Quote Investigator digs diligently, delightfully and with positive results into the provenance of William Gibson’s lumpily doled-out future|present.

But the bit that stands out for me is Ralph Thomas’ 1967 criticism of Marshall McLuhan…

McLuhan suffers also from a mixed-up time sense. He believes the future has already happened. He often says most people can see thru the rearview mirror, but he seems to have the opposite fault. He appears to think total automation is upon us, that the whole world is linked as “global village” by TV, that even space travel is now a reality.

Meanwhile, 45 years and exactly six Moon landings into McLuhan’s future, this from Ed Booty of BBH London…

As we’ve explored and embraced the bewildering possibilities, we’ve increasingly convinced ourselves that a revolution is here. Meanwhile real peoples’ lives and needs simply aren’t changing at the same pace. What is possible is growing at an exponential rate, but how people actually live and use technologies has changed very little.  This gap between the myth and reality is ever-widening.

Mind that gap, people.

Therefore it seems apt that at the Museum of London a “timeline handrail”  runs from 1688 to 2012, around the new Galleries of Modern London.

At first sight this is a cute way to lay out the span of years through the expanse of the gallery, surrounded by some excellent exhibits that bring past generations of the capital’s people back to life.

But the handrail left me feeling queasy, unsteady on my feet, because here London’s past is for sale.

I don’t mind the principle of sponsorship so much as the way it is done. Critically, for £5000 corporations and wealthy individuals can not only affix their names to a year, but also dictate the very events with which that date should be associated.

It’s a strange price, £5000 – beyond the reach of mass participation by ordinary Londoners, yet chickenfeed for the City’s many firms and institutions. And, the website boasts, it counts as gift aid so…

if you are a 50% higher rate taxpayer, your donation could cost you even less at £2,500.

In other words, the rich may occupy a year of London’s narrative for half the sum that their history-loving cleaners or chauffeurs would have to scrimp and save.

Regular followers of my ramblings will know that I have a special thing for the year 1794. I wondered which of the various happenings of that eventful year might have made it onto the timeline.

• The hounding from Hackney of the nonconformist minister and scientist Joseph Priestley?
• The trial and acquittal of radical leaders after a massed rally of the London Corresponding Society?
• The composer Haydn, writing and performing in the city?
• Publication of Mary Wollstonecraft‘s  ‘Origin and Progress of the French Revolution’ or William Blake’s ‘Song’s of Experience‘?

From the latter…

London

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe. (1-4)

You’ll see where this is leading.

Now I know nothing of Norton Rose LLP and their business. Well done them, I say, for 217 years of lawyering in London.

Yet this entry inadvertently speaks volumes  – more even than those lines of William Blake – about the nature of power in the City of London. The structure of this sponsorship scheme guarantees a history written by the victors. It underwrites the narratives of the already powerful.

When you place your hand on a rail it does more than offer support; it also guides your direction of travel. Where do you want it to lead you?

For one thing, it was a chance to appear alongside Rachel Coldicutt‘s dream team of Rohan Gunatillake, Natasha Carolan, Lucy Bannister, Helen Harrop, Frankie Roberto and Greg Povey.

Also, I got to try out a half-baked thought about an unexpected way in which situated stories could lead to long-term, physical changes in our cities, even better, to do so with some people whose Culture Hack projects could be pivotal to bringing that change about.

I made a Prezi to go with the talk, but for those who can’t abide all the whizzing and swooping here it is in static words and pictures. I’d love to know what you think.

What if the interior lives of buildings were as exposed as their exteriors?

I ask because I think we’re heading for a profound change in the way we experience our built heritage.

We’ll start by considering a heritage concept that got a bad name in the latter part of the last century. There was a trend for ripping out the hearts of old buildings but leaving the shells intact. Critics called this trend “façadism” – the privileging of the exterior or front to the detriment of the building’s deeper character.

