Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [24]
How far we have come from the hand oiling of early motorcycles is indicated by the fact that some of the current Mercedes models do not even have a dipstick. This serves nicely as an index of the shift in our relationship to machines. If the oil level should get low, there is a very general exhortation that appears on a screen: “Service Required.” Lubrication has been recast, for the user, in the frictionless terms of the electronic device. In those terms, lubrication has no rationale, and ceases to be an object of active concern for anyone but the service technician. In a sense, this increases the freedom of the Mercedes user. He has gained a kind of independence by not having to futz around with dipsticks and dirty rags.
But in another sense, it makes him more dependent. The burden of paying attention to his oil level he has outsourced to another, and the price he pays for this disburdenment is that he is entangled in a more minute, all-embracing, one might almost say maternal relationship with . . . what? Not with the service technician at the dealership, at least not directly, as there are layers of bureaucracy that intervene. Between driver and service tech lie corporate entities to which we attribute personhood only in the legal sense, as an abstraction: the dealership that employs the technician; Daimler AG, Stuttgart, Germany, who hold the service plan and warranty on their balance sheet; and finally Mercedes shareholders, unknown to one another, who collectively dissipate the financial risk of your engine running low on oil. There are now layers of collectivized, absentee interest in your motor’s oil level, and no single person is responsible for it. If we understand this under the rubric of “globalization,” we see that the tentacles of that wondrous animal reach down into things that were once unambiguously our own: the amount of oil in a man’s crankcase.
It used to be that, in addition to a dipstick, you had also a very crude interface, simpler but no different conceptually from the sophisticated interface of the new Mercedes. It was called an “idiot light.” One can be sure that the current system is not referred to in the Mercedes owner’s manual as the “idiot system,” as the harsh judgment carried by that term no longer makes any sense to us. By some inscrutable cultural logic, idiocy gets recast as something desirable.
It is important to understand that there has been no “high-tech” development such that it is no longer important to stay on top of oil consumption and leakage. With enough miles, oil is still consumed and will still leak; running low on oil will still trash the motor. There is nothing magical about the Mercedes, though such a superstition is encouraged by the absence of a dipstick. The facts of physics have not changed; what has changed is the place of those facts in our consciousness, and therewith the basic character of material culture.3
Agency versus Autonomy
Grime-under-the-fingernails, bodily involvement with the machines we use entails a kind of agency. Yet the decline of such involvement, through technological progress, is precisely the development that makes for an increase in autonomy. Is there a paradox here? Not having to futz around with machines, we are free to simply use them for our purposes. There seems to be a tension between a certain kind of agency and a certain kind of autonomy, and this is worth thinking about. My bike has an electric starter, and centrifugal spark advance, and an automatic oil pump, because I’d rather ride the bike than mess around with it. So I want to fully concede that such readiness to serve our will is a good attribute in a machine, in case there were any doubt.
But I also want to notice that there is a whole ideology of choice and freedom and autonomy, and that if one pays due attention, these ideals start to seem less like a bubbling