The Dark Side of Frictionless Technology
A few weeks ago I wrote about the joy of calm technology; specifically, the satisfaction that I’ve found trying to learn a new physical skill (for me, playing guitar). A whole lot of you wrote in with your own stories, and a few of you also shared reading recommendations. Last week, while taking the week off, I read one of those books: Matthew B. Crawford’s 2009 best seller, Shop Class as Soulcraft. Crawford—a Ph.D think-tank dropout turned motorcycle mechanic—offers a passionate case for the value and dignity of manual work and elaborates at great length on what I like to call the art of slow progress.
Crawford has a compelling argument about the misconceptions around how people unlock creativity. He suggests that the common view of creativity (what he dubs a “kindergarten idea”) is that it happens almost only when we have enough freedom from conventional constraints, and that our creativity is some special force inside us that we can unleash. Crawford thinks this is bullshit and that creativity is actually “a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice.” He continues:
[Creativity] seems to be built up through submission
