So much craft is lost! In the Spielberg movie "The Post" there are some wonderful scenes of type setting using boards and lead. I also enjoyed the scene where the printed, folded newspapers ran on a huge conveyer belt until they were taken and collected for delivery. When I graduated from high-school, we got the final results from the morning newspaper. Hundreds of us and our parents got up before dawn, drove downtown, and waited until the huge doors of the paper delivery dock opened. Kids whose job was to sell papers on the street ran out and made a bonanza day selling the first edition to us. What followed were the cheers and tears you would expect. The day is etched permanently in my memory. No comparison with an email congratulating me and enclosing my transcript.
You could argue that the art of cave painting or tablet engraving was lost to make way for manuscripts written on papyrus and that was lost to make way for the printing press and so on.
Losing craft for efficiency will happen as civilizations advance, but one thing to keep in mind is the amount of craft that went into sending an email. It can be at the level of writing an email server with a high uptime and a client that reads them reliably. It can go down to bits and byte. And that doesn’t account for the crafting of the hardware that those software run on or the effort that went into the infrastructure to carry those signals.
The trend is that each individual that has an idea to share has to put less effort into sharing their own idea, but that doesn’t mean that what we built no longer requires craft. The tragedy is that we don’t see and appreciate the monumental craft that went into making email work in the first place. I’d argue that whole process requires more craft, but the sender and recipient of the emails don’t have to understand it.
I don't think that so much craft is lost, I think it has just reduced in scale. For example, I still believe that there are places where Linotype machines are available and usable, even if the number has shrunk.
Maybe this is a good example of a long-tail problem? As interesting technologies are supplanted, the number of practitioners drops, levels out at a low number for some time, and then eventually goes to zero. Then the hard part is—if people still care—extending that tail as long as possible.
This article reminds me of a book I read many years ago, "The Mozart forgeries", by Daniel Leeson [1]. It tells the story of two forgers which create the autographs of two Mozart's most beloved works for clarinet, the Clarinet Quintet K581 and the Clarinet Concerto K621 (the originals have long been gone), planning to sell them to some museum for a huge amount of money. In order to do this, they acquire the documentation needed to learn how music was written in the XVIII century was written. They start from the production of paper sheets, the engraving of a watermark, the creation of a quill from bird feathers, the production of ink and so on. I really enjoyed the book and suggest it to anybody which appreciated this article. (Or Mozart. Or both, like me.)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 19.8 ms ] threadYou could argue that the art of cave painting or tablet engraving was lost to make way for manuscripts written on papyrus and that was lost to make way for the printing press and so on.
Losing craft for efficiency will happen as civilizations advance, but one thing to keep in mind is the amount of craft that went into sending an email. It can be at the level of writing an email server with a high uptime and a client that reads them reliably. It can go down to bits and byte. And that doesn’t account for the crafting of the hardware that those software run on or the effort that went into the infrastructure to carry those signals.
The trend is that each individual that has an idea to share has to put less effort into sharing their own idea, but that doesn’t mean that what we built no longer requires craft. The tragedy is that we don’t see and appreciate the monumental craft that went into making email work in the first place. I’d argue that whole process requires more craft, but the sender and recipient of the emails don’t have to understand it.
EDIT: grammar
Maybe this is a good example of a long-tail problem? As interesting technologies are supplanted, the number of practitioners drops, levels out at a low number for some time, and then eventually goes to zero. Then the hard part is—if people still care—extending that tail as long as possible.
Step one: Live in the middle ages.
Step two: ??
Step three: Profit.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4368020-the-mozart-forge...