I used to resent all the
anti-lawyer articles and jokes, but I've been largely won over.
Modern corporate training is built to produce a checkbox, not a mechanic. Modern consumer documentation is built to win a deposition, not to teach you anything. Modern “how-to” media is built to monetize attention, not to transfer skill. Those are three different poisons, but the lawyers are the one that made the first two mandatory.
And you can see the societal consequences everywhere. Repair literacy collapses. Trades become credential-gated while simultaneously deskilled. People lose the ability to reason from symptoms to causes. Everything becomes a black box serviced by a priesthood. Machines become disposable because maintenance is treated as unauthorized tampering. The consumer gets trained into passivity. The worker gets trained into compliance.
2 comments:
Mostly true. Far more so than 40 years ago.
But there are some partial exceptions. The less ‘advanced’ the economy, the less urban ( all ‘cities’ think they are Rome, or NY) reality matters more than make believe.
Like the monks of old Ireland or the remote establishments that kept writing and thought alive, far off places could be where things to pass on come back.
I will confess to not reading more than excerpts from the article but as with the comment above I'm skeptical that you can lay this at the hands of lawyers. There is a continual drive to replace labor with capital equipment to improve productivity as any industry scales up, and this is going to include replacing labor that performs maintenance and repair. If it's cheaper to throw away and replace a maintenance-free tool every five years (or when it breaks) than to build one that lasts for ten years and can be repaired but requires periodic maintenance, the throwaway is going to win. Partially this has been driven by changes in manufacturing technology as well as off-shoring. It coincides with increasing safteyism but I don't think the causation runs in that direction. I think it's also a bit of a misunderstanding to think everything has gotten less durable over time. That's not to say that it hasn't happened since in many cases we have shifted to disposing of entire products rather than components. Take lightbulbs as an example. Even though there is a lot to dislike about the forced introduction of CFL and LED bulbs, I remember when replacing burned out incandescent bulbs was a pretty regular occurrence that now happens far less frequently with LED bulbs. With more complex capital equipment I think there has also been a drive by manufacturers to capture the stream of service income for themselves and their dealers as their margin on sales has shrunk due to competition.
Post a Comment