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A short essay on the making of things in the knowledge economy

Note: An earlier draft of this piece was posted a few days ago on dailykos.com, a liberal online community. I have taken many -- most -- of my political musings there, where they sink like a stone, rather than burdening y'all with them. I realized, later, that this wasn't really about politics, and so have taken the opportunity of a quiet morning to revisit and repurpose the words.

It is, I would add, an interesting thing to compose words anonymously in the dailykos world. I have come to take for granted the premise that most of my readers in the ND community either know me or have a working familiarity with my writing persona. As a confessional writer, I find anonymity a curiously limiting construct. But a useful learning tool, as it were.

In 1942, as part of the war effort, John Steinbeck wrote a book called Bombs Away: The Story Of A Bomber Team, reprinted in 1990 and picked up off the remainder table in a weak moment because for some unknown reason I had gone on a mild Steinbeck binge. And because it was cheap. An extension of my "rescue good literature from the thrift shop" school of acquisition.

(And I note, in passing, that Steinbeck was part of a war effort, that there was a war effort embraced by artists and artisans and even most partisans; and that there is not now, has not been for decades.)

The premise of Bombs Away, in any event, was that American men entering the military in 1942 would find that their natural-born civilian skill-sets translated nicely into the component parts of a bomber team; and that not everybody should want only to be a pilot, that there was honor in each job on the plane.

I was struck, reading the book so many years after the last good war, that much had changed. That I had none of those skills -- not the hunting and shooting, nor the repairing and welding of things, nor even the physical fitness that comes with labor -- for they were no longer a part of the life of the typical American suburban kid.

Much has changed since 1942, and much since Steinbeck's book was reprinted in 1990.

But I was reminded of it a few weeks back when my wife broke up a long car trip by reading to me an essay she had found on the back page of the summer edition of Spin-Off magazine. The author's name is Abby Franquemont, and the headline reads: "What Are You Doing? And Why?", not coincidentally the same question my wife would ask were she to walk into my home office just now and find me writing for free again, but no matter. Ms. Franquemont was explaining why she likes to spin her own yarn, and snapped:

"Look," I said, "do you want to live in a cave, wearing skins, without fire, knapping flint to enable you to hunt and gather, and be dead by age twenty-five? Because this -- this right here in my hands -- this is why you don't. Without this, that is all you can do. Without this, there is no civilization, no technology, no history, no agriculture, no animal husbandry, no permanent settlements, and the whole of human history just did not happen. Without what I'm doing right now, making yarn, there is no life as we know it."

Textiles are at the root of many essential advances in civilization, both in terms of the textiles themselves and the technologies needed to create them. Cultures lacking in textile production capability don't generally advance beyond hunting and gathering. Which is fine, but given a choice, few of us today would opt to live such a life.

The full substance of her argument is well beyond my competence, and it is not clear to me whether textiles are an indicator of the possibility of civilization, or a prerequisite to its development. Nor, for my purposes today, does it matter.

Fourteen years ago I left Seattle for a job at RayGun Publishing in Los Angeles. I brought with me my books and my records and my CDs and my power tools -- not so many tools, then, just a drill and a saw, really -- and not much else except the cabinetry to hold all that stuff. And though I was theoretically a member of the senior staff -- indeed, though I had broken a finger playing basketball (again) -- when we added staff and needed new office furniture assembled, it fell to me to do the job. Because I could read directions, because I had tools and knew how to use them. (I also cooked. I was a freak. I didn't mind being a freak, that part came naturally. LA, on the other hand...)

Today, we are well down the road to losing most of the hand skills necessary to function in the world we have built. Or paid others to build on our behalf. Children aren't taught to drive a nail, or change a toilet, or even to change the oil in their car (which I did all of once, and stripped the bolt). We're not taught how to make things, how to cook food from fresh ingredients, how to sew. Which is, to a degree, fine. Some people shouldn't drive cars, either.

Two problems, though: First, we -- as a culture -- devalue those people who do know how to fix and make things. (Unless and until we need them; and then they are talked down to, and about, and we don't understand what they're doing, why it works and fails, nor even how to communicate clearly and honestly with them.) In passing, this has made it easier to undercut the union movement. And we have whole-heartedly embraced the exportation of those jobs abroad, ensuring -- much like the capital flow T. Boone Pickens laments on television each night -- that the skills necessary to build and operate and staff a modern manufacturing enterprise are no longer native to our shores.

We're forgetting how to make things. On purpose. (Unless it's a hobby, or a quaint anachronism; or unless we're trying to get off the grid, still very much a minority position.)

What's been offered instead is an information economy, a service economy, a world -- ah, the pristine vision -- built around intellect.

An illusion, that.

My stepmother clipped a column from the July 7-14 Newsweek, written by a man named Sal Nunziato, who until recently owned a CD store in Brooklyn with which I am otherwise unfamiliar. He writes eloquently about knowing his customers, knowing their tastes and temperaments well enough to suggest music they might like, to order things specially for them, to nurture their community. And like many CD stores, he is out of business, his specific knowledge of that community -- and of the music in the marketplace -- lost to that corner of Brooklyn, lost forever.

Replaced, perhaps, by Rhapsody and Amazon, both anxious to use mathematical equations and the science of the computer to do the job of a smart and intuitive human. Of a man with taste.

Having labored as a music critic for 21 years, I feel Mr. Nunziato's pain.

Friends of ours own a bicycle shop. We live in a small town. They are the local experts in bicycles and canoes and climbing equipment. People come to their store and talk and talk and talk. And then they go online and distill that knowledge into a purchase that does nothing to support the local business.

Do we really value knowledge?

Surely the present administration did not value nuanced views of Iraq, does not value the science behind global warming, and a dozen other things we might profitably carp about another time. Indeed, Mr. Bush behaves like a mediocre student who is unable to make sense of competing and complex theories about a system he is studying, and so decides simply to go with the answer he wants to hear, seeing instead of the anarchy of the intellectual process the arrogance of a salesman.

Because it's all about the sale, isn't it, in America?

Here's the question, then: Who's going to fix it when it's broken? Who's going to build the new one?

This, in part, is why I now refer to myself as a semi-retired music critic, and an apprentice farmer. Which is not to say that I aspire ever to sell what we grow; but which is to say that I hope to learn enough to grow what we eat, should we wish to do so, and to share whatever bounty we may unexpectedly have with our neighbors. Which is not to say that I ever wish to work on my car, but which is to say that I have no objection to changing out the toilet should it need doing again.

Hand skills are not my gift. But I played basketball from the time I was seven or eight year old well into my 40s, and it wasn't until some point in my mid-30s that I finally figured out the mechanics of a jumpshot, the part where the jumping helps to propel the ball toward the hoop. I have put out publications of one kind or another since 1974 or 1975, and yet only in the last few years would I have suggested I was anything more than a hack designer, and I am barely better than that, even today. A certain tenacity is, apparently, my gift, and like every student I believe that if I apply myself I will acquire knowledge. Though, in fairness, that never worked in physics class. (Bad teacher, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

Posted by grant on July 27, 2008 10:44 AM | Permalink