Essay: Why the Way We Make Things Matters

I stumbled across a documentary called "Manufactured Landscapes" from 2006. There's a clip inside a clothes iron factory in China. The factory makes - and I want you to sit with this for a moment - essentially every single clothes iron sold on earth.

The clip shows a woman testing spray nozzles. She sits at a bench. She picks up a nozzle. She plugs it into a testing device. She presses a pump lever. She watches the spray pattern. She puts it in a 'pass' bucket, or a 'fail' bucket. She picks up another one. She presses it. She watches. She puts it down. She picks up another one.

She will do this all day. She will do it tomorrow. She will do it the day after that. She did it yesterday. She will do it until she is too old or too slow to be useful, and then she will be replaced by someone younger and faster, and that person will sit at the same bench and test the same nozzles and watch the same spray patterns until they, too, are used up.

I watched that clip once and it has been haunting me.

It's not the working conditions, though I'm sure they're a ways from "ping-pong tables and free vending machines". It's not the wages. It's not the hours. It's something worse than all of those things. It's the totality of the reduction. This is a person. A person with a name, a family, a history, a set of things she finds funny and things that frighten her, things she dreams about when she's falling asleep. She has a face that someone loves. She has hands that have held a child, a lover, a letter from home. And we - all of us, collectively, with our demand for a $12 iron - have arranged the world so that those hands spend their waking hours testing spray nozzles.

John Ruskin saw this coming in 1853.

Ruskin was a Victorian art critic, arguably the most influential one Britain ever produced, and he spent the first half of his career looking at buildings. Specifically, he spent years looking at Venice, and what he saw there became the foundation of his most enduring argument.

In The Stones of Venice, and particularly in the chapter called "The Nature of Gothic," Ruskin laid out an argument so simple and so devastating that we've been trying to wriggle out of it ever since. The argument goes like this:

The quality of a made object is inseparable from the moral and spiritual condition of the person who made it. A society that treats its workers as interchangeable parts will produce ugly things. And ugly things will, in turn, degrade the society that tolerates them.

Ruskin arrived at this by looking at the difference between Gothic cathedrals and the neoclassical buildings that replaced them. The Gothic cathedral is rough, wild, imperfect. The gargoyles are crooked. The carvings are uneven, the proportions shift from bay to bay. And Ruskin argued that imperfection is the evidence that a human being was permitted to think. That crooked gargoyle was carved by a man who was allowed to use his imagination, to make his own decisions, to fail. The roughness is the proof of freedom. The cathedral, for all its irregularity, is alive because the people who made it were treated as people, not as tools.

Then he turned and looked at the factories springing up across England and he saw the opposite. He saw workers reduced to repetitive motions. He saw the division of labour, the principle formalised by Adam Smith that production is most efficient when each worker performs only one small part of the whole process, and he called it what it was: not the division of labour, but the division of men. "Divided into mere segments of men," he wrote, "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."

Wendell Berry, writing over a century later, pointed out something Ruskin missed: the men walked into the factory voluntarily. In "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," Berry described how men submitted to the destruction of the household economy — the loss of home employment and self-employment, the disintegration of their families and communities — and continued to believe, obey, and vote for the people who most eagerly abetted their ruin. These men, who went from understanding everything from how tractors worked to how to repair a sash window, instead specialised in a single task and ultimately became helpless to do anything for themselves or anyone else without money. And so for money they did whatever they were told. Their usefulness was defined not by their range of skills, but by their willingness to be somebody else's tool.

Ruskin had a line that should be carved into the wall of every business school on earth: "You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both."

He wasn't speaking metaphorically. He meant it literally. If you demand the precision of a machine from a human being, you must, as a matter of mechanical necessity, suppress everything in them that is not machine-like. Their imagination, their creativity, their capacity for surprise and error and discovery; all of it has to be crushed flat so the finger can hit the same point ten thousand times without deviation. The soul gets smothered so the hand can be steady. And out the other end comes a perfect product, and behind it stands a diminished person.

