Manifesto

I've been told that you should start your blog with a manifesto that explains your philosophy or your purpose. I thought about writing "I'm just here to have a good time playing in my woodshop", but I figured I should come up with something more pedantic that essentially says the same thing, so here goes.

The New Arts and Crafts Movement

The original Arts and Crafts movement had a strong element of socialism in it. It was an attempt to improve the lives of the masses by eliminating the capitalists and factories. The founders especially found fault with division of labor and romanticized the individual craftsman. As Ruskin said 'It is not truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men: - divided into mere segments of men - broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.'

Thus, the original Arts and Crafts movement was a social movement. It was also a backwards looking reaction to the excesses of the industrial revolution. Ruskin, Morris and others romanticized the Middle Ages with its emphasis on Guilds. The idea of the designer and the craftsman united into one person was appealing to them. They did not like the concept of the designer as an elite industrial engineer and the worker as a limited, truncated troglodyte serving a machine. Ruskin’s popular book, The Stones of Venice (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964, c1960, original credo of the Arts and Crafts Movement), makes this point (although the book is almost unreadable to the modern eye. Victorian writers wrote in a florid style that is just too long winded before ever getting to the point).

Here in the 21^st century, all of that backward looking romanticism is long dead. The Middle Ages are not romanticized any more, but recognized as dirty, unhealthy, intellectually straight jacketed and socially frozen. The impracticality of returning to a small shop guild system is recognized, but fortunately, the ills of industrial revolution have been more or less ameliorated. Labor is not as brutally exploited and workers have more of a say in the activities of the factory floor.

However, life is not completely wonderful here in the technological vastness of the future. The relentless onslaught of multimedia manipulation from our mercantile overlords demands that we work at meaningless jobs for money that we squander on meaningless tech toys in the belief that this makes us happy. Well, it doesn’t. It just keeps us satiated so we will prime the pump and make the overlords richer. Sorry to sound overly Socialist here, but that's just the way it is.

The juggernaut of the advertising machine will continue to have most people completely beguiled and trapped in the soft chains of a software life. However, each individual can choose to manage his or her life differently. When the modern worker comes home to a MacMansion, popped up in a MacSubdivision, surrounded by MacRestaurants and MacMalls, he or she can make a decision whether to pop in a CD, turn on the TV, throw in a DVD, fire up the Play Station, read the MacNews on the MacNet, chat with virtual friends about their virtual life in a virtual world, or perhaps, make an alternate individual decision and do something creative and uplifting.

The New Arts and Crafts Movement is not a social movement, but an individual movement. The idea that the designer and the worker can be united into one individual is not dead. The idea that each individual can devise suitable work methods based on his or her own needs and not what Home Depot or Sears wants to sell is not dead. It is not a social movement but an individual movement.

You and I make the decision what we do with all that leisure time that the technological revolution has supposedly given to us. We decide what to buy with our paycheck and to what degree we are enslaved by our ties to the mercantile dictatorship. Even though we would like to think that we are different from the serfs of the Middle Ages and have freedom, we are not and we do not. We just have a slightly longer leash. What we do with that leash makes all the difference.

Which means, I'm just here to have a good time playing in my woodshop.