Header image: KF in Dall-E
- “it was in the 1990s that shop class started to become a thing of the past, as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.””
- “The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.”
- “What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed.”
- “manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.”
- “Following a doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, I took a job as executive director of a Washington “think tank.””
- “I want to avoid the kind of mysticism that gets attached to “craftsmanship” while doing justice to the very real satisfactions it offers.”
- “I also have little interest in wistful notions of a “simpler” life that is somehow more authentic, or more democratically valorous for being “working class.””
- “Those who work in an office often feel that, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provided by, for example, a carpenter’s level, and that as a result there is something arbitrary in the dispensing of credit and blame.”
“In schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.” (Crawford, p. 11)
- “This seems to capture the kind of iterated selfcriticism, in light of some ideal that is never quite attained, whereby the craftsman advances in his art.” (13)
- “You give it your best, learn from your mistakes, and the next time get a little closer to the image you started with in your head.” (13)
- “Failing forward”
- “as Hannah Arendt writes, the durable objects of use produced by men “give rise to the familiarity of the world, its customs and habits of intercourse between men and things as well as between men and men.” (16)
“The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors.” (16)
- “For this very reason, the repairman’s presence may make the narcissist uncomfortable. The problem isn’t so much that he is dirty, or uncouth. Rather, he seems to pose a challenge to our self-understanding that is somehow fundamental. We’re not as free and independent as we thought.” (17)
- “the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one’s life is determined.” (19)
“Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn new things, celebrating potential rather than achievement” (19)
- “This stance toward “established reality,” which can only be called psychedelic, is best not indulged around a table saw.” (19)
- “the widely accepted dichotomy of knowledge work versus manual work.” (20)
- “At the beginning of the Western tradition, sophia (wisdom) meant “skill” for Homer: the technical skill of a carpenter, for example.” (21)
- “to be that, a realistic solution must include ad hoc constraints known only through practice,” (24)
- “What is required then is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules.” (27)
- “The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 gave federal funding for manual training in two forms: as part of general education and as a separate vocational program.” (30)
- “The motivation previously supplied by the intrinsic satisfactions of manual work was to be replaced with ideology; industrial arts education now concerned itself with moral formation.” (31)
- “Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of white collar versus blue collar, corresponding to mental versus manual.” (31)
“In what circumstances does the human element remain indispensable, and why?” (35)
“viewed from this rules-based perspective, creativity [sic] is knowing what to do when the rules run out or there are no rules in the first place. It is what a good auto mechanic does after his computerized test equipment says the car’s transmission is fine but the transmission continues to shift at the wrong engine speed” (35)
“Knowing what kind of problem you have on hand means knowing what features of the situation can be ignored” (36)
“The central culprit in Braverman’s account is “scientific management,” which “enters the workplace not as the representative of science, but as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science.”1” (38)
“Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose Principles of Scientific” (38)
“The timber was far from being prey, a helpless victim, to a machine. Rather it would lend its own special virtues to the man who knew how to humour it.” (41)
“In a temporary suspension of the Taylorist logic, Ford was forced to double the daily wage of his workers to keep the line staffed.” (42)
“Ford himself later recognized his wage increase as “one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made,” as he was able to double, and then triple, the rate at which cars were assembled by simply speeding up the conveyors.” (42)
“So workers eventually became habituated to the abstraction of the assembly line. Evidently, it inspires revulsion only if one is acquainted with more satisfying modes of work.” (42)
“Here the concept of wages as compensation achieves its fullest meaning, and its central place in modern economy.” (43)
“Eventually it was learned that the only way to get them to work harder was to play upon the imagination, stimulating new needs and wants. Consumption, no less than production, needed to be brought under scientific management—the management of desire. Thus, there came to be marketers who called themselves “consumption engineers” in the early decades of the twentieth century. They were armed with the latest findings of experimental psychology” (43)
“through the installment plan previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt” (43)
“White-collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same logic that hit manual fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers—clerks—who replace the professionals.” (44)
“Taylor’s time and motion studies broke every concrete work motion into minute parts,” (46)
“In other words it uses (or replaces) judgment.12” (46) Chat GPT
“void making decisions, because they could damage your career, but then spin cover stories after the fact that interpret positive outcomes to your credit. To this end, upper management deals only with abstractions, not operational details.” (50)
“work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible.” (52)
