I’m going to use a personal example as a lead-in to one of the most important distinctions we can make in the modern history of technology. Then, I’ll explore the ramifications of that distinction, as well as where it blurs.
I want two things these days. One is a sailing skiff that I would build myself. The other is a Jaguar XK8 or XK. You might think that the latter would be significantly more expensive than the former, but actually they’re not that far apart. In all likelihood, I’ll get both, but not at the same time. The idea for this piece came from realizing an obvious but big-picture-important difference between them: I can build the skiff myself, with the skills, space, and tools I have as a handy property owner who’s owned and fixed up a boat before. I can’t build a Jaguar. I don’t have the skills, but even if I did, I don’t have the equipment or the tools or the space. I don’t even have what’s necessary to fix one up. To acquire what I’d need to build a Jaguar is impossible—but it’s almost absurd to even say that, because, if I built a car, it wouldn’t be a Jaguar because it wouldn’t have been built by Jaguar. It would be a Jaguar replica. Even to acquire what I’d need to restore a Jaguar, which plenty of people do, would be prohibitively expensive for me, as would the garage I’d have to build, the lift I’d have to install…it’s just not at all practical.
And that’s because a Jaguar is a product of industrial technology. It’s built in a highly-specialized factory, that cost the kind of money to build and operate that only a well-capitalized corporation can raise. It’s built by a large group of people, each of whom has a specific skill set to accomplish one part of the process. It’s all skilled work, as is the construction and maintenance of the robots that do some of the work, but no one person can do it all. And it’s proprietary; the law protects the exclusive right of one organization to build and sell Jaguars.
On the other hand, industrial technology can produce things that are remarkably financially attainable for what they are. Many, certainly including cars, are worth keeping long-term, as they’re built for durability and replacement parts are readily available. If we look at it one way, a Jaguar in good condition, even a 20-year-old one with 100,000 miles on it, should be many times more expensive than a 15’ skiff made out of six sheets of plywood. The Jaguar has hundreds of precision-machined parts. The skiff has maybe forty parts, all cut out by a guy with a jigsaw working on a pair of sawhorses. And yet, there’s not a big difference between the cost of materials for the skiff and the purchase price of that Jaguar. That’s because all the materials to build the skiff—the plywood, the epoxy, the varnish and paint, the hardware—are all industrially-produced. I have to buy them. I can’t make them myself. In material culture studies and history of technology, we call things you build yourself “vernacular” technology. We call things built by a single crafter, or a small, skilled crew, working mostly by hand, “artisanal” technology. A sawgrass basket made by a basketweaver who makes them to sell for a living is a product of artisanal technology. A bird house you made for your backyard the same way your Mom taught you is vernacular technology. Unless you made it from a kit that you bought from a retail store—then, it’s a combination of industrial and vernacular.
So, with the skiff, industrial technology meets vernacular technology—and vernacular technology meets artisanal technology, if we consider that the boat’s designer runs a small business designing and selling plans for his boats.
A factory can build a Jaguar in about three days. I anticipate the skiff to take me up to six months. If I were being paid by the hour for that six months of work, then clearly the skiff would be absurdly expensive for someone to buy from me—because, as a privileged person living in a rich society with high costs, I’m going to charge a lot for my labor. So, it only makes sense to build something like that for yourself, in most cases.
Vernacular, artisanal, and industrial technology all entail different costs—labor cost, cost of tools and equipment, skill-acquisition costs, and purchase prices. And the cost equation for each will vary from society to society, depending on the wider cost of labor in a given society, the tools and equipment available, and the purchasing power of the potential customers.
Consider a fisherman from a small village on the coast of India, fishing off the beach in a wooden craft fashioned either by himself, or by the local boatbuilder, and powered by paddles and sails, as its predecessors have been for centuries. This fisherman makes very little money, but he doesn’t need very much to acquire his equipment, because the local boatbuilder doesn’t make much money either. Perhaps the boatbuilder builds a boat on credit because he knows the customer’s family and he trusts the customer to pay him back as he’s able. Because the boatbuilder’s capital expenses are low, he doesn’t have to spend a bunch of money just to start the job, so he can do that.
What’s happened with craft like this, though, is that most of them have gone to outboard-motor power in the past thirty years. So, industrial technology has come into what was mostly vernacular and/or artisanal technology. I say “mostly” because it’s likely that these craft already use nails that were made in a factory and purchased, and some have sails sewn together from cut-open feed sacks, but adopting an industrially-produced means of motive power takes it to another level. Outboard motors are expensive. They are only reliable if they are meticulously maintained, and if their operators have a source of clean fuel. I assume that, for fishermen like my putative example here, an outboard motor, even a used one, is a significant investment—and risk, because that fisherman needs to make enough income to pay for it.
This is a hint as to how industrial technology can push small-time operators out of business. If you don’t have the resources to acquire industrial technology, you’re vulnerable to being pushed out by a group of people who do. And those groups of people are likely to operate on an economy of scale, so that their income can exceed their higher expenses. The industrial technology allows them to do that.
This is what happened to small farming when mechanized equipment took over. Small farmers went into heavy debt to purchase tractors and combines and other power equipment, so that they could compete with other farmers who had done so. Farming is a notoriously unpredictable business, though, so many of them found themselves unable to pay these debts on time. Farmers traditionally put up their land as collateral on loans, as that is likely the only valuable asset they own. So, if they default on their debts, they lose their land. The successful farmers were the ones who could scale up their operations to cultivate more and more land, producing more and more crops, which they could sell for more and more money. They could then buy farmland foreclosed on by the banks.
The transition from wooden to fiberglass boats also represents a transition from artisanal to industrial technology. Each wooden boat is a one-off, but a fiberglass boat requires a set of molds, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive to make. It only makes sense if you’re going to build at least several of the same boat. But the explosion of affordable pleasure boats of all types, beginning around 1960, was thanks to industrial fiberglass production.
And plenty of 1960s fiberglass boats are being kept in excellent working order by their current owners, who acquired them for modest sums.
There is an interesting liminal zone between industrial and artisanal or vernacular technology, and most of us operate in that zone sometimes. If you work on your own car, you’re in that zone. If you hand-build an electronic adapter to allow a twenty-year-old car’s infotainment system to communicate with today’s handheld electronics, and you sell that adapter in small numbers to people who own those cars, you’re in that zone. In parts of Saharan Africa, where parts availability is spotty at best, local shops have kept old diesel Mercedes-Benz cars going for decades by making their own replacement parts. Those shops work in that zone.
The current right-to-repair movement exists in that zone. Some manufacturers want to reserve the capability to repair and modify their products for themselves, as a proprietary prerogative. Customers, and independent repair technicians, are fighting this, pushing back against high repair costs, planned obsolescence, and unsustainable waste. The very values and larger agendas of society meet in this liminal zone where older forms of technology meet industrial dominance.
I’m not trying to denigrate industrial technology. As I said, it’s the only way someone like me could ever have something like a Jaguar—when cars were a new thing, only rich people could buy them. But a lot of the push-and-pull that goes on with technology in our world can be better-understood if we keep in mind that industrial technology is a recent way of doing things that coexists with, rather than obliterates, older ways of doing things. That coexistence is where interesting and instructive stuff happens.