Shop class as soulcraft
In this wise and often funny book, a philosopher/mechanic systematically destroys the pretensions of the high-prestige workplace and makes an irresistible case for working with one’s handsShop Class as Soulcraft brings alive an experience that was once quite ordinary, but now seems to be receding over the cultural horizon—the experience of making and fixing things. Working with your hands, as Mathew B. Crawford describes it, connects us to the world around us. Those of us who sit in an office often have intuitions of something gone amiss, a sense of unreality accompanied by feelings of impotence. What, after all, do we do all day? In this wholly original debut, Crawford offers a brief for self-reliance and a sustained reflection on this problem: how to live concretely in an ever more abstract world. Shop Class as Soulcraft seeks to restore the honor of the manual trades as a life worth choosing for anyone who felt hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents. On both economic and psychological grounds, Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a “knowledge worker.” This imperative, he explains, is based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing, the work of the hand from that of the mind.
Stats for nerds
42recommend
78mentions
53people
2009–2026years
78% recommend18% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'm afraid I won't do this justice, as it's been a while since I've thought deeply about these ideas, but here is an attempt!
For me, Pirsig put it best: "Quality is the goal of Art." I too struggled to understand Pirsig's full metaphysical hierarchy of Quality, but this quote gets at the core of the similarities I saw in these books.
Pirsig was concerned with teaching his students writing and maintaining his motorcycle. Berry was concerned with doing fulfilling and meaningful work on the farm. The MIT hackers were concerned with finding The Right Thing: "the unique, correct, elegant [program]." All of these individuals were concerned with some notion of Quality.
Interestingly, they all viewed what they were doing as a form of art. A colleague remarked, "Sounds like art," to Pirsig upon hearing his ideas on Quality, to which he responded, "Well, it is art." Levy identifies "You can create art and beauty on the computer." as one of the tenets of The Hacker Ethic. "[A]ll serious computer programs are expressions of an individual." This was the first clue to me that they were all talking about the same thing.
Like art, Quality is more a description of a process than product. And the Quality way of working that all three books discuss is very much the same. For me, it is exactly the defining characteristics of the artistic process. Through their work, an artist expresses themselves. They make contact with their medium, be that motorcycle, field, code, or painting. They make choices. Their medium responds. Both evolve with each other. The process is inherently experimental. Importantly, their medium imposes limitations and constraints.
I gave this talk back in 2024, two years after I took the course. At the time, I was frustrated with my lack of artistic output post-graduation. These readings made me realize my creative/artistic outlet had just changed for the time being. I took a lot of solace in that. Recently, I've been trying to understand how AI fits into my picture of Quality programming.
If you've come this far, you might be interested to see some of my image & algorithm work [1]. The decluttering, exaptation exhibition was the culmination of the class and an independent study.
I should also mention Shop Class as Soulcraft (Matthew B. Crawford) as another book that influenced my thinking.
- Shop Class as Soulcraft essay (and book) continues on these points pretty well: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-so...
- I really didn't like that book. Shop Class As Soulcraft is a far more lucid treatment of the topic in my opinion.
- See also the excellent book "Shop Class as Soulcraft" for a thorough examination of skilled trades as an under-appreciated and vital aspect of our economy and culture.
- I recommend Shop Class as Soulcraft, which contrasts blue-collar work (motorcycle repair) with knowledge work. It's not specifically "tech"-related, but it does a good job of exploring how corporatization has diminished the ability to be a craftsperson in modern careers.
- +1
I thought Shop Class as Soulcraft was excellent and found the author's theories on the lack of job and life satisfaction among those doing "knowledge work" compelling.
It reminded me of the movie Margin Call when Kevin Spacey's character, who manages a trading floor for a wall street investment firm, laments that if he'd been a ditch digger, at least he'd have a bunch of holes left behind as evidence he accomplished something.
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