“Façadism (or Façadomy) is the practice of demolishing a building but leaving its facade intact for the purposes of building new structures in it or around it.” – Wikipedia

Here’s a particularly egregious example from Estonia:

Victorian architects and builders sowed the seeds of this practice themselves in the way they put their emphasis on the public face of a structure, while skimping on the unseen parts. Here’s Temple Works in Holbeck, Leeds. In front, it’s a grand millstone grit temple; round the back, nicely detailed but workaday redbrick…

That tension remains today. The building’s blue plaque focuses on the spectacular facade, the industrialist and architect who erected it…

But if you listen to local people, the complex is important to them as something else, the unglamorous Northern Distribution Depot of Kay’s Catalogues, the Amazon.com of its day. This sign is from Slung Low’s Original Bearings project which sought to capture some of those real Holbeck stories and expose them on the street…

This is the inside of Kay’s as we found it a couple of years ago, a pre-digital data centre abandoned by its previous occupants…

And still the same site: fittingly, Reality was the name of the last company to occupy the complex…

But now it’s possible to see inside buildings through time and space. The pun is too good to miss…

All this would be academic if it wasn’t for the fact that planning law is shifting, away from purely national, architectural significance, towards a system that gives weight to local people’s views of what’s important in their environment.

The Draft National Planning Policy Framework talks (page 55) about “heritage assets” which should be…

“identified by the local planning authority during the process of decision-making or through the plan-making process (including local listing).”

According to English Heritage, local listing is …

“… a means for a local community and a local authority to jointly decide what it is in their area that they would like recognised as a ‘local heritage asset’ and therefore worthy of some degree of protection in the planning system.” – Good Practice Guide for Local Listing

And while the Tory-led government seems to use localism as cover for an attack on communities’ rights to resist inappropriate developments, the National Trust is leading the fightback by positioning heritage in terms of dialogue between people and places:

“I believe that the planning system should balance future prosperity with the needs of people and places – therefore I support the National Trust’s calls on the Government to stop and rethink its planning reforms.” – National Trust Planning for People petition

The upshot of this focus on local significance is that the images and stories of use that we expose through geo-location and augmented reality could influence which buildings are preserved and reused and which are demolished. Historic buildings won’t just stand or fall on architectural merit, but also on local residents’ attachments to them.

Those attachments tend to arise from the activities carried on inside buildings as much as what they look like on the exterior. I visited the old Majestyk nightclub on City Square a year ago because it was on Leeds Civic Trust’s Heritage at Risk list…

And I found this – a spontaneous display of affection for a derelict building…

And while it’s a striking building in a prominent location, I don’t think whoever wrote that loved it for its architectural merit. They were remembering the good times they had at Majestyk’s – the laughs, the drinks, the music, the snogs.

And then there’s this unassuming late 90s box, called the White House, on Melbourne Street…

It has its own Facebook page! Or rather the people who worked here do…

In this building they launched Freeserve, the UK’s first free ISP which got millions of Britons on the net for the first time. If anywhere deserves local listing for its historic significance surely this does.

But I think the real potential is for places like the Leeds district of Chapeltown. (I owe a debt for many of the ideas in this post to my wife Caroline Newton who has just completed her MSc in Historic Building Conservation, studying the development of the Chapeltown Conservation Area. Ask her about it if you get the chance.)

Currently buildings get protection for their contribution to the Edwardian streetscape. But the really interesting stories are ones like this launderette, which was started as a cooperative in response to the needs of the immigrant community in an area that many had written off as a slum…

Such narrative capital is fragile and often completely disregarded in the name of regeneration. If stories like the laundry coop’s were better known, they might count for something in decision-making about the district.

Finally, this is the Mandela Centre, also on Chapeltown Road…

I stopped to take this picture because I loved the big sign commemorating Nelson Mandela’s visit to Leeds in which his drove through this area. But then I noticed the cups in the window. I have no idea what they’re for, but they speak volumes about the activities that go on in a community centre and the pride of the groups that meet there.

What if those stories were as obvious as the sign on the wall? The great thing is that, for the first time, they could be.

Maybe in the future buildings will no longer need to shout for attention with elaborate archiecture. In fact, to do so will be useless as nobody will see their peacock finery through the data smog. Instead, places will be recognised for the richness of their inner lives, meaning we preserve a fuller, messier cross-section of structures for their historic significance.

