At one point Crawford cites Toqueville’s prediction that Americans would become dependent on the “soft despotism” of what’s nowadays sometimes called the “nanny state,” while suggesting that today’s outsized corporations are more of a threat than government itself. But he also refers to Toqueville’s remedy for this situation: small enterprises that allow people to solve problems without recourse to corporate psychological manipulation.
One member of a small technical “crew” can say to another “It’s plumb and level — check it for yourself,” whereas a member of a modern corporate marketing “team” can only assert his semi-independence from management-imposed ethics by “pinning Dilbert cartoons to his cubicle wall and watching The Office every Thursday night.”
The point here is that office work often has no verifiable criterion available by which to judge if someone is working well or not. As a result, “speech codes, diversity workshops, and other forms of higher regulation” proliferate, leading to the spread of “a dull and confusing anxiety.”
Crawford extends his dislike of the office ethos to computers — machines that have no inkling of things that practical men and women in many spheres of life often know by instinct. He also argues against Marx’s idea of manual workers’ “alienation” — that the object over which they have labored is “torn away” by the rich man who eventually buys it, leaving the worker “alienated” as a result. Why so? the author asks. Doesn’t a furniture-maker want to see his furniture used, what use has he for 100 chairs, and so on.
This excellent book, published in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, ends with a caution against all revolutionary nostrums. The vision of a future in which economic antagonism has been abolished may blind us to the problem of how to live well here and now, one best solved by insisting on what human beings do best in a local context — such as making motorbikes purr and hum in harmony with the pulsations of the stars.
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