Fast Bikes, Slow Food, and the Workplace Wars

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/22/090622crat_atlarge_sanneh?currentPage=all

by colins_pride • 17 years ago

14 13 17 years ago

newyorker.com

kvs• 17 years ago

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

dhs• 17 years ago

Pssst...read it here: http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/pirsig.html

thunk3• 17 years ago

"... 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• 17 years ago

"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.

thunk3• 17 years ago

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.

anamax• 17 years ago

> 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;

A trip to your local Home Depot/Lowes shows that a huge amount of that home construction and repair that used to be a service has already become a user-installable product.

Many of the tight spaces for this stuff is a design decision that can change.

Kadin2• 17 years ago

That doesn't really sound like an argument against skilled labor to me. Somebody needs to maintain those machines. Someone needs to set them up, plug them in, calibrate them, feed them raw materials, and generally keep them working.

As technology changes, the skills you need in order to rightly be called a "skilled" laborer change. In general, they seem to tend to require more education over time (although this might just be social; I'm not convinced that it really requires more study to become a programmer today than it did to become a good paleolithic hunter, it just seems easier to us because their training wasn't formalized and thus seems invisible). You can't expect one skillset to just carry you safely through the rest of your life without staying on top of changes.

Machines eliminate some jobs, but they inevitably create new ones: designing, maintaining, and operating the machines. In many cases they eliminate more jobs than they create, which is something we need to plan for, but I don't see any real chance that the machines are just going to make human beings obsolete -- in any avenue of work -- tomorrow.

thunk3• 17 years ago

As far as maintenance of telerobots, in the extreme case it's performed by other telerobots, manned by call centers full of "certified" gamers 10 or 10,000 miles away. Maybe not even call centers. Maybe employees are just perpetually on call, forced to "goggle in" periodically throughout the day to snake a drain in Brisbane or Bangladesh or Boise. In fact, they were probably goggled in already, playing U(niverse)oS(tarcraft) XXII, so they just alt-tab over.

Sounds crazy, I know, but it does seem to follow the general historical trend of alleviating manual labor from those of lower and lower socioeconomic status, while neatly sidestepping the problem of Strong AI with an ass-ton of artificial artificial intelligence.

The romantic, manly labor the article talks about requires the direct manipulation of physical reality with one's hands. The above scenario is skilled, certainly, but by no means manual.

dkarl• 17 years ago

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.

Kadin2• 17 years ago

> 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.

edw519• 17 years ago

"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.

ezy• 17 years ago

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"? :-)

jsteele• 17 years ago

"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.

Fast Bikes, Slow Food, and the Workplace Wars

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