Just as in quantum theory, the act of observing changes the outcome. Facadism is dead; the future is all about interiors.

Original post: http://matt.me63.com/2011/09/16/the-pace-of-change/

The way into this tale, the loose thread that first attracted my attention, is a 1920s advertisement. But tugging that thread a little, Laura Willson’s story just gets better and better. Her achievements, it seems, are so diverse that no one website has hitherto woven them together in one place.

The ad shows a property developer with keen interests in engineering and the conditions of working class life. Laura Wilson combined these passions by providing affordable homes, ready-made for the latest gas and electricity-powered labour-saving devices.

These were homes fit for heroes. Some of the houses still stand today, plain and solid, nearly 90 years on: “modern, attractive, durable”, planned and priced to bring the garden city ethos to ordinary working families.

Besides being the very first woman member of the Federation of House Builders, Laura Willson was one of seven founder subscribers, and served as President, of the Women’s Engineering Society.

The WES still exists with the following aims:

to promote the education of women in engineering sciences and other  skills, the better to fit women for the practice of engineering;

to advance the education of the public concerning the study and  practice of engineering among women; and

to relieve poverty amongst women who are or have been professional or technician engineers or technologists in allied sciences or educated in science or technology or in the art and techniques of engineering and allied sciences or in other disciplines considered by the Council to be complementary, their dependants and (if they are deceased) their former dependants.

If these aims appear now to be uncontentious, remember that at the time of the society’s foundation in 1919, they were highly incendiary. Laura Willson and her co-founders were making a stand for their right to remain in trades previous reserved for men – only briefly opened up to them by the crisis of the First World War.

Because when Laura Willson saw an opening, she took it, bringing her comrades along with her. Note the “MBE” on the property advertisement, one of the first ever awarded. The 1917 citation reads: “Organiser of Women’s Work in Munitions Works in Halifax”.

In a time of crisis the women of Yorkshire answered the call of their country to take up the dirtiest, riskiest jobs, including the filling of shells with live explosives. The number who lost their lives went unappreciated for many years because factory accidents were hushed up to maintain morale.

Here’s Laura Willson pictured in happier times, circa 1912, with her husband, George, also a self-made engineer, and their young daughter.

But rewind just a few more years and we find the same Laura Willson in a different context, her organising talents not always so welcomed by the authorities.

In 1907, as a member of the Women’s Labour League and the Women’s Social and Political Union, she took part in a weavers’ strike and was arrested on a charge of ‘violent and inflammatory speech’.

Given the choice of two weeks’ imprisonment or a 40 shilling fine, she picked prison, becoming one of the first two suffragettes to be locked up in Yorkshire. On leaving Leeds’ Armley Prison, Laura Willson said:

“If they could sentence me for thinking, I would have been sentenced for life. I went to gaol a rebel, but I have come out a regular terror”.

Contrary to the common picture of the genteel suffragette, Laura Willson did not come from middle class stock. She lacked formal education, having started work aged just 10 as a “half-timer” in a West Yorkshire textile mill.

Yet she went on to be an effective and celebrated labour organiser, war hero, engineer, house-builder and pioneer of new technology. Any one of these achievements would make a person noteworthy. This amazing Yorkshirewoman combined them all.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Sources:

• Cheryl Law’s Women, a modern political dictionary
• English Heritage Architects, Builders and Garden Cities
• Jill Liddington’s Rebel Girls

See also:

• Finding Lizzie Le Prince – my post from Ada Lovelace Day 2010
• “Embellish your Country with useful inventions & elegant productions” – my post from Ada Lovelace Day 2009
• Why I took part in Ada Lovelace Day – a subsequent post about, erm, why I took part in Ada Lovelace Day

Slides 52-56…

It took radio 40 years to reach a market penetration of 50 million…

by comparison we only had 10 years to ‘adapt’ to television…

while the iPod took only 5 years…

and Youtube less than 6 months…

Google+ may reach this milestone in less than half this time…

The rate of change is accelerating, exponentially, we are told. Old verities no longer apply. To which the historian in me cries out. How do you know? Were you there? And what’s the unit of measurement anyway?

