Divorced From What Is Around Us

I was in my late teens the first time I went to Amsterdam and walking around the city centre, around the canals and looking at the buildings, I fell in love. Even then I knew that part of the reason was that it was so easy to detect the care that had been put into the buildings, each individual one, when they were built, but also that any craftsman could have built the buildings. And that singled them out from modern buildings where the techniques and the organisation seemed to be, or are, foreign to the common or garden craftsman.

For example, if a hundred men today sat down and put themselves to working out how to build one of those houses in Amsterdam, I’m sure that they could gather the materials, read the references and work out how to build such a house and actually do it. Whereas if a hundred men sat down and looked at some modern buildings, they’d be lost. The techniques are somehow very removed from what an individual can do.

Anyway, that was then and then much later on I heard car mechanics and car owners complaining that the electronics in a modern car were now a black box, meaning that they were unobtainable. The insides of them, the construction of them were unobtainable. If they went wrong you simply sent back to the manufacturer to get another one.

In contrast, in years gone by any man who set his mind to it could learn the techniques of how a car works and they could rebuild a car. And I know the comparison between how to build a house in Amsterdam and how to rebuild a car is an analogy that stretches too thin quickly, but there is something about human size and human methods that unites them.

The fact is, as we all know, that we now live in a world where probably worldwide a few thousand people understand the code that runs basically the whole of our human systems. And outside of them, forget it, nobody knows.

And the point of this is that when we divorce ourselves from a feeling that the construction methods we use are of us, then we lose ownership, authorship and a sense of position relative to those things and we become effectively slaves because we don’t know how to do it.

‘We’ being the great mass of humanity. And I think that’s wrong. I think the great mass of humanity should be able to put together the techniques and the means to build the things with which we occupy our lives.

But that is not the turn we took.