Spark 97 – January 3 & 5, 2010

By
Dan Misener
– January 3, 2010Posted in: Episodes

Spark 97

On this episode of Spark: two different looks at how to reclaim meaning in your work life. Click below to listen, or download the MP3 (runs 54:00). Full transcriptions of both interviews are after the jump.

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Seth Godin transcript

Nora Young: OK, I’m not really one for resolutions, but I do think that the beginning of a new year is a good time to take stock and reset for the year ahead. Work is a big part of how we spend our days, what we think about, stress over, and plan for. So today we’ve got two very different looks at how to reclaim meaning in your work life. In a while, I’ll talk to Matthew Crawford about the value of skill trades and physical labor and why that may be the key to more meaningful work. But first, Seth Godin. Seth is a serial entrepreneur and the author of many books about changing work place culture and how institutions should adapt to contemporary life.

But I wanted to talk to him about two projects he’s involved in now. They focus, not on the organization, but on the individual; you and how you can create a more generous, meaningful work life. Now, Seth is not about the touchy feeling nostrums. This is tough talk for tough times. Hi, Seth.

Seth Godin: Hi, Nora. How are you?

Nora: Very well, thanks. So you’ve just put out this e-book called “What Matters Now,” which is free for anyone to download and there’s a link at our website. It’s this set of very short essays by prominent innovative people and it’s described as things to think about and do this year. Now you coordinated this. Why did you want to put this e-book out now?

Seth: Well, in the old days, newspapers used to be really good at doing these round ups at the end of the year, where they talk about the new jazz albums that were going to be important or some opera that people should look forward to. And then, inevitably, there was a piece where they would ask a bunch of innovative thinkers for their big thoughts for the year. But as we know, it’s no fun to be in the newspaper business anymore. And I felt like newspapers weren’t able to reach enough people anyway. And it occurred to me that it would be fun to reach out to some of the smartest people I know, some of whom I’ve known personally, some of whom I know by reputation and give them a platform where they could do that same sort of thing.

Nora: So, what were some of the big takeaways or themes that struck you about what people had to say?

Seth: Well, I think there’s one giant theme throughout, and it is that the future belongs to people who take initiative. And that is a real eye opener for a lot of people, because we weren’t trained in school or in our first jobs to take initiative. We were trained to follow instructions. And there’s a long history of churning out compliant factory workers in our culture, but what we’ve discovered post the great recession is that there are huge opportunities for people who refuse to settle and are looking for a tool that they can lever, as opposed to people who are just waiting for instructions.

Nora: Yeah, I picked up on that, and I also picked up on two other related themes. One, that really struck me, was that these high fliers, very busy charged up people talked about getting unplugged from time to time–about restoring yourself. And also about the priority of creating meaningful connections, that it’s not just about sort of spamming people with your message and “friend-ing” everyone you can, but creating context and real meaning for people.

Seth: Yeah, and I think those are related. The new tools that exist now eliminate the last barrier we had to spending all our time doing something that feels busy. That if you worked in a factory, or if you created a product, there was a moment when you couldn’t create anymore, when the inventory was too big, or when the office was closed or the factory wasn’t running. But now if you’re on Twitter, Facebook, or you have a blog or are connected to a increasing tribe of people, you could literally do it 24 hours a day and still not catch up. And even worse, the more you do it the more stuff comes back. It’s like telling knock-knock jokes all day long and people keep saying who’s there.

[laughter]

Nora: Yeah, no kidding. I really recognize that for sure. As I mentioned, this e-book is a free download and this isn’t the first time you’ve given ideas away for free. This seems counter-intuitive to a lot of us. Why do you do it?

Seth: Well, lucky for me, it’s counter-intuitive because that’s what makes it work. What happens in the digital world is the most precious thing is attention and the cost of giving away ideas is zero. The more attention you can earn, by being generous, the more likely it is you can use that attention to help people get what they want to move the conversation forward. And what I found from a business point of view is that the more you can connect with people, and the more you can give away. A, it feels great, but B, it’s also a really interesting business strategy.

Nora: And so how does that work? How does that work as a business model?

Seth: Well, the enemy is not piracy, as Tim O’Reilly has said, the enemy is obscurity. If nobody knows your ideas then they’re worthless. But if lots of people know your ideas then they want to hire you to come give a speech, or they want to read the souvenir edition of your book. Or, I’m not a consultant but if I was, I would be able to get consulting work. That if you’re a musician and everyone hears your song on the radio, actually record sales go up, not down. If you’re a politician and everyone hears your speech, you get more votes, not fewer. That whatever it is you do for a living. If you’re a cook book author or a restaurant tour, giving away all your secret recipes actually increases the number of people who come to your restaurant, it doesn’t decrease it.