Goaded by my Twitter followers after dConsruct, and by Ivor Tymchak’s pseudo-science, I offer this first draft. It’s an attempt to tell an alternative story about change in our culture, why it seems so rapid yet is probably much the same as it ever was. Also, critically, why the misperception is a bad thing and what we should do about it. You can tell me why I’m wrong, what I’m missing, and what I should read before opining on this subject again.

It goes like this.

Yes, there are isolated metrics that display exponential growth. Moore’s Law has held remarkably well on the terms of its clear and specific prediction: it says the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.

Yet Moore’s Law says nothing about what people will do with that exponential power. Whether playing ‘Pong’ or ‘Call of Duty’ we still have the same cognitive capacities and number of eyeballs. Kurzweil? I’ll believe it when I see it. With my own two eyes.

Besides, these data points tend to conceal three sleights of hand.

First, they are highly selective by sector. While communications technology is undoubtedly in a period of flux, the same cannot be said of other critically important domains of everyday life, such as transport. Granted this is not your father’s cellphone, but the guts of the car you drive would be familiar to Henry Ford. I’m writing this just south of Grantham, travelling up the East Coast Mainline, where the Mallard clocked 125mph in 1938.

Individual sectors and regions may experience periods of rapid change, followed by plateaux of stability. But put them all together and I reckon the pace of change is, overall, quite constant. And anyway how would you measure it? The number of transisitors on an integrated circuit is a great measure for computing power but meaningless in the field of, say, sanitation. So it is with ham-fisted attempts to express pre-digital human creativity in the terms of bits and bytes.

Second, exponential change narratives like the Riegers’ play fast and loose with multiple layers of the same stack, with massively different degrees of significance and disruption. How can one seriously compare 50 million households hearing radio broadcasts for the first time with 50 million men, women, children and spambots taking a couple of minutes to sign up for free accounts on Google’s latest foray into social networking?

We could so easily tell the opposite story. Why not just chain together sequential inventions in the field of short messaging, from the 1794 Chappe telegraph to Twitter in 2006? 212 years! What took you so long, Jack Dorsey?

Jaron Lanier writes about these layers thus:

“Slow-changing layers protect local theaters within which there is a potential for faster change. In computers, this is the divide between operating systems and applications, or between browsers and web pages. In biology, it might be seen, for example, in the divide between nature- and nurture-dominated dynamics in the human mind. But the lugubrious layers seem to usually define the overall character and potential of a system.”

For reasons I’ll come back to, I think we tend to overplay the importance of those local theatres while being blind to the greater significance of the lugubrious layers.

Finally, as David Edgerton shows in his solid and empirical book “The Shock of the Old”, the use-histories of technologies are far more elongated than we’d expect. Finland, for example, reached peak horse only in the 1950s. When will we hit peak transistor? We cannot possibly know until some time after we get there.

There is one factor that is radically different today from any other time in history, and that is the size of the Earth’s human population. But the number of other people (mostly unknown to each other) does not of itself affect the individual human experience. Indeed one might argue that the global population boom is only made possible by stability in whole swathes of the world previously troubled by uncertainty and disruptive change.

I already blogged about the Economist’s breathtakingly simplistic equation of years lived to history made. At the time I made the point that the globalisation accompanying population growth erases the diversity on which change relies.

A billion drinks per day of Coca-Cola is an amazing thought, but such uniformity is a symbol of inertia, not dynamism. For the most part world trade still travels at the speed of shipping containers, not data packets.

And even if we focus solely on the world of information, of culture, fashion and memes, there’s some evidence that the move to digital can prolong the shelf-lives of media properties as much as it can churn them.

When digital downloads were first included in the music charts, it led to a resurgence of golden oldies, rather than the breaking of hitherto neglected new talent. As some in the music business fretted:

“…it’s entirely possible that you could end up with the top 10 in the singles chart entirely dominated by Beatles tracks.”

