There is a physics lab at a university you would recognize. In it is a broken piece of equipment. A custom made glass spring. It’s not complicated in principle, just a precise coil of specialized glass. It would cost sixteen thousand dollars to replace. Not because the material is rare. Because the skill to make it is.
The last person who knew how is gone. Retired. Then died. The knowledge left with him. The experiment that needed that spring is now frozen. Not by a law of nature, but by a law of economics. The spreadsheet said it was not profitable to maintain the skill. So, we deleted it.
This is not an accident. We have built a world that only values what it can sell right now. Everything else is clutter. We’re not innovating. We are conducting a controlled demolition of our own capability and calling the rubble progress.
It’s happening everywhere.
An aerospace firm needed a fifty-year-old component. The original factory was gone. The machinists were gone. The blueprints were gone. They found one in a museum and paid a fortune to reverse engineer it. A power plant runs on the dying memory of three engineers who understand its analog control systems from the 1970s. When they retire, that knowledge winks out. A hospital cannot repair its own MRI machine because a single, proprietary ceramic component is no longer made.
We have a list, an actual formal list, of endangered crafts. The Red List. Glass working. Hand forging. Precision toolmaking. Analog circuitry repair. We are not losing hobbies. We are losing the physical vocabulary of our civilization. We are burning the manual and then acting surprised when the machine breaks.
The decision is always made by a person with a spreadsheet, never by a person with the skill. The cost to make the thing is high. The cost to train someone new to that level of mastery, is astronomical. The return on investment timeline is too long. The decision is simple. Stop. Let it go. The knowledge isn’t an asset. It’s a liability.
We call this “efficiency.” It’s a short-term fantasy. It means the cheapest price this quarter. It never accounts for the cost next decade when the thing is gone and you desperately need it. We are saving pennies by burning down the library.
We have created a caste system for intelligence. The “innovator” works with code and slides. The “artisan” works with glass and steel. One is the future. The other is a relic. We have stripped all dignity from the hand, from the maker, from the person who understands a material in their fingertips. We tell our kids, “Learn to code.” We never say, “Learn to build.” We think the world runs on ideas. It runs on plumbing. It runs on electricity. It runs on glass springs we can no longer make.
And when the pipe bursts, or the grid fails, or the spring breaks, we will call for a plumber, an electrician, a glassblower. And we will find no one there.
Our true innovation is helplessness. We are building a world we are incapable of maintaining. We are engineering fragility. We are perfecting dependence. We are becoming a civilization of managers presiding over machines they do not understand in a house they have forgotten how to build.
We need to stop this.
First, kill the spreadsheet as God. The value of a master craftsperson is not in their quarterly revenue. It’s in the option value they provide. The ability to solve a problem we have not even imagined yet. We must start measuring what we cannot price.
Second, treat this knowledge as public infrastructure. Like a bridge or a reservoir. These skills are national assets. Fund guilds and apprenticeships with public money. Make “endangered craft” a critical designation, not a nostalgic one.
Third, we have to write down what is left. We need a Library of Skills. Video archives. Detailed recordings. Not to replace the artisan, but to preserve the seed of knowledge in case we need to grow it back.
Finally, we need a new contract. If a company benefits from a world built by skilled hands, it must pay into the system that creates them. Tax breaks tied to apprenticeships. No more mining human capital and leaving the pit empty.
That glass spring is still broken. The lab is still waiting. Somewhere, a person with the knowledge to make it is probably retiring. Or they are already gone.
They told us to innovate. We optimized instead. We streamlined ourselves into incompetence.
And one day, a very smart person in a very clean lab will have a brilliant idea that requires a piece of glass no one on Earth knows how to make.
And that will be that.
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I’m not sure if the profit motive is actually different these days, but it is true that some skills are being lost. And that if you need an individual with blue-collar skill, you probably pay more for that service (in comparison to other costs which haven’t gone up as much).
Part of this is a result of globalization, the decline of American manufacturing/loss to China, etc.
I wonder how much it would cost these days to replicate the ornate woodwork on a Victorian-style house – the type you see in San Francisco. (Or, to rebuild the Bidwell mansion in Chico that someone purposefully burned down a couple years ago.)
There also does seem to be more planned obsolescence these days, combined with excessive technology introduced into products that don’t need it (and actually make the experience of using it worse).
My vehicles are (on average) 30 years old, and I turn my head around to see what’s in back of me (rather than rely on a camera). Also, it’s up to me to ensure that my vehicles stay in their own lane, etc.
Meanwhile, I recently learned that Toyota might bring back the bare-bones $12,000 Hilux truck that they’re still selling in other parts of the world – if they decide it’s worth it to deal with U.S. regulations. A truck that’s actually designed to be a truck, unlike the “$60,000 cell phones on wheels” with extremely short beds that are being marketed as a “truck” these days.
Some of the U.S. regulations don’t actually serve buyers very well (e.g., resulting in sacrificing longevity for a couple extra miles/gallon). If we want people to use less gas, do what Trump is “accidentally” doing (increase the price of gas), instead. But it probably needs to be at least double the current cost, to have any real impact.