That was 1853. The nozzle tester is 2006. The argument hasn't aged a day.

There's a word Ruskin invented that we need. He called it "ill-th" — the deliberate opposite of wealth. Where wealth, for Ruskin, meant life — full-breathed, bright-eyed, happy-hearted human creatures — illth meant everything that economic activity produces that works against life. Pollution. Degradation. Commuting. The spiritual emptiness of joyless labour. The landfill. The self-storage unit.

Australia holds two dubious honours: the largest average house size in the world, and the second largest amount of self-storage per capita. We have so much junk that we have to rent extra buildings to keep it in. Every one of those storage units is counted as a positive contribution to GDP. Every piece of Amart furniture that falls apart after three years and gets replaced by a piece of Kmart furniture that will fall apart after three years — that's not waste, that's economic growth. The manufacture of the junk and the disposal of the junk are both measured as productivity.

Ruskin would call that illth. I'd call it something else, but my wife reads this newsletter.

The feedback loop he described is running at industrial scale. We make things badly because we treat the makers badly. The badly-made things teach us that objects are disposable. The belief that objects are disposable teaches us that the people who make them are disposable too. And so the next generation of objects is made worse, by people treated worse, and the cycle tightens. The $7 t-shirt is made by someone whose full humanity has been compressed into a seam allowance; we wear it three times and throw it away, and the throwing-away is the final act of the same disrespect that produced it.

Walk through a Kmart. Really look at what's on the shelves. Feel the weight of the things — or rather, the absence of weight. Pick up a $15 side table. A $9 set of shelves. A $4 picture frame. Hold them. They are dead objects. Not dead in a metaphorical sense, dead in the Ruskinian sense: no human judgement was exercised in their making. No one chose that timber. No one adapted to its grain. No one made a decision that affected the outcome. The objects passed through human hands without being touched by a human mind, and you can feel it. Your hands know. Everyone's hands know. We've just been trained to ignore that nagging sensation. Buy something else and the feeling might go away.

However right Ruskin was about his diagnosis, Ruskin was also wrong about a lot.

He romanticised the medieval period with the confidence of a man who had never had to work with his hands. The Gothic stonemason he celebrated was, in many cases, a piece-rate worker who turned the same moulding all day, who never saw the finished building, who was fired when his eyes went and who died poor. The British woodworking trade that dewy-eyed hobbyists think of as the golden age of the craft was brutal on the men who worked in it. A chair bodger turned the same leg hundreds of thousands of times. A turner in a production shop never saw the table his legs were joined to. There was no workers' compensation for the frequent and severe injuries. No free healthcare. No welfare. Older men were discarded the moment they needed glasses. Thomas Chippendale — Chippendale, whose name is synonymous with the finest of English furniture — died in penury.

The tyranny of financial necessity ruled then as it rules now. Ruskin couldn't see that because he didn't have to. He had an inherited fortune and could admire the dignity of labour because he never had to do any. These are the romantic fantasies of a man who fancies he would have been a craftsman if he'd had another go at life. But he'd have been a craftsman with wealthy parents and a Cambridge education, which is a different thing from a craftsman with fourteen children and rent to pay.

He was also wrong about the binary between hand and machine. Ruskin set up an opposition — handwork is good, machine work is bad — that doesn't survive contact with reality. My beautiful Harold and Saxon chisel backs were made perfect by a CNC mill, and there's a good argument that the precision of that back is what makes my hand-cut baojiansun (抱肩榫) joint possible. If the chisel back is twisted, the skill of the hand holding it is irrelevant. A router, which Ruskin would presumably have hated, takes genuine skill to use well. Nothing fucks up faster than a router. Can someone who has never touched one before use it as well as me? Not likely. There are a hundred decisions before the router gets involved — timber selection, grain reading, jig design, test cuts — that require skill, judgement, and care. Does the router negate all of that just because it plugs in? Of course it doesn't.