“The idea of opportunity costs presumes the fungibility of human experience: all our activities are equivalent or interchangeable once they are reduced to the abstract currency of clock time, and its wage correlate.” (55)
“Spiritedness is an assertion of one’s own dignity, and to fix one’s own car is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one’s car, and of oneself.” (55)
“It’s true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.” (56)
“retard” (57) [BCTEA FB thread]
“Old bikes don’t flatter you, they educate you.” (59)
“The development of what we might call a subethical virtue: the user holds himself responsible to external reality, and opens himself to being schooled by i” (60)
“Both as workers and as consumers, technical education seems to contribute to moral education.” (60)
““intuitive,” meaning that it introduces as little psychic friction as possible between the user’s intention and its realization.” (61)
“There seems to be a tension between a certain kind of agency and a certain kind of autonomy, and this is worth thinking about” (63)
“Somehow, self-realization and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.” (63)
“One can’t be a musician without learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one’s fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician’s power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience;” (64)
“her musical agency is built up from an ongoing submission. To what?” (64)
“These limits need not be physical; the important thing is rather that” (64)
“they are external to the self” (64)
“f I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal.” (65)
“Albert Borgmann” (65)
“An instrument is “arduous to master” (65)
“A thing requires practice while a device invites consumption. Things constitute commanding reality, devices procure disposable reality.” (66)
“choosing is not creating, however much “creativity” is invoked in such marketing.” (68)
“For the early Heidegger, “handiness” is the mode in which things in the world show up for us most originally: “the nearest kind of” (68)
“We have too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar.” (69)
“The effect is to preempt cultivation of embodied agency, the sort that is natural to us.” (69)
“The consumer is disburdened not only of the fabrication, but of a basic evaluative activity.” (70)
“the diversity of dispositions.” (72)
“Aristotle can help here. He expanded the idea of an art, or techne, to include those cases where our efforts are less than fully effective. In doing so, he steers a course between impotent fatalism and its opposite, a fantasy of complete mastery, shedding light on the true character of human agency.” (81)
“The mechanic and the doctor deal with failure every day, even if they are expert, whereas the builder does not. This is because the things they fix are not of their own making, and are therefore never known in a comprehensive or absolute way.” (81)
“In the real world, problems do not present themselves unambiguously.” (99)
“Piston slap may indeed sound like loose tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is an ethical virtue.” (99)
““[A]nything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with” (99)
“Any discipline that deals with an authoritative, independent reality requires honesty and humility.” (100)
“I believe this is especially so of the stochastic arts that fix things, such as doctoring and wrenching, in which we are not the makers of the things we tend.” (100)
“If occasions for the exercise of judgment are diminished, the moral-cognitive virtue of attentiveness will atrophy.” (101)
“To respond to the world justly, you have to see it clearly, and for this you have to get outside your own head. Knowing you’re going to have to explain your labor bill to a customer accomplishes just this.” (103)
“the trappings of scholarship were used to put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise.” (108)
“The illicit character of the whole scene made me feel more at ease than I had ever felt at a job or an academic conference. Everybody was on the wrong side of propriety, at the very least.” (111)
“I keep a logbook in the shop, a sort of motorcycle diary that serves a number of purposes. It is a record of bikes taken in, work done,” (112)
“and lessons learned.” (112)
“how truthful it is prudent to be.” (112)
“I feel like an amateur, no less now than when I started, but through such devices I hope to appear like somebody who knows what he is doing, and bills accordingly.” (113)
“How do you bill for time spent solving a problem of your own making?” (114)
“So at the beginning of any resuscitation of an old bike, you try to think logically about a sequence of investigations and fixes that will reveal the most serious problems sooner rather than later.” (118)
“At this point I’d exhausted my entire lexicon of “motherfucker”-based idioms, and was running perilously low on slurs against the Japanese.” (119)
“This is a common experience, actually, and in an effort to save time in assembling and disassembling things with an inscrutable Oriental fit to them, I used to try to hypnotize myself into a Zen-like state of resignation at the outset.” (119)
“I have my own process, as they say. I call it the motherfucker process.” (119)
“It occurred to me that the best business decision would be to forget I’d ever seen the ambiguously buggered oil seal.” (122)
“The compulsion was setting in, and I did little to resist it. I started digging at the seal, my peripheral vision narrowing. At first I told myself it was exploratory digging. But the seal was suffering from my screwdriver, and at some point I had to drop the forensic pretense. I was going to get that little fucker out.” (123)
“A lot of academic work has this quality of curiosity without circumspection; my own Ph.D. dissertation proceeded in a way similar to the Magna oil seal episode. But with the Magna I had to give an account to the customer.” (124)