The remarkable thing about the Cheezeburger phenomenon is not so much its sudden arrival as its amazing longevity – who’d have thought captioned cats would still make an impact after all this time?

Meanwile we find that the past was actually rather good at moving ideas about.

The postal service of 18^th Century England ran twice daily mail coaches between major cities. On a bad day that’s more frequent than I check my emails.

The Victorian Charles Mackay chronicled the viral spread of catchphrases:

“London is peculiarly fertile in this sort of phrases, which spring up suddenly, no one knows exactly in what spot, and pervade the whole population in a few hours, no one knows how.”

(“Has your mother sold her mangle?” is my favourite.)

Ideas could certainly be “in the air” without the aid of modern communications technologies – indeed the telephone is a celebrated example of simultaneous invention. It’s as if someone phoned up Bell the night before to tip him off about Gray’s patent.

Even the change trope itself goes back further than we might expect. I ran the Google Books Ngram Viewer for the phrase “accelerating change“. Turns out its rise began around the 1950s and peaked within the literary corpus back in 1970…

Accelerating change is not just a wrong idea, it’s an unoriginal one!

I’m fascinated by the new stuff in our culture, but it seems grossly arrogant, a disservice to past generations, to claim that our experience of change is quantitatively different. Try telling that to a farm worker in the time of enclosure, to a native of a newly “discovered” country, or to the people of a 1980s British mining village.

What explains this fallacy’s enduring appeal? Why does every generation feel as if it experiences change so much more acutely than its predecessors?

I think it has to do with perspective.

We humans see change as if looking through a window at a stormy night sky. Clouds rush by while the Moon appears a fixed point. In fact the Moon is hurtling by at 2288 miles per hour, much faster than the clouds. It’s just further away.

And because the clouds are moving, they draw our attention. We try to make sense of them, and see patterns in their random shapes. In a few hours the wind could turn and push the clouds a different way, but to us in the moment, they move in only one, inevitable direction.

So it is with the past relative to the present. Disruptive changes that happened long ago appear steady, motionless, shorn of their uncertainties and wrong turns, even though at the time there was nothing inevitable about their course.

Meanwhile the things that are changing around us stimulate our primitive motion-sensing reflexes. The new shiny grabs our attention at the expense of the far larger body of things that stay the same.

Add to this some features specific to our time.

One of the domains that is changing fastest right now is the media, the self-same media that drives the discourse around change, and likes nothing better than to talk about itself. How many more column inches have been expended on the disruptive changes in the newspaper business than on, say, the shift from supermarket shopping to online groceries?

The other peculiarity is the fine net curtain that separates culture and knowledge produced in the age of the Internet from everything that came before.

We’re now so much more likely to type something into a search engine than to leaf through the library’s card index that we discount the very existence of all that stuff in the library, even though it may be better quality or more fitting to our needs. Order the journal or cut and paste that random excerpt from Google Books snippet view? Track down the original on 12 inch vinyl or settle for the bedroom remix on MP3? You know what you should do, and you know what you will do.

Like a theatrical lighting effect, the stuff on the digital side of the gauze is so visible, so brightly illuminated, that it renders invisible everything on the pre-digital side. Before the internet there were no revolutions, no financial crashes, no volcanoes. The illusion is complete.

Does it matter that we flatter ourselves into believing we’re special?

Yes. It matters because of the way the exponential change narrative makes people feel. The idea of free-wheeling change disempowers individuals. It puts them at the mercy of forces they cannot control or even understand. It sends them the message that their past experiences count for nothing. It squeezes out critical thinking and softens them up for the change proponent’s chosen flavour of inevitability.

Because there’s always a therefore. Can you guess the source of this quote from the Riegers’ dConstruct presentation?

“events, threats and opportunities aren’t just coming at us faster or with less predictability; they are converging and influencing each other to create entirely new situations.”

Did you guess?

Step forward Samuel J. Palmisano, Chairman and CEO of IBM, who believes his customers seek to “learn from a company that itself had undergone continual change.”