David Pye tried to sort this out in 1968 with his famous distinction between the "workmanship of risk" and the "workmanship of certainty." It's become a touchstone for anyone who wants to theorise about craft, and I strongly dislike the book. Pye uses the example of a printing press to illustrate the workmanship of certainty — the idea that the quality of the result is entirely predetermined, that the operator's skill is irrelevant. Christopher Schwarz, a woodworker and publisher who has actually operated printing presses for decades, pointed out that this is nonsense. Nothing is certain about printing. Everything depends on skill, dexterity, tacit knowledge, and the capacity to respond when things go wrong — which they constantly do. Schwarz's conclusion: the workmanship of certainty doesn't exist. It's all risk.

I think Schwarz is right, and I think the reason Pye got it wrong is the same reason Ruskin got the medieval period wrong: he was theorising about work he hadn't done. You can sit in a professor's chair at the Royal College of Art and imagine that a printing press runs itself. You cannot sit at a printing press, nerves on a knife edge with tool box in hand, and imagine the same thing. The theory evaporates on contact with the reality of machines.

So the line between craft and not-craft isn't where Pye put it, and it isn't where Ruskin put it either. It's not in the tool. It's not in the power source. It's in the relationship between the person and the decision. When the person operating the tool is making decisions that affect the outcome — choosing, adapting, responding to what the material is doing — that's craft, whether the tool is powered by muscles or electricity. When the person has been reduced to executing someone else's decision with no latitude for judgement, that's the condition Ruskin described, and the tool doesn't matter. A hand plane in a sweatshop is still a sweatshop.

Evan Dunstone uses routers, horizontal mortisers, spindle moulders and some of the most extensive and sophisticated jigs I've seen in real world use, and his workshop produces furniture of the highest quality. Is his work "handmade"? I don't know. I don't care. What I know is that he's thinking. He's choosing. He's exercising judgement at every stage. The electrons are irrelevant; the cognition is everything.

The nozzle tester is not exercising judgement. She's executing a binary check — spray or no spray — a thousand times a day. That is the condition Ruskin was talking about. Not the absence of hand tools, but the absence of the mind.

Ruskin's argument, the one everyone remembers — the quality of the object reflects the moral condition of the maker — is actually the second argument in "The Nature of Gothic." The first argument, the one most modern summaries skip past because it makes them uncomfortable, is theological.

I've made no secret that I'm a newbie Christian. For those who are triggered by these things, bear with me. What I'm about to say is the only explanation I have for why that iron factory clip haunts me so much. If your framework is different you'll get to the same destination by a different road. But this is my road, and I can't in good conscience leave it out.

Ruskin argued that the Gothic system of ornament was Christian. The Greek system enslaved the worker by only giving him tasks he could execute perfectly — geometric forms, precise repetitions, ornament reduced to compass-and-ruler patterns that required obedience, not thought. The Egyptian system enslaved the worker differently, by fixing a legal standard for his imperfection — hieroglyphic figures drawn to rigid proportional rules, the worker trained by discipline to reproduce them, punished for deviation. In both systems, the person was a tool.

But in the Christian system, Ruskin said, this slavery is done away with altogether because Christianity recognises the individual value of every person. Not the aggregate value. Not the average value. The individual value. Each person carries the image of God, and that image includes the capacity for thought, imagination, error, and creative freedom. The Gothic cathedral accepts imperfect work from imperfect hands because the theology underneath it insists that those hands belong to a person that matters — not despite its imperfection, but in full embrace of it.

The crooked gargoyle isn't a defect tolerated by a merciful employer. It's the visible evidence of a theology that says: this person, with all their limitations, is made in the image of God, and the work of their mind is worth more than the precision of a machine.

This is why the nozzle tester breaks my heart.

If she is a unit of labour — a cost input, a line item on a spreadsheet — then what's happening to her is merely unfortunate. Inefficient, maybe. Sad, if you're the sentimental type. But ultimately just the way things are. The cost of progress. The price of a $12 iron.