And the reason is simple. Having the recipe and cooking the dish are two different things. It’s nice to know I could make it if I wanted to, but guess what? I’d rather pay you, the originator, to do it for me.

[laughter]

Nora: Right. And is this really “generalize-able?” Like what if I’m not in the business of sort of writing about stuff? What if I, I don’t know, what if I make gift cards for a living? Can you do it for just about any type of work?

Seth: Well, I think that you can. The woman who started Blue Mountain Arts, her son started an online version of it. And they gave the greeting cards for free, digital cards online, and two things happened. One, he built a business that he sold for 800 million dollars. And two, her greeting cards sales went up. I’ll give you another example that I think is even more local and relevant. My friend Joanne runs a summer camp in Algonquin Park called Camp Arowhon and she’s also an outspoken writer and leader on the idea of bullying. And she gives speeches about ending bullying and has written about it and all of that stuff is free. Well, the more parents hear about her point of view, the more her idea spreads. Guess what? The more people who want to send their kids to her summer camp. So the only way to win is to keep reinventing what it is you make and how you talk about it.

Nora: It sounds great but that also sounds tiring coming up with new ideas and new approaches all the time.

Seth: Well my new book which comes out in about three weeks is the answer to that question. If you were in the ditch digging business, you don’t get to say to your boss, “You know, I’m sort of tired today. I don’t feel like digging ditches.” We call it work for a reason and the reason is it’s hard. People who are in the idea business whine often about the fact that they don’t have any good ideas. They have writers block, they don’t feel like being creative. But we’re getting paid a lot more than ditch diggers are, and the imperative here is to earn that pay by doing emotional labor. Difficult work that other people don’t feel like doing today.

Nora: I want to pick up on some of the ideas in Linchpin. But I just want to return for a moment to the idea of e-books and giving things away for free. Is this something that you would suggest that other people do? Write e-books? Like what if I’m, I don’t know, a contractor or something, are there benefits to doing that for me in that case?

Seth: Well there’s a guy in the States who has written a book and I believe an e-book called Dry Basements, and it’s 150 page book, with pictures, that explains in great detail how to make your basement dry. And by the time you’re done reading it, there’s no way you’re going to hire anybody else in the world. And so my argument is, if it’s not a blog then yeah, an e-book, something that shows your expertise, something that’s generous, and most important, something that’s going to spread. Because the essence of what it takes today is not to yell at any individual, but to encourage people who already like you to go get their friends.

Nora: Right. So let’s talk a bit about this new book that’s coming out at the end of the month, “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?” Which, you’re really focusing not so much on organizations or what businesses can do, but what each of us as individuals can do. Now you say very clearly at the beginning that the system we grew up with is a mess, it’s falling apart at the seams, and a lot of people are in pain because the things we thought would work don’t. So what do you mean by that? What’s wrong?

Seth: Well, the excitement and hoopla of the Internet has sort of drowned out a lot of the pain and suffering that people have been going through in their work lives. Add to that the impact of the great recession and unemployment and businesses that we used to depend on going away, and it hasn’t been a particularly good decade for a lot of people. And the thing is, it’s not really your fault. And the reason it’s not is because we were brainwashed through 10 or 20 years of school to do what we’re told, to fit in instead of stand out, to have a resume that looks like everybody else’s resume, to get a job like everybody else’s job, and to put in our time and then we’ll get rewarded.

And the sad truth is, the reward isn’t coming. That pensions are going away, and that long term careers are becoming short term jobs and businesses are moving to computers or overseas or to lower paid people. There’s some fast food restaurants in California where if you drive into the drive in window and you talk into that little microphone, the woman who you’re talking to isn’t even at the other side of the window; she’s in South Dakota because it’s cheaper.

Nora: Really?

Seth: Yeah. And this whole model of how can we make it a little cheaper, how can we outsource it in some way, has really hammered people. And what I’m arguing, and I’m really passionate about this because I can see the pain in the world and it makes me angry. What I’m arguing for here is that we need to stand up and say, “Wait a minute, I’m not going to buy into this model that was invented by the factory owner to get cheap labor. You didn’t keep your end of the bargain, and so the bargain is off.” And the people in our culture now who are the happiest and most successful, they’re the people who have done what they’re “not supposed to do,” but ended up making change, making noise, and making a difference.

