Today’s video is not the main meat of the article, but just an appetizer:
Joe van der Steeg is a blacksmith from Netherlands. I came across his videos a few years ago and I found them very informative, even though admittedly not very entertaining. I did not subscribe, because I do not intend to seriously go into forging at the moment, but I kept him at the back of my mind for future reference should I need plain and to-the-point info about forging techniques. What was clear from the few videos that I have watched was that he is very committed to the craft and that it is his life.
Previous year he announced that he is quitting the craft as a professional and will only continue with it as a hobbyist. When I have noticed that video, I was saddened, because I hate that old crafts are disappearing.
A few days ago I found out that Alec Steele, the youth YouTube blacksmithing star has afterwards invited him for a few days of collaborative work at his workshop, they had a lot of fun together and Alec’s enthusiasm and infectious personality have motivated Joe to continue to make videos. I shed a sentimental tear over that outcome, and I subscribed to Joe, although his videos are still on a back-burner for me, because day has only so many hours.
I know that to make knives for a living is for me just a pipe dream. There is a lot of people in that market, the competition is fierce and getting notorious enough to make a living would be difficult, even more so for a shy and introverted personality (I can pretend self-confident and strong, but not for long).
But overall I think that at a societal level a step back from automation would be desirable. With current state of technology, it is entirely conceivable having 5 hours working days somewhere at a factory/farm and the rest of the day having off to be a weaver, cobbler or whatevermaker to your heart’s desire. The factories with their automation are perfect for delivering necessities for survival, but to my mind nothing beats handicraft for delivering the beautiful, unique and shiny. Further jobs at factories are soul-crushing and many people afterward have no energy for anything else than to sit in front of TV. Also most people whom I know who do have a creative hobby are mentally much better off than those who do not. There are reasons for arts therapy.
I am not entirely convinced that decline of handicraft is purely due to automation – there are a lot of people who would love to own handmade goods, but cannot afford them.
So why do we as a society insist on having most people do jobs they hate most of the time if that is not, strictly speaking, necessary for the survival of the species?
In my opinion the thing that is killing handicrafts is the same thing that drives the world inexorably towards global warming – insatiable greed of the upper 1% who are sucking money out of the economy only to put it on their bank accounts so they can engage in pointless dick-measuring contests with their fellow parasites. More and more people have to spend 8 or more hours a day in a factory to produce cheap goods, because fewer and fewer people have the means to purchase the more expensive handmade goods. It is a self-reinforcing cycle.
A pretty loaded question. Nobody has been “insisting” that some proportion of people should have jobs they hate. I mean, sure, there always seem to be a few crackpots to support any imaginable position. But that’s not what you’re asking for with this “we as a society” stuff.
Second, wouldn’t you say that we should occasionally insist on behavior, other than what’s merely necessary for human survival? So why present it in those terms, if that’s not what is problematic about it?
Third, I’m fairly sure you don’t want to claim that producing handmade cutlery (e.g.) is in fact necessary for human survival…. So even if you did take the stance that we shouldn’t ask for more than that, then you’re still left with the fact that this particular item wouldn’t make the cut either (along with most people hating their capitalist jobs, etc.).
That’s kind of a bizarre answer. The percentage of the population who (1) believe they need to amass lots more wealth than necessary for bare survival and (2) use that money to buy all sorts of junk is much greater than 1%. So you’re leaving out the vast majority of the people who are responsible for this phenomenon, which makes for an unsatisfying explanation. It’s easy to complain about the 1% — and it should be done early and often — but when the problems we’re facing are problems of the 90% (or some such number), as they often are, that should be where we focus our attention and how we should think of coherent/practical solutions.* They could live more simply (and at the same time produce/consume more hand-crafted things, if they wanted or needed them). But in fact they don’t do that, without the need for anybody else to insist that they behave this way.
* This obviously applies to global warming, since you mentioned it. Changing the behavior of 1% of people will not help much with that. It is far too big of a problem. And it isn’t the sort of problem that you can treat like a monster/boogeyman that we should try to defeat — it’s something many of us are doing to ourselves and we have to be serious about taking responsibility for it, not pushing it off to somebody else when it feels convenient.
@consciousnes razor, I apologize for poorly written article since from your answer I conclude it is not saying what I was intending to say. I will leave it at that, because I have neither strenght nor desire to argue with anyone about anything.
I think I get what you’re saying, Charly, and yeah… it would have been great for humanity if automation had been used to free people from tasks that make them neither happy nor healthy, allowing them to spend their time doing more interesting and useful things that machines can’t do. Instead automation was used to increase inequalities and make the rich richer. It’s sad, but given human nature probably inevitable. The world is in need of a serious redistribution of both wealth and work, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
He misses two key value of industrial mass production: consistency and predictability. Industrial production allows an engineer to select a set of values for durability and strength as price points against cost and to manufacture literal thousands of pieces with all the same properties. Molding with metal powders allows very fast and precision production of nearly identical parts at, once the design and molds are set up with the right materials, very low cost. This is very attractive from a functional POV.
Hand forging is only suitable for one-off sorts of production. I would say that even prototyping is better accomplished with a 3-D printer and metal molding simply because it is so easy to take that, given the digital nature, from one item to mass production. Given the ever lower cost of 3-D printing, 3-D printed metals, and powder molding demanding structures even one-off repair parts are the wave of the future. NASA and the military are starting to substituting limited 3-D printing for large inventories of spares.
Hand forging is primarily artistry. With artistry goes bragging rights, high costs, and reputation. Both of the artist, and the patron. The day will come when simple robots will routinely do near-perfect work at low cost. Having an actual human craftsman come out and do the job less perfectly will mark you as so wealthy and status conscious that you are willing to pay for imperfection.
And then the computer engineers will program the computers to be algorithmic imperfect and install programs to give computers personalities and ‘bad days’. In the end robots will steal our inconsistencies and incompetence.
In the mean time hand crafting things still is great to foster a sense of mastery and competence. Not every human can pound hot steel to produce useful and artistic items.