But if she is made in the image of God — and I believe she is — then what's happening to her is a desecration. The system that put her at that bench has taken a bearer of the imago Dei and reduced her to a repetitive motion. It has taken the image of the Creator and turned it into a mechanism for checking spray nozzles. It has done exactly what Ruskin described: smothered her soul within her, made the flesh and skin which is to see God into a leather thong to yoke machinery with.

That's Ruskin's language, and he meant it theologically, not poetically.

And here's where it gets truly uncomfortable. This isn't one factory. This isn't one company making one bad decision. This factory makes every clothes iron on the planet. Every single one of us who has bought an iron — and that is virtually every person reading this — has funded this. We have collectively, through our actions, arranged the global economy so that this woman spends her days pressing nozzles. Not because any individual decided to be cruel, but because the system's logic requires it: the iron must be cheap, so the labour must be cheap, and to make the labour cheap you must strip away everything about the person that isn't useful for checking nozzles. Their dreams, their creativity, their capacity for joy and surprise — all of it is economic friction. All of it gets beaten down.

We all did this. All of us.

And the secular version of that culpability is manageable. You feel bad for a minute. You think about buying a more ethical brand. You forget about it by dinner. The guilt has no teeth because it has no external force. If morality is relative — case by case, culture by culture, whatever works — then you can always find an angle that makes this acceptable. The utilitarian says: the aggregate benefit of cheap irons to millions of consumers outweighs the suffering of this one worker. The libertarian says: she entered the contract voluntarily. The pragmatist says: what's the alternative, should she starve?

But the imago Dei doesn't let you do that arithmetic. You cannot weigh one image-bearer against another. The child suffocating in a collapsed cobalt mine in order for your phone battery to last a little longer has identical value to your own child. Not similar value. Not roughly equivalent value. Identical value. The same God made them both. And if you believe that — really believe it, not just as a Sunday morning proposition — then the entire system of weighing is revealed as the obscenity it is. The moral calculus itself is the blasphemy. You are not permitted to put a price on the image of God, and every supply chain on earth does exactly that, every minute of every day.

So what do we do?

This is where Ruskin fails us, and this is where I have to be honest about failing too.

Ruskin's prescription was paternalistic and naive. He imagined benevolent industrialists who would voluntarily reform their factories, guided by Ruskinian principles. His student William Morris drew the harder conclusion: the system itself had to change. Ruskin founded the Guild of St. George to demonstrate his vision; the philanthropic businessmen he hoped would finance it never showed up. His social vision was feudal — a wise aristocracy presiding over a grateful craftsman class — and it was nostalgic even in 1860.

I share a version of the same fantasy. I imagine a world where people buy fewer things, but better things, made by people who are treated as people. I imagine a local economy where the maker and the buyer know each other, where the conditions of production are visible, where the object carries the evidence of a human mind.

But I also know this is fantasy, and I know it because without my wife I would have starved to death.

Monique is a GP. Her salary is the load-bearing wall under my entire practice. Without it, the practice collapses and the model becomes something else — something desperate, something compromised, something that would look a lot like the system I'm criticising. Even with her income there have been times I've had to take part-time work to make ends meet.

Every independent maker I've studied had an equivalent: Schwarz had reliable income from Popular Woodworking, Follansbee had Plimoth Plantation, Krenov also had his wife's steady income and Wendell Berry has his magazine and book royalties. Ruskin had his father's sherry fortune. You cannot stand outside the system you critique, you can only find enough shelter within it to do the work as honestly as you can.

And Monique's income relies on a medical system that uses equipment made in factories in China. Her stethoscope was assembled by the hands of a person on a production line. The drugs she prescribes were manufactured somewhere far away. The system that pays for my protest is the same system I'm protesting.

So the honest version of "what do we do" is not "overthrow the system." The honest version is smaller, and harder, and more personal.