It turns out that when you become one of those people, the company you work for can’t live without you; you become indispensable, you get paid what you’re worth, you get security and peace of mind. But in order to get there, I’m arguing, there’s a huge hurdle. And the hurdle is you have to do something that feels risky.

Nora: I blogged about our interview, Seth, and we got a comment from Rhonda that I’d like to read to you. She says, “I’m reinventing myself after quitting my job recently. I really yearn to create a role to makes a difference and brings something that is really needed to the work place. I want to know, what can be done to make organizations more inhabitable and more fully human?” So, Seth, given that this is the reality of a lot of people’s work places, what can we actually do, as individuals, to get that change happening, and to get it respected within our work place?

Seth: It turns out that the knee jerk answer, which is, “My boss needs to fix this,” isn’t going to happen. Because the minute you say, “I want to do something creative but my boss won’t let me,” what you’re really saying is, “I want my boss to take responsibility if I fail, but I want to get the credit if I succeed.” And of course she won’t do that, because she understands that’s a lousy deal. The people who are moving fast in organizations, fixing them, saving them, or if it doesn’t work, being dragged away in a bidding war by competitors. These are people who aren’t waiting for anybody to say it’s OK. They’re people who work for an airline, but instead of just treating everyone as a faceless person to put on a plane, they’re investing in emotional labor, and treating people like people, and realizing it’s a platform to make someone’s day.

Nora: What do you mean by this idea of emotional labor?

Seth: Well, a sociologist wrote about this 45 years ago in a whiny sort of way, which she wrote about flight attendants at Delta Airlines. And she was saying, “It’s not fair that flight attendants have to smile at people even if they’re in a bad mood.” And my response is, “It’s labor, that’s what you get paid for.” It’s not labor with a shovel, it’s labor with your emotions. And emotional labor is the act of connecting to another human being and making a change even if it’s not easy for you to do in that moment. Emotional labor is when Pablo Picasso overcomes painter’s block and paints a whole new set of paintings even though he’s worried that people are going to laugh at him. And that’s what we’re getting paid for today.

Nora: From what I’ve read of Linchpin, you’re making a case for seeing what we do in our jobs as art. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Seth: Well, art is not the same thing as painting. Right? Painting is using oil paints or water colors to make an image. But we can all agree that poetry is art, and writing a novel is art. Well I want to argue that calming down someone on an airplane who’s afraid of flying is art. And I want to argue that great computer programming is art, and so is the design of the cover of a book, or producing a radio show.

Nora: In the second half of today’s show I’m talking to Matthew Crawford who’s written a book about the value of skilled trades. And I wondered whether there’s something about the fact that so many of us don’t really feel like we make anything real, makes it hard for us to find meaning in the work we do. Or is it that many of us feel like we’re unable to sort of affect change in the work place that makes us feel like our work is not meaningful?

Seth: Nora, that’s a great question. I would argue that if you do a skilled trade, you have something scarce–and scarcity creates value. And so you can have peace of mind knowing that you’re a machine operator, or that you know how to work a lathe or whatever, because they can’t replace you tomorrow with someone a little bit cheaper because there aren’t enough of you. Well, people who work with ideas and with people, also have the ability to do something scarce, if we choose to. But a lot of us got lazy and said, “OK, we’ll take the high pay, we’ll take the nice working conditions, but no, I don’t want to put myself on the line.” And for a long time there was enough productivity out there that we could pull that off.

But now that’s going away, and so when the boss is trimming the number of people who work there, or when they’re deciding who to hire, guess who gets to keep the job? It’s the person who did the hard work, which was scarce, not the person who merely followed the manual, which wasn’t.

Nora: I get the feeling, Seth, in these projects, but in general in your work, that you’re almost talking about a cultural shift that goes beyond the workplace. About creating a culture of giving and gifts, as oppose to a culture of getting and hoarding.

Seth: Exactly. Doug Rushkoff wrote about this in a book last year called “Life, Inc.” And his argument is that ever since Middle Ages, we have been on this path. Ever since we invented money, basically. The transaction that occurs when you trade money for goods doesn’t really benefit the community. And the reason is that as soon as you trade money for goods, the deal is over. No relationship is implied. I got one thing, you got the money, see you later. We’re strangers. And this idea of enriching the corporation at the expense of the community, this idea that we need to make more, more, more faster, faster, faster, works for a long time. It gave us medicine and a lot of interesting bits of civilization and a great lifestyle, but it doesn’t scale forever.