“But where there isn’t anything material being produced, objective standards for job performance are hard to come by. What is a manager to do? He is encouraged to direct his attention to the states of minds of workers, and become a sort of therapist.” (127)
“Process becomes more important than product, and is to be optimized through management techniques that work on a deeper level than the curses of a foreman.” (127)
“In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that the expansion of higher education beyond labor market demand creates for white-collar workers “employment in substandard work or at wages below those of the better-paid manual workers.”” (129)
“The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work” (130)
“My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract there is a method that merely needs to be applied, and that this does not require understanding” (133)
“To not do justice to an author who had poured his life into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.” (134)
“required me to actively suppress my own ability to think,” (134)
“demanded that I suppress as well my sense of responsibility to others” (134)
“Now, it is probably true that every job entails some kind of mutilation” (134)
“But none of this damage touches the best part of yourself.” (134)
“In this sense, I was not held to an external, objective standard.” (135)
“Frequently we come to hate things that we nonetheless continue to depend on (like Windows).” (135)
“Managers are placed in the middle of an enduring social conflict that once gave rise to street riots but is mostly silent in our times: the antagonism between labor and capital.” (138)
“to preserve one’s interpretive latitude so that if the context changes, “a new, more appropriate meaning can be attached to the language already used.” (139)
“Nothing is set in concrete the way it typically is when one is, for example, pouring concrete.” (139)
“these circumstances generate their own sort of morality, one in which the fixed points of an internal moral compass must give way to a certain sensitivity and nimbleness.” (140)
“a moral demand) not to be too “moralistic.” This pressure is rooted in the insecurity of managerial careers.” (141)
“Marx, who writes that under conditions of estranged labor, man “no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions.”” (142)
“Interlude: What College Is For” (143)
“credential inflation” (143)
“human capital theory.”” (145)
“n a famous study of air traffic controllers, a job requiring complex decision making, for example, the sociologist Ivar Berg found an inverse correlation between educational achievement and job performance.18” (145)
“the technocratic/meritocratic view of education treats it as instrumental—it is good for society” (145)
“instrumental—it” (145)
“When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge” (147)
“college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality.” (147)
“a willingness to conform to organizational discipline” (147)
“n the new dispensation the whole person is at issue; one has to have certain personal qualities, more than a well-defined set of competencies” (147)
“a complete personality package” (148)
“n important part of the package is that one be a joiner, as this signals the possession of a self that is ready for “teamwork.”” (148)
““the expectation that corporate culture could be managed was both central to its appeal and its crucial conceptual innovation.”23 The idea that culture can be managed entails a reversal of the usual idea of culture.” (148)
“Managers needed to become anthropologists. But above all they needed to become founders of cultures,” (149)
“harismatic world making (with executive pay to match).” (149)
“light wooden dowel” (151) · Helium stick
“Given our democratic sensibilities, authority cannot present itself straightforwardly, as authority, coming down from a superior, but must be understood as an impersonal thing that emanates vaguely from all of us.29 So authority becomes smarmy and passive-aggressive, trying to pass itself off as something cooperative and friendly; as volunteerism. It is always pretending to be in your best interest, in everyone’s best interest, as rationality itself.” (152)
“Some notion of the common good has to be actively posited, a higher principle that can give people a sense of purpose in their work life.” (153)
“Tocqueville foresaw a “soft despotism” in which Americans would increasingly seek their security in, and become dependent upon, the state.” (155)
“How is being part of a crew different than being part of a “team” in the new mode of office work?” (155)
“His education prepares him for this; it is an education for working in a large organization, and he has difficulty imagining how he might earn a living otherwise. This predisposes him to be deferential to the authority exercised in the organization (however tinged with irony this deference may be), since the organization is that which gives meaning to his work.” (156)
“There is a real freedom of speech on a job site, which reverberates outward and sustains a wider liberality. You can tell dirty jokes. Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn’t quite so fragile.” (157)
“Where no appeal to a carpenter’s level is possible, sensitivity training becomes necessary.34” (157)
“When self-esteem is artificially generated, it becomes more easily manipulable, a product of social technique rather than a secure possession of one’s own based on accomplishments.” (158)
“Thinking as Doing” (161)
“The current educational regime is based on a certain view about what kind of knowledge is important: “knowing that,” as opposed to “knowing how.”” (161)
“Practical know-how, on the other hand, is always tied to the experience of a particular person. It can’t be downloaded, it can only be lived.” (162)
“the way we come to know a hammer is not by staring at it, but by grabbing hold of it and using it” (164)
“acit knowledge. This tacit knowledge seems to consist of recognizing patterns, and the causal patterns of the ignition problem are mirrored by patterns in his own bodily motions: periodically scratching the sand out of his scalp, or peeling a clammy shirt off his shoulders.” (166)
