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Comment by forcry | Hacker News Reader

Sadly this is a global phenomenon. The same thing can be seen in, for example, movie/music industry as well. And we have to assume that the same holds in other fields as well..

I wonder if we can generalise the lost quality and attribute it to a lack of case by case application human ingenuity and experience that an experienced craftsman brings to the trade.

Or may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the financial gain it brings. There is no free lunch, and somethings got to give to make gains elsewhere. And it is inevitable that when one of those two things is extreamly measurable (finance) and the other extremely un-measurable (aesthetics), the measurable thing always ultimately wins.

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> may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the financial gain it brings.

That's an element, but another big element is specialist-subject education.

If you are an old-money guy, you can spend your life figuring out the best attributes of everything around you, and pursuing excellence in what you own. Your parents and grandparents can educate you in what a great staircase looks like, and you can spend weeks going from shop to shop until you find the right thing, or hire a carpenter to make it for however long it takes to be "just so".

If you are somebody who's just made their money, and maybe are still neck-deep into the rat race, you don't know anything about staircases and you have no time, nor contacts, to educate yourself on what it should look like. Developer shows you the staircase, it looks alright, sold.

More and more people are chained to their day job for longer and longer. More and more people are coming up in the world and buying stuff they don't know anything about, enriching companies targeting the mass-market more than specialist ones. This is nothing new: in the XX century we've seen this happening for anything from clothes to cutlery. In a way, it's a good thing: objects become more and more efficient and functional, eschewing aesthetic values that are somewhat irrational and often just classist. It's true, though, that we lose a cultural element.

I'd love to see a study done on this. What you you wrote made me think of Phaedrus slowly losing his mind trying to define quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Quality goods are still available, even if they are buried in the marketplace of cheap disposable goods and hard to find amongst all the noise of advertising and sponsored content.

What worries me more is the receding availability of _quality work to be done_. If you've ever worked with tools and materials, I mean physical ones, you know. It's among the most satisfying experiences in the world to feel the sensation of being good at (and becoming better at) something through practice. To be able to select the materials you use and discern their quality. To feel a familiar and trusted tool manipulating the materials to produce something. Those things are innately pleasurable.

McJob robot babysitters that only intercede when the machine screws up, overseeing the production of low-but-acceptable-quality products at a predictable pace is, in my mind, a dystopia. Getting a Bricklayerbot 2000 unstuck a few times per hour is not the kind of skill I can imagine being pleasurable to hone. There's a very low ceiling on the craftsmanship there.

Yeah, but for every craftsman, there's 10 people who just want a job that can make them a good living. That's really just how the world is.

There will always be people who take great pride in their work and enjoy doing the best job they can with the tools & materials they have. But they will always be a small minority.

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