When the machine becomes the master: Window sash edition

Impressions

Let’s talk about machines. Not machines as metaphors, but grease-and-sawdust, rattle-and-hum, be-careful-or-you’ll-hurt-yourself machines that do actual physical work in the actual physical world. When, and how, does an actual machine take charge?

In a 2006 episode of The Woodwright’s Shop (“Old Woodworking Machines“), Roy Underhill visited a restored 19th-century factory that makes window sashes using belt-driven machinery. Roy built his reputation working with hand tools, but in the presence of all this chatter-roaring interconnected machinery he is as excited as any little boy. And as much as I too prefer working with hand tools, I have to admit it’s all just really cool. Everything runs off the same steam-driven belt! You can see all the working parts: the gears, the levers, the controls. There is no magic, no black box whose workings are obscure; the genius of the machines’ creators is right before your eyes, and accessible to the worker’s hands.

Until we come (at about 10:30 in the video) to a mortising machine that, rather than plunging its bit into the wood when the worker steps on a pedal, reciprocates. “Wait a minute, now,” Roy says. “You’re not having to force the chisel down here. It ‘s going automatically.” To this point each operation as been at the worker’s command. Roy himself owns a mortising machine that chops each time the worker steps on a treadle. Make no mistake: despite saving physical labor it still requires skill and care to use. (I’ve used it. Oh, wouldn’t I love to have one?) But here, the worker has to bring the wood to the machine and position it precisely on the machine’s schedule. “It isn’t going to wait for me!” Roy is told.

“I don’t like this,” Roy says. “You are having to be the servant to the machine!”

There—precisely there, I would say—is the dividing line. Reduce the relationship between worker and tool to its essence and this is what you have. Whether you bring your work to the machine or the machine to your work, if you do it on your own time and under your own control, you are the master. (Or, at least, you have the opportunity to develop mastery.) If you are following the machine’s patterns and obeying its designs, you are the servant. Your relationship to your work has fundamentally changed. You have lost, as they say, agency. In a few steps across the floor of a 19th-century factory, the machine took charge, and Roy pointed it out, and didn’t like it. Nor do I. Nor, dear reader, should you.

Biodiesel people vs. electric car people

Impressions

The subject of biodiesel came up last week, and in explaining the concept to my daughter I remembered how much I’m drawn to it—as opposed to electric cars, which I instinctively distrust. That statement says as much about me as it does about the two technologies, so let me unpack it a little.

Here’s why I’m drawn to biodiesel:

1. Biodiesel piggybacks on existing technology. We already know how to build and maintain diesel engines.
2. At its best, biodiesel turns waste material—used vegetable oils—into fuel rather than requiring new production.
3. You can literally make biodiesel in your back yard. More practically, it can be made on a community scale.

Will biodiesel solve all the world’s problems? No. It is a small and partial solution to an enormous global problem, which though it cannot solve the whole, nevertheless—by virtue of being small!—empowers people to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Moreover, in principle, it creates no new problems that others will have to solve later, e.g. waste that will have to be cleaned up.

The electric car, by contrast, promises a total solution to that enormous global problem—but one that, by its very totality, disempowers people. The electric car…

Cheap Sonnet No. (√5±1)/2. In Which the Poet Bemoans, Again, the Failure of His Tomato Plants

Poems

These are the seeds that Christ forgot to mention,
Guaranteed by faith and factory rearing,
Sown not on rock nor thorn nor bitten path
But in good scientific soil, and bathed
With electrically timed warmth and light.
They thrust themselves awake like Christmas morn,
Unfurled leaves like mouths of baby birds
Mother-fed, quiescent while the year matured,
Stunted, never feathered out for flight.
Beware, my brothers, engineered intention!
Every life must suffer nature’s wrath.
Plant by singing and by signs. Mourn
The lost. Save what will be saved.
Listen though you are not granted hearing.

Tools and externalities

Impressions

Following on my previous post: In trying to define a “traditional” tool I raised the issue of toolmaking. But the way a tool is made has implications for the maker of the tool as well as (if not more than) for the end user.

The low stages of my scales suggest a toolmaker who pursues a craft in a small shop: people who make wooden molding planes, for example. That may be a kind of ideal, but it isn’t always practical.

In the middle are small, semi-industrial operations in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, with relatively few workers, an emphasis on craft, and a working environment that is, for lack of a handier term, more or less flat, in that it minimizes the distance and distinction between labor and management workers being given latitude for authority and the owner is not only capable of doing some actual work but even now and then does it. That, at least, is the kind of working environment I would prefer for myself, whether as a worker or a manager ( I have been both).

At the high end of the scale, you have machine parts cranked out by machines wherever labor is cheapest for the profit of corporate shareholders.

If I value the way I work, surely I ought to try to extend that privilege to others? That’s merely the golden rule. So I might say, as a third principle, that “A tool (and its components) should be made by workers who work as the user would want to work and who are treated as the end user would want to be treated.”

Hand tools and “traditional woodworking”

Impressions

When I asked recently “What is a ‘hand tool,’ anyway?” I considered two fairly literal definitions of a hand tool: a tool held and operated with the hands, and a tool powered exclusively by the hands (or possibly by other body parts). Neither was really satisfying. Here’s another, more complicated idea that comes up in conversations about hand tools: the idea of “traditional woodworking.” Continuing my list, I could say that

3. A hand tool reflects traditional woodworking practice.

But what do I mean by traditional?

Here we go again.

Limits and conscientious consumption

Essays & Articles

At some level it remains inconceivable to me that slavery still exists in the world. And so it was that, a decade ago, when I read news reports about “human trafficking” in the global chocolate industry, I assumed that this problem had been “taken care of.” But of course it hasn’t, because our boundless need to consume—even something as ultimately trivial as chocolate—trumps everything.

Ignorance is fear: or, “it’s gross” is not an argument

Impressions

A former “food industry insider” named Bruce Bradley has started a blog to tell the world about all the terrible things the food industry does. In his most recent post, he lists some of the disgusting things that industry passes off as natural products. “Unfortunately,” he writes, “big food companies have cast a spell over most regulators that allows them to manipulate us with advertising, make deceptive claims, and mislead us with ingredient labels.”

I appreciate the effort to speak truth to powerless, but here’s the problem: Three of the five things he lists have been commonly used for centuries or, in some cases, millennia. Not only are they, in fact, natural; they’re traditional and originally handmade.

What’s a chicken worth?

Uncategorized

Occasionally I see arguments to the effect that eating red meat is dangerously damaging to the environment — red meat specifically, as compared to poultry. For example, that it takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef, but only 800 gallons to produce a pound of chicken. (“Only” is relative here.) Or that 27 pounds of carbon dioxide are produced for every pound of beef consumed, but only 7 pounds of CO2 per pound of chicken. The figures vary so wildly that I won’t bother citing sources: I assume these numbers are inaccurate; I offer them only as examples of the argument being made, which is that eating chicken is more “environmentally responsible” than eating beef.

I wrote recently about my objection to this sort of bean-counting, this reduction of lives and complex realities to mere data. Here’s another example of what I meant: linking pounds of meat with pounds of CO2 or gallons of water ignores the fact that those pounds of meat come from once-living creatures, which somebody has to kill.