Rolling the ladder up behind us
Published on 2025-06-20 , 5674 words, 21 minutes to read Who will take over for us if we don't train the next generation to replace us? A critique of craft, AI, and the legacy of human expertise.
A picture of two patches of wild grass bifurcated by a retaining pond. - Photo by Xe Iaso, Canon EOS R6 Mark 2, unknown lens
Cloth is one of the most important goods a society can produce. Clothing is instrumental for culture, expression, and for protecting one's modesty. Historically, cloth was one of the most expensive items on the market. People bought one or two outfits at most and then wore them repeatedly for the rest of their lives. Clothing was treasured and passed down between generations the same way we pass jewelry down between generations. This cloth was made in factories by highly skilled weavers. These weavers had done the equivalent of PhD studies in weaving cloth and used state of the art hardware to do it.
As factories started to emerge, they were able to make cloth so much more cheaply than skilled weavers ever could thanks to inventions like the power loom. Power looms didn't require skilled workers operating them. You could even staff them with war orphans, which there was an abundance of thanks to all the wars. The quality of the cloth was absolutely terrible in comparison, but there was so much more of it made so much more quickly. This allowed the price of cloth to plummet, meaning that the wages that the artisans made fell from six shillings a day to six shillings per week over a period of time where the price of food doubled.
Mind you, the weavers didn't just reject technological progress for the sake of rejecting it. They tried to work with the ownership class and their power looms in order to produce the same cloth faster and cheaper than they had before. For a time, it did work out, but the powers that be didn't want that. They wanted more money at any cost.
At some point, someone had enough and decided to do something about it. Taking up the name Ned, he led a movement that resulted in riots, destroying factory equipment, and some got so bad they had to call the army in to break them up. Townspeople local to those factory towns were in full support of Ned's followers. Heck, even the soldiers sent to stop the riots ended up seeing the points behind what Ned's followers were doing and joined in themselves.
The ownership class destroyed the livelihood of the skilled workers so that they could make untold sums of money producing terrible cloth that people would turn their one-time purchase of clothing into a de-facto subscription that they had to renew every time their clothing wore out. Now we have fast fashion and don't expect our clothing to last more than a few years. I have a hoodie from AWS Re:Invent in 2022 that I'm going to have to throw out and replace because the sleeves are dying.
We only remember them as riots because their actions affected those in power. This movement was known as the Luddites, or the followers of Ned Ludd. The word "luddite" has since shifted meaning over time and is now understood as "someone who is against technological development". The Luddites were not against technology like the propaganda from the ownership class would have you expect, they fought against how it was implemented and the consequences of its rollout. They were skeptical that the shitty cloth that the power loom produced would be a net benefit to society because it meant that customers would inevitably have to buy their clothes over and over again, turning a one-time purchase into a subscription. Would that really benefit consumers or would that really benefit the owners of the factories?
Nowadays the Heritage Crafts Association of the United Kingdom lists many forms of weaving as Endangered or Critically Endangered crafts, meaning that those skills are either at critical risk of dying out without any "fresh blood" learning how to do it, or the last generation of artisans that know how to do that craft are no longer teaching new apprentices. All that remains of that expertise is now contained in the R&D departments of the companies that produce the next generations of power looms, and whatever heritage crafts practitioners remain.
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