Sticks & Stones

 

Hacking is not simply the province of software geeks, gamers and hardware tweakers. Hacking is the stuff of invention in all fields of human endeavour. The ability to hack is the ability to improvise, with whatever tools or materials you have to hand. Starting with just a rock or two, you can make a hammer and a knife; and cutting and hammering can shape your world. Add making fire through friction, and you’ve got the basics not just to build shelter and to eat decently, but to make more sophisticated tools, from which to make more sophisticated tools, still.

At its heart, the history of technology boils down to these very mechanical radices and the ability of higher-order species to hack their environment in order to achieve what they themselves physically cannot. If you can cut wood, you can make a lever. If you make a lever, you can move stuff that you’re not strong enough to lift or move without the machinery you’ve yet to invent. If you can cut wood, you can fashion rollers to supplement the levers in aiding the moving of that heavy stuff you need to move. One of my abiding memories of the two years I spent in the building trade in the eighties was when we needed to shift a large cast iron safe that was over six feet tall and about half that wide and deep, out of our workspace in a building in Bangor. I really couldn’t see how several tons of metal could be shifted without machinery we plainly didn’t have to hand, or the space in which to wield. Bryan, the guy I worked for, was unfazed; simply using a long iron bar and two steel rollers, he moved the thing pretty much single-handedly up the corridor and out of our way. The two most basic tools known to man, both ultimately created using simpler tools still.

This very basic, no - fundamental - skill set is the one we are losing so rapidly as tool-use is being taught less and less to our children, either by example or more formally, through school. Throwaway culture is not just an environmental issue: it's ultimately a survival issue. The natural endgame of the destruction caused by our wastefulness is the loss of the means of production of that very stuff that we simply don’t know how to make, salvage or repair ourselves.

Passivity of consumption is a pivotal modern problem and the overarching cult of perfectionism propagated by consumer tech companies creates closed ecologies of ‘stuff’ that are ultimately beyond our control when they go wrong or simply cease to work altogether. If it does all go south - and this pandemic is an indicator of just how little real control we can have over our world - I’d rather be a toolmaker and stand some chance of surviving to rebuild the world we’d just screwed up. Maybe then, we’d get back to teaching our children the basics, materially, politically and spiritually; giving them the tools, mental and physical, to make the world a better and more equitable place in which to live.