Fee Versus Free

With Issue 4 done and dusted I’m eager to begin work on the next Issue. I want to thank those who purchased the magazine and left a review on the blog and the Etsy shop. I can’t stress enough how valuable that feedback is to me. So, a big thumbs up for you.

The topic I really want to cover today is “free vs fee”, and I’m not referring to the magazine, but labour costs (humans vs robots.)

Everywhere I turn I witness ever more self-serving machines. I walk into a supermarket and there they are self-serving checkouts with a queue sometimes a mile long or you go into a bank and there’s no bank teller to be seen, but there it is row after row ATMs.

This cost cutting is eliminating thousands upon thousands of jobs worldwide and not a peep in protest from our governments. In fact, they are in support of these moves. What I see is a repeat of 1830 when England kick started the Industrial Revolution and hand work was replaced by machinery. You may say to yourself, “well that’s progress”, but that was regression rather than progression. Streets became filled with the homeless. Children were left to fend for themselves and prostitution was at its highest level, crime reached its peak, unemployment was also high, no education for the trodden, child labour was the norm and the list just goes on and on. With introducing driverless cars even more jobs will be put at risk. Economists predict 100 million worldwide jobs will be gone thanks to this technology that’s supported and promoted by Google and Uber.

Corporations try to justify their inventions by brainwashing us to believe machines are better, more intelligent and safer than us. But they forget that it was we human beings that created these machines in the first place so we can’t be as stupid as they make us out to be.

A machine is a machine, it’s lifeless and so is its work. Have you ever compared a hand carved object to a CNC machine carving? There is no comparison, not in beauty and not in elegance. A machine can never replicate the hand work of a real person. There just isn’t any character to it. The need for hand skills has never been greater than it is today. The power is with people. Companies can try to force a change, but the power lives with us if we only unite and stand against their demands by refusing to travel in a driverless car or go to a bank with no bank tellers and by not giving away our time and labour so freely to supermarkets through their self-service checkouts but utilise their employees and keep them in a job. We can realize that power by reintroducing back into the market real handmade products, by introducing more craft markets and by teaching others the craft, by teaching our children, and by reopening shop classes at schools, technical colleges and apprenticeship programs. We can all play a part. Even if we do one of those things I mentioned above it would have a grave impact on corporations.

I hope to play a part in this revolution against so-called modernisation through the magazine by passing on what knowledge I can to others. The Lost Scrolls of HANDWORK is not just a woodworking magazine but an idea, a revolutionary idea. It’s a message that says out loud that we will not be made redundant by robots.