This blog is to celebrate non-economically viable pursuits.
Rather than engage in nostalgia, we’ll celebrate the black hole of labor and capital which the engagement in arts and crafts production represent. Automation and mechanization have been eliminating previously viable career paths since the dawn of humanity. How did an experienced flintknapper feel when during the Chalcolithic period when they first laid eyes on a copper axe?
We’ve had a few thousand years to sort out our feelings. Shaking our tiny fist of rage at the winds of change is an understandable emotion. Let’s turn our hamster fury away from Luddism and towards capitalism. Cruelty isn’t taking a scythe out of the hands of an itinerant farm laborer, its not giving them anything else to do.
I’m not an economist or a historian. This brushes over the suffering we see as a black smear running from the industrial revolution to the present as workers were deprived of their customary labor opportunities. We’re looking at people who are gleaning in the stubble of these professions.
What does it mean to engage in a pastime that produces objects that have no value on the market and can be purchased for far less than the individual would need to spend in terms of materials and labor to produce them?