These machinations of Artificial Intelligence are but tools in the hands of MAKERS MAKING. What matters to them as the makers of things is what can be made, purposefully and in timely ways. Fitted with, well let's call them NOZZELZ, or BLADEZ if they cut, they can manipulate in an appropriate state: plastics, resins, clay, cement, paper mache, cum PAPERclay, metals etc., that can be ejected though a NOZZEL, these printers are quite simply tools like any hammer. Fitted with BLADEZ these A1tools can carve wood, stone, plastics bones, whatever BUT not quite in the same way as a hand-held blade etc etc.
Nonetheless they are tools in the hands of a MAKER doing what a maker might have in mind to fulfil a need, an aspiration, and in the numbers that best fit the circumstance.
The breaking of printing presses in the 15th C is a historical act of resistance. Scribes and guilds feared job losses and religious cum political authorities were concerned about their loss of control over information and power. People destroyed presses to stop mass information's spread, job obsolescence, and the rise of opposing ideas that challenged their world view, their authority, their understandings including the flatness of the earth in their time.
The printing press didn’t take the poetry out of poems or the storytelling and other narratives out of books. In fact, these tools eventually allowed more to read in time and at the same time it empowered the ONEonONE exchange of ideas alongside what appears in, and is contested in THEpress, books etc. However, the nuances and nuancing in a handwritten letter, poem, story, is by-and-large missing – but it needn’t be.
We need to look no further than Japan to find exemplary examples of the richness and the impoverishment of printed and calligraphic text, but it is there in other CULTURALrealities too. It is just the case that the extremes seem more evident in Japan.
The 19th C ‘Luddites', skilled English textile workers, protested the Industrial Revolution by smashing new automated machinery, like stocking frames and mechanical looms, They weren't anti-technology but they were against poor working conditions, wage cuts, and the de-skilling of labor, fighting for quality goods and fair livelihoods against factory owners using machines to reduce costs. The government responded harshly, passing laws to make machine-breaking a capital offense.
“ During the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the Luddites were oath-sworn, machine-destroying technophobes afraid that machines would take their job. In today’s world, often compared unfavourably to Orwell’s Ingsoc, has the Luddite opposition to technological progress stuck around? Or, as Thomas Pynchon predicted in his 1984 essay Is it OK to be a Luddite?, have computers become so ‘‘user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead?’’ … Jack Cameron Stanton January 29, 2021
In the early 19th C Luddites were transported to Van Diemen's Land, as convicts after they participated in machine-breaking riots in England. English Luddites, textile and agricultural workers, smashed machinery and were sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen's Land as punishment, around 1812-1830s. lutruwitaTASMANIA perhaps because it was as far away as could be imagined and somewhere where the English status quo at home could be enriched. Indeed, hundreds of Luddites and related machine-breakers were sent to Van Diemen's Land where the untrue idea of terra nullius was imagined and apparently imaginable.
There is a kind of narrative, indeed layers of narratives, to consider perhaps when we think about Tasmania in the 1970s/198Os as a kind of outpost of the CRAFTrevival in Australia. At that time there was a higher percentage of Tasmanians who were paid up members of a MAKERSgroup than anywhere else in Australia. Interestingly the Tasmanian Greens came into being in 1972 with the Greens in Europe being formed in i1979. If dissidence and the awareness of MAKINGSimportance has a resonance we might look to places like Tasmania and Germany.
There is a kind of narrative, indeed layers of narratives, to consider perhaps when we think about Tasmania in the 1970s/198Os as a kind of outpost of the CRAFTrevival in Australia. At that time there was a higher percentage of Tasmanians who were paid up members of a MAKERSgroup than anywhere else in Australia. Interestingly the Tasmanian Greens came into being in 1972 with the Greens in Europe being formed in i1979. If dissidence and the awareness of MAKINGSimportance has a resonance we might look to places like Tasmania and Germany.
In a historical context we might look to places like Mittagong and STURT in 1941 and say Chipping Camden in 1906 when Chipping Campden was a center for the Cotswold Arts and Crafts movement that, hosted local events like flower shows and fetes, and admitted girls to its school to boost falling enrollment. The town was undergoing a shift from its traditional crafts focus towards, let’s say a period of development in education and community life – and there are synergies to muse upon here thinking about STURT.
Likewise, we could also look to Mashiko and the mingei folk-art movement along with Kyoto and Okayama. And also, we might consider the CULTURALimperialism of a kind in the of the World Crafts Council, a non-profit, non-governmental organisation's foundation in 1964 in the context of the cut and thrust of the COLD WAR.
The point to be considered here is that MAKING is to do with its tools and the CULTURALrealities it goes on within. MAKING is to do with life’s four imperatives:
- The wherewithal to sustain it; and
- The need to identify within a group; and
- The need to procreate genetically an ideologically; and
- The need for secure shelter.
MAKING within all this is evident everywhere all the time and some of it is mediocre and some is enlightening, some empowering, and some sustaining. Arguably, it matters little IF the tool that does the MAKING is a STONEtool or a robot as both are equally capable of mediocrity or empowerment and both offer choices. Typically, the status quo and mediocrity sustain each other.
MAKING MAKING WORK is ever likely to be an ongoing human enterprise and it is likewise ever likely to manifest itself in multiple ways. Likewise, there will be MAKERS who will seek to avoid mediocrity in their MAKING and institutions that will care little about such things in their quest for power and influence.
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