In any era there are people who thrive on uncertainty and on telling others what to do. I know because I’m one of that tribe. If we’d lived 100 years ago we’d be tinkering with starter motors and leaded petrol, just because that was where the change was. 50 years ago we’d be clearing the cities for tower blocks and motorways because you can’t stand in the way of progress. Today it’s information technology. A century from now who knows.

The other risk, if we fall for the exponential change story, is that we never get beyond the low-hanging fruit. Real innovation surely stems from an appreciation of the things that are not changing fast enough, not from being caught up in the coat-tails of the market’s latest flight of fancy.

Edwin Land didn’t spend five years creating the Polaroid camera because he was scared of being left behind. He did it because his curiosity was piqued by his daughter’s impatience. “Why can’t I see it now?” she demanded.

So if you catch me, or yourself, or anyone else, expounding on the exponential pace of change, stop and ask for the evidence. Ask for the motivation. Ask if we mean to undermine people’s sense of authorship and agency.

More likely the changes that matter take decades. You – collectively we – do have the time to consider the implications and shape the direction. True, the only constant is change. But that’s OK, it was ever thus.

See also: Erm, excuse me, but I think Everybody was here all along

My notes from the talk are here, along with the Prezi slideshow.

You should also check out brilliant talks by Susan Williamson, Megan Smith, Stuart Childs, Usman Haque, Rashik Parmar and Julian Tait.

Thanks again to Imran, Emma, Herb and everyone else who made it possible. I’m already looking forward to TEDxLeeds 2011.

In the corner of an attic room in one of Britain’s oldest factories a small group are engaged in the assembly of a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic. They – it – all of us – are there for Laptops and Looms, a gathering of people whose crafts cross the warp of the digital networked world with the weft of making and holding real stuff.

It’s a privilege to be here. Projects are shown, stories shared, frustrations vented. This is the place to be if you’ve ever wondered how to:

• get funding for projects not considered “digital enough”
• break out from the category of hand-craft without entering the globalised game of mass-scale manufacture
• create a connected object that will still be beautiful when the Internet is switched off
• avoid queuing at the Post Office
• make a local car.

The inspired move of holding Laptops and Looms in a world heritage site dares us to draw parallels with the makers, hackers and inventors of the past. We are at once nostalgic for the noble, human-scale labour of the weaver’s cottage and awestruck by the all-consuming manufactories that supplanted it.

The nearby city of Derby has just hit the reset button on its Silk Mill industrial museum, mothballed for two years while they work out what to do with it. Rolls Royce aero engines rub shoulders with Midlands railway memorabilia on the site of a silk mill with a claim to be the world’s first factory.

Like Derby itself, the museum needs to find a way to build upon these layers of history, or be crushed by the weight of them. Water wheels, millstones, silk frames, steam locomotives, jet engines  – they all go round in circles.

Skimming stones on the river at Matlock Baths, someone mentions how the beautiful Derwent Valley reminds him of Tintern Abbey. And I realise that to understand where we are now, 30 years on from the last great Tory recession, we need to twist the dial back another whole turn, to the age of the English monasteries.

Abbeys such as Fountains, Rievaulx and Kirkstall began humbly enough, as offshoots of the French Cistercian movement. Their needs were simple: tranquility, running water and some land for agriculture. But over time they grew, soaring higher, sucking in labour, expanding their estates, diversifying their industries and dominating their localities. Imagine the noise, imagine the power! Until a greedy monarch who would brook no opposition made a grab for their riches and sent the monks packing.

England’s monasteries were washed away in a freshwater confluence of printing presses and Protestant ideology. The clergy who had used the Latin tongue to obscure the word of God were cut down to size, disintermediated by the Bible in English. They still had a role, but no longer a monopoly on the invention of new meanings.

In the shadow of the Gothic ruins, sometimes literally from their rubble, arose smaller vernacular working class dwellings, cottage industries. Among the cottage-dwellers’ most prized possessions was the family Bible, not as grand and illuminated as the monks’ Latin one, but there, accessible to anyone who could read.

