I’m not sure I know many people who use hand tools for exclusively pragmatic reasons. The decision to shape wood with finely honed edge tools is almost always a decision to exercise agency, to purposefully involve our very selves in our work. The world outside smugly sneers at the nostalgia. “Making things should be easy,” they tell us. Why bother learning manual skills or sweating fine-grained joinery details when you can play with composites and 3D printing? In this new wave of “craft,” our designs can be untethered from the constraints of wood grain or traditional construction methods. We are no longer hindered by our lack of skills or underdeveloped sense of design. There’s an app for that, and if we want things to run smoothly, we’d best just get out of the way.
This is simply another way of illustrating the fact that outsourcing is the obsession of modernity.
[…]
Craft is about dexterity, yes, but it is a dexterity that pays attention. This is to say that a true craftsman takes care.
By contrast, technology is not an apparatus of care. Indeed, being nothing more than belts and gears, ones and zeroes, technologies cannot care. Only a person can care. Woodshop machinery, for instance, is unconcerned with grain direction or the most attractive orientation of the lumber – that is the purview of the artisan. But the logic of the development of technology is to ever more distance the artisan from the work.
[…]
Let us be clear on this point: Writing is a craft. And if writing is a craft, it follows that authentic wordcraft is something that could only come from a writer – someone who has something to say. When we instead have nothing to say, yet we believe that something should be said, we embezzle the words from a chatbot. We publish the drivel, and no matter how readable it might be, no warm-blooded soul could be moved by it. But it’s not because there is no logic to the string of words (there often is), nor because it’s clunky or awkward in its phrasing (it’s getting better all the time), but because we have conflated our desire for having something to say with actually having something to say.
But the prompt is not the craft.
So much more in that essay worth quoting. Thanks to Jeremy Abel for alerting me to it.