“charmed with a sense of its own competence.” (166)
“situated knowledge.” (167)
“The crux of the idea of an intellectual technology is “the substitution of algorithms (problem-solving rules) for intuitive judgments.” (167)
“Our ability to make good judgments is holistic in character, and arises from repeated confrontations with real things: comprehensive entities that are grasped all at once, in a manner that may be incapable of explicit articulation.8” (169) Sully
“There is further evidence to suggest that what an expert human chess player does do is recognize patterns, like a firefighter. In a famous experiment, chess players of varying levels of competence viewed chess boards projected on a screen for a few seconds each.10 They then had to reproduce the configuration of pieces they had seen. When the projected configurations were ones that actually occur in the game of chess, grandmasters were able to correctly reproduce the positions of twenty to twenty-five pieces, very good players about fifteen pieces, and beginners five or six. But when the pictures flashed before them showed random configurations of pieces, not corresponding to patterns they would have actually come across in playing chess, then there was no difference in the players’ ability to reproduce the positions from memory; players of all levels were able to reproduce the positions of only five or six pieces.11 The expert is expert not because he has a better memory in general, but because the patterns of chess are the patterns of his experience.” (170)
“The fact that a firefighter’s knowledge is tacit rather than explicit, and therefore not capable of articulation, means that he is not able to give an account of himself to the larger society. He is not able to make a claim for the value of his mind in the terms that prevail, and may come to doubt it himself. But his own experience provides grounds for a radical critique of the view that theoretical knowledge is the only true knowledge.” (171)
“To rely entirely on computer diagnostics would put one in the situation of the schoolchild who learns to do square roots on a calculator without understanding the principle. If he commits a keying error while taking the square root of thirty-six and gets an answer of eighteen, it will not strike him that there is anything amiss. For the mechanic, the risk is that someone else committed a keying error.15” (173)
“The writers of modern manuals are neither mechanics nor engineers but rather technical writers. This is a profession that is institutionalized on the assumption that it has its own principles that can be mastered without the writer being immersed in any particular problem; it is universal rather than situated.” (177)
“The mortgage broker works hard all year, then he goes and climbs Mount Everest. The exaggerated psychic content of his summer vacation sustains him through the fall, winter, and spring.” (181)
“The Sherpas seem to understand their role in this drama as they discreetly facilitate his need for an unencumbered, solo confrontation with unyielding Reality.” (181)
“the manner of a transaction between sub-selves,” (181)
“Often someone working at a speed shop spent his younger days lingering around the counter, then, as he penetrated the social hierarchy, in the back, allowed now to pull his car around and perhaps use a floor jack to install some shock absorbers purchased at the counter. Such an exposure to injury liability would give a lawyer fits; implicit in the invitation to the back is a judgment of the young man’s character and a large measure of trust. He will get some light supervision that is likely to be disguised as a stream of sexual insults, delivered from ten feet away by someone he cannot see (only his shoes) as he lies under his car. Such insults are another index of trust. If he is able to return these outrageous comments with wit, the conversation will cascade toward real depravity; the trust is pushed further and made reciprocal. If the young man shows promise, that is, if he is judged to have some potential to plumb new depths of moral turpitude, he may get hired:” (183)
“here is someone around whom everyone can relax.” (183)
“It’s not just how fast you go, it’s how you go fast.” (185)
“Thomas Hobbes suggested the human difference lies in the fact that animals begin with a desired effect and discover a sufficing instrument, whereas we are capable of viewing everything as a potential instrument and imagining all the effects to which it could potentially give rise, corresponding to wildly different ends.” (193)
“he intellectual who pursues an academic career gets professionalized, and this may lead him to stop thinking.” (195)
“if we follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some understanding of the good life.” (197)
“This understanding may be hard to articulate; bringing it more fully into view is the task of moral inquiry. Such inquiry may be helped along by practical activities in company with others, a sort of conversation in deed. In this conversation lies the potential of work to bring some measure of coherence to our lives.” (197)
““all children are above average,” as Garrison Keillor says of Lake Woebegon.” (202)
“The Importance of Failure” (203)
“Those who belong to a certain order of society—people who make big decisions that affect all of us—don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility.” (203)
“the kind that can’t be interpreted away,” (203)
“Yet, as Murray argues, the experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the educational process, at least for gifted students.” (204)
“an experience of dependence makes you humble, and grateful.” (204)
“There may be something to be said, then, for having gifted students learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their egos and Self-Reliance will be repeatedly crushed before they go on to run the country.” (204)
“agency” (206)
“It is activity directed toward some end that is affirmed as good by the actor, but this affirmation is not something arbitrary and private. Rather, it flows from an apprehension of real features of the world.” (206)