I can’t shake this quandary, nor make any headway into even defining an answer.
There is an overarching optimism that our current tech world has layered into our culture. That at scale, through community, we can begin to address some of the key issues plaguing our world.
Not all of course, but within the blockchain and crypto community, the autonomous transportation and edge computing scenarios, and the urbanization of agriculture movement there is a light in the haze of overarching probems. A possibility that through broad connections, at global scale, solutions can be economized and the world, certainly our digital culture can be reimagined and rebuilt to a better end.
I’m all in on this but I see a growing discrepancy not just in where we culturally put things like the arts in this world, but with the artisanal and stuff made by hand. By people, one at a time, for each of us.
Go experience the crush of your inner city Green Market where more and more we want food grown by individuals and families.
Or the industry reconfiguration to artisanal, natural hand-made wine that populates the best and the most local shops and restaurants.
Or the endless brands making stuff—a hand-made rocking chair that will outlive the person who buys it. The jams and bread, candles and cookware, even the restaurants where we eat.
Stuff made by people, for us, with business models that simply don’t work.
Software may have eaten our world, but with greater economics and the free time inherent in new paradigms of work, more of us are driven to consume, appreciate and love the things that by their very nature are made/cooked/delivered by hand.
It is their very naturalness, wholesomeness, and human touch that is their value. And unscalable by that very nature.
The concept of local is the usual answer.
If you take the local geographies around our dense population centers you do naturally get circles of artisanal people and brands servicing them. Tomatoes from Jersey, Maple Syrup from Vermont and so on.
But, even though the math of supply and demand doesn’t work in this scenario, the economics of supply doesn’t as well for the artisans. That is the piece that I can’t think my way through.
We all know that when we eat out at our favorite farm or roof to table spot, that at many spots in the supply chain of labor, this is broken for the workers. As the people in the kitchen and invariably the farmers as well are not making a living wage. And the market and margin forces make the model broken at its core and seemingly unfixable.
It’s this discrepancy, the broken economic chain between our lives economized and made better through tech and redefining work, and the lack of solvency in the lifestyles of the people that make the very things that we want to consume.
This discrepancy will I bet have its analogs in people’s wages that stuff the packages I get in the mail everyday and the artisanal-no-longer brands industrializing their offering and adopting larger manufacturing processes.
This is less a complaint and more a realization that through all the things we are fixing, the economics of the people making the stuff we love is out of the equation. Orphaned but a reality nonetheless.
I don’t have an answer.
I have thought endlessly and challenged people more expert than I in crypto economics how items and people that can never be scaled can be economized more equally within that paradigm.
I know that tech will solve some of the parts that artisans fill today especially in the farming arena, but that is a creeping infrastructure improvement not necessarily addressing the human factor.
While this issue is not getting solved in the near term, I believe that being aware of it drives acknowledgement of its importance, and that awareness is always the first step to any solution.
This is not at all connected to the lament that tech will change the world and remove jobs.
It is about how value systems are connected to scale generally and how to create economics for things that don’t so we are all a bit richer, healthier and better for it.
Damn–if companies are starting to figure out the near impossible task of how to build stable crypto coins, we should be able to make some progress on this simpler but critical human factor.
Food for thought for all us.