And what I feel really deeply is that we need to take a deep breath and understand that a gift culture, a culture of community, a culture of one person owing someone else, a world where we need to trust the people that we’re engaged with, is one where enormous value is still to be created.

Ironically, the Internet, the great “anonymizer,” the digital machine, is making us more important, not less important. I get 200 or 300 emails a day. Which ones am I going to take seriously? Which ones am I going to write back to? And the answer is the people I trust, the people who have earned the right. Well, you don’t get that trust by paying me. You get that trust by engaging–and that is a gift transaction.

Nora: Why are you so passionate about this?

Seth: I don’t know, maybe it’s something that happens when you have kids or see school for the second time. I ran an MBA program last year. I had nine people come to New York and spend six months with me. I got to see the world through the eyes of a bunch of very smart 23-year-olds, 30-year-olds. And what I’m seeing more and more is this growing divide. And the people who are on the losing side don’t understand what happened. It’s one thing to play a game and lose. It’s another thing to lose without realizing that you’re playing a game. And I want to call that out, because the best events in my life, the best interactions in my life, are the ones that are gift-based, not the ones where one person sold something to someone else.

Nora: Right. Seth, I’d like to ask you a couple of, I guess, more practical questions about the workplace. What if I run a business and I realize, “Oh my gosh, I forgot about the Internet. I’ve never done anything with social media.” How can I get up to speed in 2010?

Seth: There’s really good news, which is it’s not too late. What you should not do is go get three manuals on step-by-step instructions on what to do and do them. Because then you’ll just be like everybody else, but two years behind. What I’m arguing you need to do is fail as a way of learning. Because the cost of failing on the Internet is zero. If you fail online, no one notices you and you get to try something else. It’s different if you fail when build a building or a factory. That’s expensive.

So I would, first thing, give every single person in your company a Gmail account, free email. I would give everyone in your company a bonus if they start a blog and write anything they want on their blog every day.

I would create a culture where the people you work with are saying out loud, online, what they’re doing. That will teach people to be confident enough to actually say things that are remarkable online. Then once they start doing that, then people will start interacting with them.

Then it’s a natural step to be on Facebook or Twitter. The mistake that most companies make is they try to force the Internet to match what they want, instead of the other way around. And so they invest all this money in a website, they invest all this money in social media presence, and absolutely no one wants to interact with them because they’re selfish and boring.

Nora: And what you’re really asking people to do is to give up their fear, I guess, in a lot of ways. Which I suppose can be a scary thing for managers if they’re going to be held accountable if something goes wrong.

Seth: I want people to give up fear and I want them to give up control. Because the Internet forces everyone who participates to do those two things. And if you want to be in control, you cannot be online. You can’t have both occurring at the same time.

Nora: In terms of changing the culture in the workplace, we actually got this interesting comment on our blog from someone posting as LiterateOwl. He wants your slant on the digital divide at work. He says, “Some colleagues at work are missing out in some rich workplace discourse with lagging communication skills. The rate of change is so fast that many capable and well-meaning colleagues don’t contribute to dialogue because of email fatigue or weak technology skills. Even though I am savvy and old, I’m surprised by how many young workmates still are disengaged with technology, such that they’re not participatory.”

So how do you spread that kind of culture of communication?

Seth: I think we have to understand what it is we do for a living. If you’re a musician, what you used to do for a living is get CBS Records to give you a contract. What you do for a living now, is you have 100,000 people following you on MySpace or Twitter. And you have a direct connection with your users. Now you can whine and say that shouldn’t be part of my job, but it clearly is part of your job, if you want to be successful. And I would argue, certainly if I was the boss in a company, that what we do here is more than fill out forms or ship things from one place to another. What we do here is we communicate. And the communication tool of the moment is online, and if you don’t know how to use it, you’re fired.

And if you’re not the boss and you’re just a well-meaning colleague, what I’m finding is online project management tools force people to use the tools. Because if you don’t, then you don’t know how to do your part of the project.

Nora: You’re very no-nonsense about this stuff, right?

Seth: It’s important. I’ve had real jobs, I’ve run real companies. I helped run a summer camp once. I built an Internet company and a company that made stuff out of metal. When you look at what it is to succeed, there’s stuff you don’t need, there’s stuff you do need, and there’s the in-between stuff. We can spend a lot of time arguing about the in-between stuff, but I think that most people are seeing what actually works. And if you can’t get over your fear of the stuff that’s working, then I think you need to give up and do something else.

