Artificially keeping the team together. The urgency of team-building efforts in organizations is a direct response to the lack of shared, objective, concrete goal, uniting people. “When there is no concrete task that rules the job – an autonomous good that is visible to all – then there is no secure basis for social relations.”
      • Effectivity and competence cement social relations in the shop. Common productivity/interdependence and mutual recognition of competence and worth cement social relationships in the workplace, provide a basis for them, a ground, foundations.
      • Fragmented work makes you dependent on the organization to give meaning to your work. Non-self-sufficient work makes you rely on the organisation and makes you dependent on them, lets you defer to their authority. Workers defer to the authority of the organization they work for, as they are dependent on it to give meaning to their work (as their work itself treated by itself is meaningless). (Also e.g. a cashier, café waiter…) “In most work that transpires in large organizations, one’s work is meaningless taken by itself. This predisposes them to be deferential to the authority exercised in the organization, since the organization is that which gives meaning to his work”.
  • Jobs that suppress your proactivity — jobs that don’t.
    • Bureaucratic and procedural work tend to suppress your proactivity. One follows rules (acts like a machine) and suppresses gut feelings about a situation or person.

Culture of shop class

  • Manual work is anchored in concrete results and so can do with fooling around. Manual workers don’t have anything to prove, as their results is very clear and there for us to see. Manual work has a clear and direct impact on the physical world, is “no-bullshit” — giving it room for what’s around it (banter).
    • Go into business to confirm your worth. “Going into business is good therapy for the feeling that there is something arbitrary and idiosyncratic in your grasp of the world, and therefore that your actions within it are unjustified” (Make a living out of your uniqueness, × Naval (“Nobody can beat you at being you”))
      • Being paid for a skill we developed through a quirk lets us accept it more.

  • Work extra hours for your self-development on projects for free – but increase your base rate. In projects, spend extra time following curiosities or obsessions, for your own development. Do not bill those extra hours, but compensate by charging more per regular hour.

  • Anarchy is a politic of irresponsibility. Anarchist spaces distrust and discourage centralized authority, thereby preventing single-point accountability & ownership — which tends to become the bane of these spaces.
    • Trading one evil for another. Anarchist (radical) spaces react to one extreme by going to the other. Anarchist spaces go to such lengths in trying to avoid abuses of authority, that they do away with authority (ownership) altogether (throw the baby out with the bathwater), (sometimes) yielding dysfunctional spaces. Anarchist spaces conflate authority and ownership.

Work relationships

  • Work (relationships) is more integrated to life when your colleagues inherently share your passion for the same thing.
  • Work as a philosophical place – a community of people who love knowledge, who desire to know.
    • Choose a work aligned with your desire to learn. “Seek out the cracks where individual agency and the love of knowledge can be realized.”
  • Because of the tangibility of the product, trades tend to bring more direct, immediate recognition. “I built this.”
    • Manual work is directly embedded socially — as necessary within any community.
  • Message in a bottle. In-group transtemporal communication through artifacts of beauty. Your work will be worked on by future servicers, with a shared standard of workmanship. Tradesmen communicate with future tradesmen through the quality of their work (e.g. electricians; as in programming — electricians as working on open source projects).

Crafts and science

  • Science serving crafts (historically). Crafts brought about natural sciences (physics, etc.) — because of their need to understand and manipulate the physical world. (As such, a study of natural sciences should be anchored in crafts, practical use.)
    • (Scientific) Models of the world should emerge from practice, not abstraction: the steam engine was developed by mechanics, not scientists — and then only later understood mathematically. (× First be confronted with, exposed to things you do not understand; to have the motivation to understand them. Practice-first.) (× The Design of Everyday Things) Concrete experience, not abstract reasoning, should be at the base of coming up with models, and an understanding of the world. (× Living your philosophy in the world, Wlad)
    • Correct but impractical. “Technically correct though difficult to implement” (when not anchored in reality). Some technological solutions can be technically correct, though difficult to implement (when not anchored in reality) (hence being at the gemba, × Toyota, The Design of Everyday Things)
  • Science abstracts nature (as money does relationships and humans); science tries to come up with models, easily manipulatable by science though they might not match reality perfectly.
  • Science can only study the parts of nature that are quantifiable — thereby necessarily misses part of the picture.

