

Fast Bikes, Slow Food, and the Workplace Wars - colins_pride
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/22/090622crat_atlarge_sanneh?currentPage=all

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dkarl
I find this perspective appealing and romantic, but there's another part of me
that protests that skilled labor is as vulnerable to technological progress as
any other work, and that any romanticization of it is in danger of being
opposed to progress. Like medieval guilds, it's based on the assumption that
there's a fixed amount of work to be done in each profession. What happens
when his town doesn't need small engine mechanics anymore? Economic
dislocation, retraining in a different profession, something that rips away
_his_ basis for a fulfilling life. What happens when time after time, it's
more sensible to replace than to fix? What happens if technology removes the
mystery and challenge from his job? Any technological challenge or mystery
indicates a deficiency in the underlying technology which will someday be
remedied. Also, don't forget one of the fundamental laws of software: your
intellectual interests and the interests of your users are almost always in
opposition. 99.9% of the time, there's an easy, simple, boring way to do
something, and you wish you could try something interesting instead.

The Golden Rule prohibits doing things the interesting way at the expense of
your users, and in a way it prohibits his entire vision of work. He thinks
it's a bad thing that parts are cheaper to replace than to fix. Ecology aside,
that's a very selfish way to think. It's Luddism. He wants people to forgo
cheaper and more reliable transportation so he can have the pleasure of fixing
their engines in a less efficient, more expensive, but more intellectually
rewarding way. That's fine if he makes his living doing boutique work for
well-off people who romanticize handicraft and buy his services as a
narcissistic enjoyment of their own enlightenment, but it takes on a different
tone when he's fixing the motorcycle of a working-class guy who needs it to
get to work.

The basic problem is that anything done on a human scale is extremely
expensive unless the customer makes a whole lot more money than the person
doing the work. Again, it's fine when a small number of uncommonly competent
people produce expensive, boutique work for the rich. Maybe it's even fine
when an extra-smart guy like him decides to live a modest life fixing
motorcycles. It's not fine when regular joes have to depend on the limited
competence of other regular joes for such a vital thing as transportation.
It's fine when it's one guy with a PhD writing a book for a bunch of urban
keyboard jockeys, but an entire economy full of the work he imagines would
SUCK, s-u-c-k suck. The few areas where people deal with hands-on craftsmen
are a nightmare. Plumbing and contracting are crapshoots. You can pay a big
chunk of your monthly budget for shoddy work. Imagine that model extending to
everything you buy.

If you're over forty, there's an easy way to compare craftsmanship with the
soulless corporate model. Remember what it was like to take your car to an
auto mechanic instead of a dealership? Remember the grizzled guy with greasy
hands and decades of wisdom who loved taking things apart, understanding how
they worked, and finding the most elegant way to solve things? Yeah, he took
days to work and got things right about 80% of the time. The soulless
corporate dealership model actually works pretty well. So what if they don't
care if the work is done in an interesting or elegant way? They want EXACTLY
WHAT YOU WANT which is to get your car back to you quickly in working,
reliable condition so you don't go around telling your friends how much they
suck ass and how their cars break down all the time. Whereas this guy wrote an
entire book about what HE wants to get out of fixing your stuff.

~~~
Kadin
> Ecology aside, that's a very selfish way to think.

Saying "ecology aside" brushes off a lot of stuff, and not just the sort of
hippy-dippy environmentalist shit that corporate types and pro-growth
economists scoff at. It basically assumes extremely cheap raw materials and
vast, far-off factories churning out parts. It assumes horrendous waste, both
of materials and energy, in most cases.

Disposability almost always carries with it a huge externalization of costs on
somebody else. In many cases when the costs of replacement are fully
internalized into the part, it's no longer nearly as cheap; repair starts to
become a viable option.

There may be situations where it's cheaper to replace than to repair, but in
order to find where that's really true, we need to work towards full
encapsulation of production costs in end goods, something we do a really
shitty job of today. If we work towards that, I suspect the world we'll end up
with has a lot more skilled-labor jobs, but won't create them for nonsensical
or romantic reasons, where they're clearly unnecessary or wasteful.

------
ezy
This was an excellent sarcastic commentary on Crawford's book. I thought the
reviewer took it apart quite nicely, and filed it in the correct category with
so many other similar books with the same essential pattern. It's an over the
top, generalized, justification for the author's personal decision. After all,
he had to use his PhD _somehow_. His political and personal conflicts are
blown up into societal ills so he can justify the waste of money on his
education. :-)

I really have just about zero interest in motorcycles, and car repair in
general, or really doing anything similar to that for a living. The whole
macho, often misogynistic (which was identified by the review, BTW),
motorcycle culture just completely turns me off. It's also seems to be a real
attraction for the regressive anarchist/libertarian turned authoritarian type,
which is a further turn off.

But the corporate culture is the same -- it may not have the same
personalities or political culture, but there are distasteful elements we all
know about personally (and from numerous Dilbert cartoons :-)). It, also,
seems to be an attraction for the naive libertarian cum authoritarian. :-) I
don't like it either, really.

 _But_ I like what I do, and I like being paid for what I do, so I put up with
it because I can figure out way to do so. Perhaps Crawford found something he
really likes and an environment which suits him. To generalize that into a
condemnation of "non-physical" work seems like an utter long-shot. An attempt
to counter the snobbiness of his UC peers with an snoobiness of his own.

My favorite part of the review is the end, where the reviewer delivers the
final blow to Crawford' polemic -- what exactly is "useful" about repairing
hobby motorcycles compared to certain forms of "office work"? :-)

------
kvs
IMHO: I highly recommend "Zen" for anyone's reading list.