I want to be clear about something: I am not an ascetic. I am not here to tell you to own nothing and be happy. I am a Western man and I love stuff. I love beautiful objects. I love well-made tools and Japanese knives and heavy cookware and furniture you can feel the transferred touch of the maker in. I want people to have great things — the best things — things that are worthy of the homes they go into and the hands that use them. The problem is not that we love stuff. The problem is that our love of good stuff has been quietly morphed into a tolerance of any stuff. Any shit will do, as long as it's cheap and there's enough of it. That's not love, that's addiction, and like all addictions it leaves you emptier than you were before, reaching for the next thing to fill a gap that the last thing was supposed to fill.

So what does that look like in practice? I wish I knew.

Buy less, people say. And they're right, in the abstract. But buy less of what? You can't buy an iron that wasn't made this way. You literally cannot walk into a shop in Australia and purchase a clothes iron that was manufactured under conditions Ruskin would have recognised as human. The same is true of virtually every small appliance, most clothing, and an increasingly large share of the building materials that go into Australian houses. The option to buy less only works when an alternative exists, and for most categories of object, it doesn't. The system has swallowed the alternatives.

Buy better, then. But better is getting harder to find, and more expensive when you do. There's a word doing the rounds — "enshittification" — that describes what's happening to nearly everything we buy (and that's an essay for another day). Products that were once adequate become worse, by design, so they can be replaced more often, so the margin can widen, so the quarterly number can tick upward. Drive through any new housing estate and look at what Metricon is building. Look at the cladding, the window frames, the roof trusses you can see going up before the plaster hides them. Then ask who framed those walls, and what they were paid per unit, and whether they had any say in the specification. That's Ruskin's argument in fibro cement and pine. The quality of the house and the treatment of the carpenter who built it are the same thing; both are getting worse, and both are getting worse for the same reason.

Buy local? I'd love to. But even my own supply chain is tangled in the system I'm describing. Native Australian species — our own trees, growing in our own soil — get shipped to China for processing and shipped back again, because it's cheaper to send a TREE around the world twice than to mill it here. I use that timber. I depend on it. The protest and the complicity live in the same workshop.

Demand transparency, then. But transparency is the one thing the system cannot survive, which is why such extraordinary money and effort go into preventing it. When the suicide nets at Apple's iPhone factories became visible to the West, it caused measurable — if temporary — damage to their bottom line. That's the proof of concept: visibility works. It's also the reason visibility is so ferociously suppressed. A clothes iron is a simple object. There is no practical reason why you couldn't trace it from raw material to finished product in a single document. The reason that document doesn't exist is that it would be too horrifying to publish.

Being transparent about the human experience of making benefits me. Them being transparent about the dehumanising of their making hurts them. That asymmetry should be enough. The fact that it isn't — that we can watch a clip of a woman testing spray nozzles and feel bad for thirty seconds and then replace our $12 iron that stopped working — tells you something about how deep the problem goes.

I don't have a grand conclusion. I don't have a policy proposal. I have a bench, a workshop, and a set of convictions I don't live up to, funded by a wife I don't deserve, in a system I can't escape.

What I do have is this: every piece I make is a small, insufficient, decidedly futile refusal to accept that the nozzle tester's situation is acceptable. Every Bench Mark and Brush Note I write is an attempt to make the conditions of making visible — to show that a person was thinking, choosing, adapting, making decisions that mattered. Every time I write about why a joint exists, or what the wood did that a book couldn't predict, or why the recessed-leg form is structurally more forgiving than the corner-leg form, I am saying: a human mind was engaged in this. A person was here, and the evidence of their humanity is in the object.

I cannot change the iron factory. I cannot make handmade furniture affordable to everyone. I cannot reconcile my critique of the system with my dependence on it.

But I can refuse to hide them. And I can refuse to pretend that the way we make things doesn't matter, that the conditions of production are someone else's problem, that the quality of the object and the quality of the life that made it are separate questions.

They are the same question. Ruskin knew it. I know it. And somewhere in a factory, pressing nozzle after nozzle after nozzle, there is a woman who knows it better than any of us.