Schools

  • Schools tend to provide artificial learning environments, as opposed to apprenticeships, where one learns directly, experientially. (× Naval)
  • College generalists vs tradesmen. Modern-day college forms generalists. Tradesmen drill down.
    • College favours abstraction; trades favour the concrete.
  • Education went from displaying adequateness for working in a bureaucracy, to developing the perfect personality and soft skills for the contemporary flexible workplace (“selling oneself” – rather than one’s actual skills)
    • Formatting pupils: Education and standardized tests prepare students to future jobs by habituating them to following orders, structure; the “scientific” management in bureaucratic systems; becoming robots (The Wall-E).
      • Standardized tests format students to future bureaucracy.
        • Standardized tests are symptomatic of wanting people to be able to follow rules (with a view to bureaucratic jobs)
        • Rule-following, or a system built as such, prevents people from using their intelligence. (× Banality of Evil; NSA)
    • Higher education works as a signalling function for bureaucracy : “Higher education serves as a signalling function: it rewards and certifies the display of middle-class self-discipline, […] a willingness to conform to organizational discipline, [displaying] the dispositions needed to develop competence in a bureaucracy.”
    • In today’s schools, grading is more about what it enables than what it teaches. “The point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge.”
      • As a consequence, students focus on grades rather than learning.
  • Book knowledge vs practical know-how: anyone can learn from books, but not anyone can have practical experience. The value of any school is in the practical experience (× Naval, “When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools”). As book-learning becomes more and more accessible, people with “universal skills” face increasing competition (e.g. basic programming).
    • “Practical know-how is always tied to the experience of particular person. (× Naval, uniqueness) Practical know-how can’t be downloaded, it can only be lived.”
    • Book knowledge without practical experience is disembodied knowledge.
    • Practical know-how (e.g. troubleshooting) is heuristic-based, not rule-based – relies on pattern matching with prior experiences of similar circumstances.
      • Humans are good at recognizing patterns; computers are good at following rules. The real world is uncertain and variable – hence humans as the most flexible resource you can have in your company. (× Toyota) (× “Let computers do what computers do best; humans what humans do best.”)
    • Practical knowledge begins with the specific (typical) rather than the universal. You then build your knowledge from abstracting from the very many different specific experiences you’ve had.
    • Practical experience remind you not to worship at the altar of abstraction, and that the map is not the territory.
    • Experiential knowledge can function as a gatekeeping mechanism to an in-group (e.g. alumni of a school – all having gone through the same experiences.) (× Naval, the most important thing you get from working somewhere is the people you’ll meet and have in your network.) (flip-side: higher education as a bureaucratic signalling function)

Other

  • “Technical writers (of service manuals) know that, but they don’t know how”: they know which part is deficient but do not know the reasons for it. (× The Design of Everyday Things)
    • John Searle’s critique of AI: the system doesn’t need to understand the problem (flip-side: Psycho-Cybernetics (CBT)) to give it a solution (pattern-matching). Imagine a man in a room receiving questions in Chinese and an instruction book on what to answer to each question – the man provides correct answers but does not understand any of it (× Socrates on virtue (Meno); having the right opinion but not the knowledge, not knowing why)
      • John Searle’s critique of AI applied to modern society’s ignorance of how things work, following “replacement recipes” without deeply understanding. (“Just replace it if it breaks” – lacking a post-mortem) (× Bureaucracy; Banality of Evil; learning from history)
  • Principled vs attentive empathy. Posited vs seen humanity (× Psychedelic experiential philosophy, Psychedelics: Revealing the Mind). One wants to be seen as a unique individual, not as a generic beneficiary of empathy.
    • “The lover of excellence is prone to being drawn out of himself, erotically almost, in a way that the universalist egalitarian is not. The latter’s empathy, projected from afar and without discrimination, is more principled than attentive. It is similar to bad arts and mathematical shoelaces, in that regard; it is content to posit rather than to see the humanity of its beneficiaries. But the one who is on the receiving end of such empathy wants something more than to be recognized generically. He wants to be seen as an individual, and recognized as worthy on the same grounds on which he has striven to be worthy, indeed superior, by cultivating some particular excellence or skill.”