Nora: Finally, Seth, from time to time on the show I like to ask our guests to give homework. If you were going to assign us some homework to make our work-lives more meaningful in 2010, what would it be?

Seth: I think that every day you should send a thank you note to someone you work with, in writing, not by email.

Nora: Wow.

Seth: 30 days after you start doing that, you’re going to see things change.

Nora: Thank you so much, Seth.

Seth: It’s my pleasure always, Nora. Thank you for doing this.

Matthew B. Crawford transcript

Nora Young: As much as I love making Spark every week, it does feel a bit ephemeral at times, and I’ve mentioned this on the show before. I mean, I make something, but it doesn’t have any real weight to it, and I’m not the only one who misses making a real physical product. Just look at the do-it-yourself industry — there are magazines, stores, and websites to accommodate all of the workers in the so-called “knowledge-based economy” who have an intense desire to use their hands.

But what if all those people working in offices were not meant to be doing that type of work? What if working in the skilled manual trades is what they would be happier and better at doing?

Matthew B. Crawford is lucky enough to live in both worlds. Matthew was on the path towards a full-time knowledge-worker job. He granted with a PhD in Political Philosophy from the University of Chicago and started to hunt for a job as an academic. There aren’t that many academic positions open these days.

Matthew B. Crawford: But I did manage to land a job as Director of a think tank in Washington, and on paper that job looked great.

Nora: So, Matthew took the job, but it didn’t take long to figure out that working for a think tank was not his idea of a dream job. He wanted to work with his hands. He quit the think tank and opened a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. It’s called, Shockoe Moto.

Matthew: What’s it like? Well, it’s a very small operation. It’s just me. And it’s a mix of European, Japanese, and British motorcycles.

Nora: Are you working on a particular bike right now in the shop?

Matthew: I’m finishing up a 1984 Yamaha, and next up is a 1970 Triumph, and it hasn’t run since 1974, so it’s kind of a nice project.

Nora: Matthew’s other recent project is his book, “Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.” In the book, Matthew speaks up for the manual trades, advocating that working with your hands is a life worth choosing. Matthew Crawford is my guest for the second feature interview on today’s program. So, you’re a philosopher and a mechanic. You have a motorcycle repair shop. What do you get out of fixing bikes that you don’t get working as an academic?

Matthew: I guess one appeal of dealing with physical stuff, concrete stuff, is that, you tend to know right away if you’ve gotten something wrong. It lets you know. In fixing motorcycles, either it starts and runs right, or it doesn’t.

Nora: [laughs]

Matthew: And if it doesn’t, you can’t really weasel your way out of that.

Nora: [laughs]

Matthew: Or, I should say, you can’t interpret your way out of the fact, as you often can in academic work.

Nora: What sort of general cultural assumptions do you think we make about so-called blue versus white-collar work?

Matthew: It’s easy to assume that if the work is dirty, that it must also be stupid. It seems like we’ve had this dichotomy of knowledge work versus manual work as though they’re two very different things. But that’s a distinction that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Say you’re trying to diagnose why a car doesn’t idle properly. It’s not a trivial problem, and more broadly, I guess I’d say that the kind of thinking that goes on in the trades can be genuinely impressive, if we stop to notice it.

Nora: Can you describe that? How would you characterize the kind of thinking that’s going on there?

Matthew: Any work where the physical circumstances of the work vary, they can never be reduced to simply following a set of procedures, and so they always require some amount of improvisation and adaptability. Say, what an electrician does, or a plumber, or an auto mechanic, because that work can never be reduced to simply following rules, you always have to rely on your own judgment, and I think that’s kind of what we want in work. We want to feel like our actions are genuinely our own.

Nora: So then where do these kind of clichés about the difference between skilled physical labor and so-called knowledge work, where does that come from then?

Matthew: Well, that’s an interesting question. Maybe I’ll just say a word about how I got on to this topic. I was looking for a table saw, and I wanted to get an older one. I found a dealer in used shop equipment, so he has this warehouse that’s old milling machines, and band saws, and metal lathes, when he happened to mention that most of this stuff had come from schools. And I was kind of disturbed by that and started looking into it and learned that shop class in schools was pretty widely dismantled in the 1990s to make room for computer classes. I think we had this idea then, and maybe we still do, that somehow we were going to be taking leave of material reality and sort of gliding around in a pure information economy.

