I have always had a deep appreciation for the crafts, for people who make things with their own hands and have thus formed the backbone of civilization for thousands of years. Especially today, in an age marked by the seeming disappearance of work, I want to share such documents of the past that show ways of making that have remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years, were still commonplace a hundred years ago, and today seem to us as if they came from another planet.
I’m very critical of the narrative of perpetual technological progress, that is in large parts just a way to produce more useless stuff in ever quicker succession, a race that increasingly seems detached from human flourishing.
Craft matters because it gives the human body a role—effort, resistance, learning, frustration—that modern automation quietly erases.
We live in bodies that have evolved to physically interact with our environment, to secure survival through struggle and creativity, repetition and rhythm. And if we do indeed achieve total automation soon, what forms of meaning, dignity, and self-efficacy will remain available to us?
The film series Der Letzte seines Standes was a series on German television in which several filmmakers produced 30-minute documentaries about old crafts and traditional manufacturing processes.
Find the rest of the episodes on the YouTube channels of these two filmmakers: Benedikt Kuby & Rüdiger Lorenz
The films are in German, but remain highly informative even without language. And I’m sure that YouTube will soon offer real-time dubbing :)
I recommend the following posts for further reading:
Primitive Technology — Shelter Publications — Ted Kaczynski
The well builder
The charcoal burner
The coppersmith
The grindstone carver
The lime burner
The wind tower builder
And a few pages from the book ’30 Werkstätten von Handwerkern nebst ihrer hauptsächlichsten Werkzeugen und Fabrikaten’ (1835)
