Cybernetic Arts and Crafts, or Mingeiware

Popping another post off the yearslong backlog stack, which I'm really enjoying doing and hope I can maintain the momentum for a little longer. This was has been sitting there half-baked for many years, and it's probably still only going to come out three-quarters-baked at best. I'm not necessarily happy with or proud of that, but I have been letting perfect be the enemy of good with these things for so long that I think it's time to just get them out there. This one involves exploring parallels in historical craft movements, particularly pottery because I'm currently "in my pottery era", and programming. That's actually a connection which I think is sort of doing the rounds at the moment, in connection with vibecoding, slopcoding, etc. That's not where I'm coming from, although I certainly appreciate the relevance. I started thinking along these lines well before that conversation started. Not that I'm claiming any great originality or ahead-of-the-times-ness here. In fact I am certain that around maybe 2020 or 2021 I saw someone somewhere in then-burgeoning Geminispace mention the Arts and Crafts movement in connection with tech philosophy. That didn't plant the seed in my mind, or anything, I'm just saying this is probably a place people naturally end up after a long enough period of pondering and reading. If - and I know it's a long shot - someone reading this thinks that might have been them that I'm remembering, please do get in touch!

I'm no expert in any of these things, and if you read all the Wikipedia articles linked to below you'll know about as much as I do. As a kind of quick and dirty high-level summary, "Arts and Crafts" was a movement taking place mostly in the US and the UK, spread about twenty years either side of the change from the 19th to 20th centuries. "Mingei" (民芸, meaning something like "folk craft") was an ideologically similar movement which happened in Japan a little later, kicking off in the 1920s after Arts and Crafts had largely wound down. Both movements basically espoused a "reject modernity, embrace tradition" approach to the production of both decorative and utilitarian artefacts in everyday life, rejecting - not always to the same extent or for the same reasons - mechanisation, automation and industrialisation in favour of individual craftspeople working by hand, and also rejecting excessive ornamentation or impractical "high art" products where aesthetic form took priority over function. This is all happening a good hundred years after the OG Luddites did their thing. There were many thinkers concerned with many different facets of both of these movements, and in some places and at some times there was also a lot of concern with the profit motive, division of labour, sense of place and connectedness to nature. Big names in the UK-side of Arts and Crafts were William Morris and John Ruskin, while Yanagi Sōetsu was one of the main thinkers behind Mingei, as well as a strong influence on British pottery Bernard Leach and his notion of "ethical pots".

English Wikipedia article on the Arts and Crafts movement

English Wikipedia article on Mingei

English Wikipedia article on William Morris

English Wikipedia article on John Ruskin

English Wikipedia article on Yanagi Sōetsu

English Wikipedia article on Bernard Leach

English Wikipedia article on Ethical pots

The term "Mingeiware" in the title of this post is of my own coining, a kind of play on the fact that the -ware ending is used both for styles of software (e.g. malware, vaporware) and also types (e.g. stoneware, earthenware) or regional styles (e.g. Arita ware, Tamba ware in Japan). It's a kind of notional software written in accordance with the tenets of Mingei. I'm still not even really sure if that's a thing that can or should exist, but it's something which has been kicking around in my head for a few years at this point.

The first thing that really tickled my brain into thinking along these lines was the following few sentences from the Wikipedia article on the Arts and Crafts movement:

Unlike their counterparts in the United States, most Arts and Crafts practitioners in Britain had strong, slightly incoherent, negative feelings about machinery. They thought of "the craftsman" as free, creative, and working with his hands, "the machine" as soulless, repetitive, and inhuman.

The very first time I read that I thought "hey, that sounds like us!", meaning the smolnet community. It was specifically the "slightly incoherent" part of "strong, slightly incoherent, negative feelings" that resonated with me. I always suspect myself of being slightly incoherent in some ways. There are a few facets of modern tech criticism/scepticism which map well to the language above. With regard to things like unique and hand-crafted personal websites compared to soulless generic one-size-fits-all social media profiles or presences on writing platforms like Medium or Substack, I think actually most of us have a pretty consistent and clearly formulated message. I also see echos, though, of my own feelings toward the ubiquitous and unthinking application of "industrial scale" technique (containerisation, virtualisation, test-driven development, continuous integration, etc.), and I feel on somewhat less solid ground there, because it's not like I think those things are innately evil or never appropriate. I reject them in some contexts, not through careful argument or strict criteria, but more a kind of "gut sense" which perhaps would not survive careful scrutiny. I have often thought that these things ought to be somewhat uninteresting to the "true hacker", in the same way and for the same reasons that a keen amateur woodworker with a basement workshop full of chisels, who knows their dovetails from their mortises and tenons and who builds a lot of their own furniture, would presumably not give two figs how things are done in an IKEA factory. There's some sense that the craft is just *not about* certain things, even things which are undeniably beneficial from some perspectives and in some contexts. There's also, of course, a kind of incoherence in wanting to mimic the spirit and ideals of pre-industrial craftspeople in the operating of a personal computer, an undeniably fundamentally industrial artefact.

But while those few words were what really got me thinking about connections between traditional and computational crafts, the idea which has really stuck in my head, though, is Leach's idea of "ethical pots". These are quick, cheap, simple utilitarian pots which embody the exact opposite of the high art studio pot, too beautiful and expensive to actually use. Far from being plain or ugly, the ethical pot acquires a level of beauty and spiritual worth directly by virtue of simplicity and honesty. Leach opined that ethical pots ought to be so simple that they can be "thrown before breakfast" ("thrown" here in the sense of shaped on a spinning wheel). An ethical pot, following Mingei principles, "must be made by an anonymous craftsman or woman and therefore unsigned; it must be functional, simple, and have no excess ornamentation; it must be one of many similar pieces and must be inexpensive; it must be unsophisticated; it must reflect the region it was made in; and it must be made by hand".

Being made by hand is perhaps the most salient of these points these days, but it's actually the one I'm least interested in, because, well, that just goes without saying, right? It's also never been clearer what it means for a piece of software to be "made by hand". What might it mean, though, for a piece of software to "reflect the region it was made in"? Is that something software can really do, and is it something we might want? Is it too much of a stretch to see, say, text editors, of which there are a great many different types which nevertheless at the end of the day all do more or less the same thing, such that one can take one's pick, as better embodying the directive to "be one of many similar pieces" than something like modern web browsers, which exist in something close to a duopoly? In the spirit of "throwing before breakfast", can we interpret "inexpensive" not in monetary terms (most FOSS software also being free as in beer) but in terms of not involving a great many person-hours to produce? Do "one shot" software projects such as OFFLFIRSOCH entries, written by a single person in one month, have Mingei spirit? Is a simple utility shell script copy and pasted without attribution from a StackOverflow post the product of "an anonymous craftsman or woman"? Does the "bazaar" model of software development butt heads with Morris' opposition to the division of labour and insistence that craft objects ought to be both designed and manufactured by the one person?

I don't know if I'm over-extending the "programming as craft" analogy too much here, but given how thoroughly many people are finding their sense of what it means to be a programmer being shaken up these days, I think it can hardly hurt to be more familiar with the thoughts of earlier generations of skilled and passionate people during similar periods of upheaval.