Nora: [laughs]

Matthew: So, why was it disturbing to see this stuff sitting in a warehouse? I think because the disappearance of those tools is maybe the first step toward a wider ignorance of things, just how they’re made, and how to repair them. And there is, I think, a kind of engineering culture, or maybe design philosophy that’s emerged in recent years, where the point is to hide the works. So, for example, if you lift the hood on some cars now, there’s essentially another hood under the hood. I don’t know what the thinking is.

Nora: [laughs]

Matthew: Maybe that the sight of an alternator might disturb us somehow, or offend us.

Nora: [laughs]

Matthew: Take another example — some high-end cars now don’t even have a dipstick, so you couldn’t even check your own oil level if you wanted to. I don’t think I’m the only person who’s a little “creeped” out by that. Instead you get an email from someplace when your oil level gets to low.

Nora: [laughs] You make the point actually though, as distinct from this idea that we’re kind of getting further away from physical things that, now that we have a globalized labor market, skilled trades might actually be in a better position than white-collar knowledge workers. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Matthew: Well, yes, I’m not an economist, but I quote some people in the book who are — one in particular, an economist at Princeton named Alan Blinder. He makes the argument that there’s a distinction emerging in the labor market that’s not the conventional one of those with more education versus those with less education. Rather, it’s between those who have some service, that can be delivered over a wire, and those who’s service has to be delivered on site or in person. And it’s the latter who are going to find their work more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As he puts it, “you can’t hammer a nail over the Internet,” you know?

Nora: Right [laughs].

Matthew: Thirty years ago, we learned that anything that can be put in a box, and then on a container ship, is going to be made wherever labor is cheapest, and in the last 10 years, a similar logic has emerged for the products of intellectual labor that can be delivered over a wire.

Nora: Including journalists, I have to say. That’s happening a lot, as well, yes.

Matthew: [laughs] Yes, it’s interesting. I wrote an article a few years ago and found myself interacting with a copy editor who turned out to be in the Philippines. And radiologists face this problem, because they examine images, and an image can be transmitted over a wire just as their analysis of it can be. Architects, programmers, editors, but not, for example, builders. So, the upshot of that argument is that the trades have an especially sort of compelling economic rationale, in light of this sort of outsourcing threat.

Nora: Although in my experience, at least, parents who work in so-called blue collar jobs still tend to want their kids to go to university, if possible. Are they wrong?

Matthew: I think there’s great reasons to go to university. The life of the mind is, in some ways, the best part of life. And if you can spare four years to devote yourself to it, by all means I would encourage anyone to do that. But university has also become a kind of credentialing operation, where employers use a college degree to screen people for jobs just simply because it’s sort of a cheap and easy way to make a cut.

And it’s become, it seems like, a winner-take-all economy, where most people who go to college think they’re going to become a doctor or a lawyer or end up on Wall Street, but in fact, of course, the vast majority of them don’t.

So you’re entering a kind of a competition for what’s really a fairly small number of top slots in those professions that we imagine that we’re going to go into. Whereas the trades seem like it’s a more reliable course into work, in that there really is a demand for electricians and plumbers and air conditioning people.

So it’s maybe a less of a gamble to go that way, is one way to think about it.

Nora: You make the point somewhere in the book that the sort of “credential-ism” ante keeps getting pushed up and up and up, so you need university degrees for some things there’s no real reason you would need to have a university degree, just because of this idea of having the credentials, or passing some kind of vague test for your suitability in the workplace.

Matthew: Yeah, a kind of credential inflation. We’ve developed a kind of educational mono-culture, you might say, where just about every kid gets pressured to go to college and then get on a certain track where you end up working in an office. But some people, and I think including some who are plenty smart, would rather be learning to build things or fix things. Why not honor that?

Nora: In part, your book is a critique of contemporary work more generally, of what happened to the way we work in the 20th century through things like scientific management and the rise of the horrors of corporate culture. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Matthew: Yeah. I think that one of the kind of central imperatives in the modern economy is this tendency to separate thinking from doing. And the beginnings of that are quite interesting. It seems to lie in the early decades of the 20th century when you had the invention of the assembly line. The point of the assembly line seemed to be to gather all this craft knowledge that was scattered in the heads of workers and kind of gather it into a central location. So originally, people in the automobile industry were recruited from bicycle shops and carriage shops.