~~~
dhs
Pssst...read it here: <http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/pirsig.html>

------
thunk
"... fixing bikes has given him 'a place in society,' as well as an
'economically viable' job that won’t evaporate or get moved overseas."

At least until telerobotics delocalizes skilled labor. Like it or not, there's
no guarantee of job security even for the plumbers and electricians and
carpenters. Keeping your hands dirty will increasingly be a hobbyist
anachronism or affectation. Maybe unfortunate, but so it goes. All is flux.

~~~
jamesbritt
"Like it or not, there's no guarantee of job security even for the plumbers
and electricians and carpenters."

Well, to the extent that there is no guarantee of _anything_.

What make you think that improvements in technology in the next 30 years will
enable machines to crawl under sinks or behind furniture; make estimates about
corrosion, or wood grain, or wiring quality; manipulate small, complex items
in tight spaces; explain the options (fix now but risk breakage later; replace
now, but pay larger cost upfront) and answer questions, and do all this in a
timely and friendly manner?

There is a large human factor to much manual labor that is hard to replicate
with machines or remote operation.

Most everyone I know who ends up dealing with a non-local telephone support
person hates it. Trying to get a decent explanation of why I should have my
plumbing replaced rather than repaired from someone with poor localized
language sounds skills sounds like a nightmare.

A better bet would be for, say, North Americans to operate remote repair
devices for locations in North America (and likewise for other language-
unified locales).

Perhaps a local, unskilled person operates a device to feed information back
to a pool of technicians in some other location; you get the human element,
but centralized technical smarts.

I believe something like that happens now with medical imaging. Technicians
run the scanning machines, send the images off to who-knows-where for skilled
readers to interpret, the results are moderated by a more-skilled supervisor,
and sent back to the lab or hospital.

Still, I get the feeling that fixing bikes is part engineering, part art, and
transmitting sufficient information over the wire for remote viewing may a
hard problem. Like cooking, some things are just better handled by real live
people.

~~~
thunk
Well, you seem to be dissagreeing, then agreeing with me, which is fine. I
don't know where your 30 year deadline came from. Betting against the
accuracy, efficiency, scalability and lower cost of our tools hasn't
historically been a smart move, and I don't see why that would change. It's
easy to envision a scenario where you could pay n times as much for an artisan
plumber (or ... Bicycle Repairman!). But I bet most would opt for the cheap,
standardized service of a tele-op'd Mario9000.

------
jsteele
"Skeptical readers can savor the irony that Shockoe Moto [his motorcycle
repair shop] specializes in imports."

Working on non-import (i.e. US-made) bikes would be the specialty. Otherwise,
it's like writing that some restaurant specializes in salads made from
lettuce.

------
edw519
"But how do you serve craftsmanship without serving the market? How can an
independent artisan insure that he doesn’t become an entrepreneur and, in
time, a corporate executive?"

What's so bad about "serving the market"?

Many of us absolutely love writing great software. Almost as much as we love
watching people use our software.

We _are_ craftsmen, in every sense of the word. We have tools we love, some of
which we built ourselves. We may not wash them with soap, but we do collect
the garbage from time to time.

Ours is a labor of love, often done alone, and sometimes done only for
ourselves. We call that "dogfood" and it's not the only way to be a craftsman.
We get double joy when someone _uses_ our products, and no, we don't have to
sell out to the man in order to do that.

If Crawford better understood what some of us do with technology, he'd
probably realize that many of us are already living his utopia and his outlook
would improve. Who knows, maybe his next book will be about programmers
quietly building the new order in a million garages around the world.

