Normally Caitlin writes about Israel and their policy capture of the West at the expense of our basic morals. This was a rare AI take of hers, but the imagery of it was so visceral I thought I’d share.
Quotation reads:
They’re encouraging us to spend our lives curled up in impotent little balls of emotional infancy and intellectual stagnation so that they can sell us machines which act as digital prostheses for the sacred parts of ourselves we have amputated. We mustn’t let them do this to us. We must remain human. We must hold fast to all those precious aspects of our humanity they’re trying to extract and commodify.
I don’t think this is debatable because the artisans were right. Industrialization killed fine work of all kinds from carpentry to weaving to shoemaking to tailoring to typesetting to all kinds of skills in favour of the generic and artless. The only people who can now afford fine skilled work are the people who removed it from the rest of us.
I’m not under the impression that the rest of us could ever afford fine skilled work.
Most clothing was hand-made, for example. It was expensive, but also durable and repairable, not the throw-away garbage we’re having pushed on us these days. As another example, a travel bag I bought for a recent holiday barely lasted the holiday (indeed breaking just before the final flight home). Such bags from those times would be about as functional (this was a very simple bag) but would last a lifetime.
Most hand-made clothing was also shoddy. It just had to be functional and durable, it didn’t have to look or feel good.
Skilled work? Absolutely. Was it fine skilled work, though? Not really. It was rough skilled work.
OK, fair point. I was thinking more the fabrics than the cuts.
The fabrics made by artisans were more durable, though the affordable ones would have been rougher than we’d like today (think jute over denim).
And that’s part of my point: fine fabrics would be worn by wealthy merchants and aristocrats and mercenaries, everyone else gets whatever fabric they can afford. At no point in history did we get to wear fine anything.