So these were all-around mechanics who knew what they were doing. And the big innovation of the assembly line was to take all that knowledge and locate it in a sort of system or process which, once it’s installed, doesn’t require any ongoing deliberative effort of thinking.

So the point was to transfer knowledge and skill from employee to employer. And the point of that, is that then you can replace skilled employees with unskilled ones who you don’t have to pay as much.

And this dynamic, once you have it in mind, you see it all over the place in the economy, and including in many white collar jobs. I think we often romanticize different kinds of white collar work by presuming they have more intellectual content then they may actually turn out to have. There’s such a thing as the electronic sweatshop, which can be every bit as stultifying as the assembly line.

Nora: Earlier in the show I was talking to author Seth Godin, and he was partly talking about reclaiming your power in this sort of stifling bureaucratic corporations in which many people work. Do you think this is something we can do? Or is the big corporation just kind of a lost cause?

Matthew: One of the interesting things about corporate culture these days is that this sort of critique of bureaucracy has become very much a part of corporate culture. So you have places like Google, and sort of Silicon Valley places, more generally, that adopt this very anti-bureaucratic mentality where the workplace is supposed to be fun. Nerf basketball hoops and they announce pajama day, it’s sort of an obligatory pajama day. And that sort of opens the way to uncanny new modes of manipulating people, where instead of just a straightforward boss, you have someone who’s more like a therapist, or a life coach, who’s helping you to realize your human potential or something. I think I’d rather just have a boss, thanks.

Nora: [laughs] You know, I was thinking about your book with respect to my own job. We’re a small group of people, there are three of us, we make a show every week. Each of us knows what the other two bring to the table, we have this measurable thing at the end of the week, where it’s the show, and we can listen to it, and we’re responsible for it. And yet even given all that, at the end of the day I still feel like I want to make something physical. I want to knead pizza dough or I want to work in the garden or something. Do you think there’s something about digital stuff, in itself, as distinct from physical things, that’s sort of unsatisfying?

Matthew: That’s a very good question. In fact, there is interesting brain research that indicates that actually using your hands seems to hit some kind of pleasure centers in the brain. That apparently the parts of the brain that are connected to the hands and are also closely connected to the part that control higher thinking and language.

Nora: I’m Nora Young and this is Spark on CBC Radio One. Today I’m talking to author, philosopher, and mechanic Matthew B. Crawford about his book, “Shop Class as Soul Craft.” There’s a really palpable sense in the book of your frustration with a lot of modern devices seem to kind of treat us like idiots and infantilize us or so forth. There’s a great — maybe you could just describe that situation of using those taps that you don’t actually touch, that you wave your hands in front of.

Matthew: Yeah, the infrared faucet in the bathroom. I’m probably revealing something twisted about myself, but I’m one of those people who gets really angry at those infrared faucets. It never seems to work for me, but it seems to work for everybody else. But it says though you’re being asked to supplicate these invisible powers, I don’t understand why there can’t just be a handle. We mentioned the dipstick before, sort of the disappearance of the dipstick from some cars. It used to be that, in addition to a dipstick, you had something called an “idiot light.” And it was called an idiot light for a reason, because we had a harsh judgment for anyone who was so uninvolved in their own car that they’d let it get to the point where the idiot light is coming on because the oil pressure is that low.

But there’s some weird cultural logic, whereby idiocy — that is, a lack of involvement — gets recast as something desirable. Right? It’s a sign of technological progress. And the result is that there is, I think, fewer occasions to be directly responsible for your own physical environment. And with that, I think, there’s less expectation of responsibility.

So, I take the disappearance of the dip stick and the idiot light as sort of an index of a broader shift in our relationship toward our own stuff, a shift toward greater passivity and dependence.

I do think that the material culture carries with it a kind of moral education. And it can go in different directions. And the way things are going currently, it often feels like the modern personality is getting reformed on the basis of, kind of, passivity and dependence.

Nora: You know, I went on a bicycle trip this summer. And there was something really satisfying about being able to get to a place totally under you own steam, and to change your own flat tire. That it’s a machine that’s simple enough that you can understand the way it works and make some, you know, at least rudimentary repairs, but yet we have so little opportunity to have that kind of, you know, just to exercise our agency in modern life. What do you think the implications of that are?

Matthew: It does seem like it’s become more difficult to be self-reliant. I also think that we feel bereft of those occasions to be self-reliant. And I wonder if the growth of the do-it-yourself movement, which seems to be pretty big in these days, is partly an attempt to reclaim that. You know, also that effort to reclaim it is, in part, a response to changes in the world of work. You know, working in an office is often that the case that the chain of cause and effect can become a bit confusing, and responsibility can often get spread around. And so, people come home from work and they knit a sweater, say, or build an addition on their house in an effort to reclaim that.

Nora: You mean, because there’s sort of a direct link between, “I hammer this thing and then it was stuck to something else.” And it’s really — things are really clear that you’re having some kind of an impact.

Matthew: Yeah. To see it, to actually be able to see a direct effect of your actions in the world, that seems like it’s a basic part of what’s required by our nature, just to have that experience.

Nora: Patrick Drew wrote a great blog comment about this interview. In part, he said, “I’m a self-professed technological dinosaur, but one who has a number of pre-PC skills that are out of fashion. I’m a 55-year old man who was able to renovate his house on his own, other than the electrical portion. I grew up with men who could build a bungalow with tools that could be carried in a knapsack. They only needed a circular saw, a square, a plum bob, a roll of twine, and a tape measure, and of course, a hammer. If all the materials were delivered to the job site, they could build you a house.” And he also talked about the way media, like our show, and like the CBC, often act like everyone makes a living staring at a computer screen. Do you think there’s hope for reclaiming the value of those skills? Or as Patrick, as these of his termed “dinosaur” implies, is as a part of a life that’s going away.

Matthew: Well, I think it really varies, you know, from one trade to another. Some trades do become kind of obsolete through technological progress. The carpenter, I think, is never going to become obsolete. What wages they can command is another question. I mean, we need to ground all of these considerations into economics, I think, because I wouldn’t want this to become a kind of romantic, or nostalgic kind of celebration of craft, without regard to whether you can actually make a living doing it or not.

Nora: I mean, you know, my brother who was a carpenter at one point, said to me that, you know, the difference that he saw was that people used to hire a carpenter to build, say shelves or whatever, because they knew they were going to be living in that house for a long time. Whereas now, people are imagining themselves as flipping their house, moving into a bigger house in five years, so what difference does it really make if the carpentry can stand up for, you know, a generation or two? Like, in a way, it’s the broader context that goes on around the craft, too, I think.

Matthew: Yeah. That sounds really important point, actually. A kind of social rootedness, as opposed to kind of radical mobility ,as maybe being the condition necessary for people to take the idea of craftsmanship seriously. And craftsmanship, you might say, is just the desire to do something well, for its own sake. And that’s a mentality that, I think, has become hard to sustain in our economy. To get good at something requires time, and practice. But, we’ve developed, I think, a kind of fetish of change and flexibility. And you see this in a number of ways, not just flipping houses. There’s a great mania for re-engineering companies. That’s a phrase you hear where you have corporate officers who go from company to company, maybe just spending a few years. And they take their job to be “to shake things up,” in order to impress stock analysts who believe that rapid market return is best generated by rapid institutional change in the company.

So these officers act as a kind of chaos-mongers. You pump the stock, cash out, and move on. And the result is that if you’re someone who works at one of these companies, you, too, have to be ready to reinvent yourself at any time. And not get too invested in any particular career path. So there isn’t — there doesn’t seem to be much room in the corporate economy for the steady accumulation of skill and experience. The kind that, I think, give coherence to a working life, such that you can look back on it and say, “Yeah, it added up to something.”

Nora: Matthew, this interview is airing at the beginning of a new year, the beginning of a new decade. Do you have any thoughts on like what people should be, I don’t know, thinking about as they head out into the new year in terms of reclaiming some of those skills in their own lives?

Matthew: Well, you know, if there’s any kind of silver lining in the economic mess that we find ourselves in, maybe it’s that the question of what a good job looks like is a little more open now, than it has been for a while. Our channels of aspirations seem like they’ve narrowed into certain tracks over the last, I don’t know, 20 years. And the career aspirations that many people have formed, especially young people, based on the last 15, 20 years have gotten scrambled. And people sort of casting about, and maybe taking a broader view of what kind of work is both secure and worthy of being honored. You know, I think trades are worth taking a fresh look at this moment. And it also seems to be a time when people are reconsidering their relationship to their own stuff, and what it is we actually want from our stuff. I think it’s something more than simply convenience. I think we want some kind of active engagement and involvement such that we feel like we’re masters of our own stuff.

Nora: Matthew, thanks a lot for talking to me.

Matthew: Yeah. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

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