To our modern eyes, there was much wrong with the cottage industries: patriarchal, piecework-driven and still at the mercy of merchants higher up the pyramid. But economically this seems closest to the model to which some laptops-and-loomers aspire, (dread phrase) a “lifestyle business” bigger than a hobby but smaller than a factory.

It was 200 years before Britain’s gorges would see the rise of new monsters: water wheels and spinning frames and looms and five storey factories. Something in the cottage industries had got out of kilter. With the invention of the flying shuttle, home-spinning could no longer feed the weaver’s demand for thread. The forces of industrialisation seemed unstoppable, pressed home by a new ideology, Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the productivity gains from de-humanising division of labour. The pattern was repeated elsewhere in Europe with local variations: Revolutionary France threw out its monks and turned the Abbey of Fontenay directly into a paper-mill.

By then the ruined abbeys had lost their admonishing power; some became romantic ornaments in the faux-wild gardens of the aristocracy. Gothic became the go-to architectural style of the sentimental idealist. I’m still a sucker for it today.

There were warnings, of course. Just six years after William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”  we got William Blake’s “And did those feet in ancient time”. But still the dark Satanic mills grew. They outgrew the valleys and by means of canals and steam engines dispensed with the need for water power. They swept aside the Arts and Crafts objections of Ruskin and Morris, who fought in vain to revive a labour theory of value.

Until one day some time in the second half of the 20th Century, the tide turned. And here we are today picking our way through the rockpools of the anthropocene for glinting sea-glass, smooth abraded shards of blue pottery and rounded red brick stones. Look closely in those rockpools – the railway arches, hidden yards and edge-of-town industrial parks – and you’ll see that Britain is still teeming with productive life, but on a smaller scale, more niche than before. No longer the workshop of the world.

What comes after the dissolution of Britain’s factories?

That 3d printer in the corner could hold some answers. Despite its current immaturity, 3d printing seems an emblematic technology – perhaps as powerful as the vernacular Bible. It may never be the cheapest way to make stuff, nor turn out the finest work. But it speaks powerfully of the democratisation of making, now within reach of anyone who can use a graphics programme or write a little code. Factories still have a role, but no longer a monopoly on the invention of meanings.

These things move slowly. A straw poll in the pub reveals that many of us already come from the second generation of geeks in our families. Some of us are raising the third. A child who grows up with a laptop and a 3d printer knows she can make a future spinning software, hardware, and the services that bind the two.

This time around the abbeys and the factories should stand equally as inspirations and warnings.

Their makers’ inventiveness and determination have left us a rich seam of narrative capital. And for all the current Western angst over the rise of Chinese manufacturing, the Victorians were nothing if not outward-looking. Leeds’ engineers willingly gave a leg-up to Germany’s Krupp Brothers and motorcycle pioneer Gottleib Daimler.

Yet the overbearing influence and precipitous declines of monasteries and mills should make us wary of future aggrandisements. Want to know how that last bit pans out? Please check back on this blog in August 2211.

Thanks to Russell, Toby, Greg and everyone else who made Laptops and Looms happen. And thanks to you, dear reader, for making it to the end of this ramble. As a reward, check out Paul Miller’s proper take-out from Laptops and Looms. He has a numbered list and everything.

I have been using the word “machine” in this connection, because it was the only name by which it was designated at that time. The adoption of a suitable name, however, was being discussed at this time by Mr. Sholes and his associates. “Printing machine” was first suggested, but the name did not meet with favor as describing the work it was designed to accomplish. “Writing machine” was also suggested, but as the work would be in printed letters the word “writing” seemed inapplicable. At length Mr. Sholes suggested the name “typewriter.” This was subject to the same objection, and there was some discussion as to whether the name “printing machine’* was not a better name after all, but “typewriter” was an unusual name and had a unique sound, and so it was finally adopted, and then for the first time was heard a name, sounding oddly enough at that time, but which has now become so common throughout the civilized world that we wonder that any other name was thought of.

Our interest in the work became more and more absorbing as it progressed, and the various parts completed and assembled. The keys were of black walnut, about three inches long and a quarter of an inch wide, with the letter of the alphabet to which it was attached painted in white on each key while between each key was a space sufficient to insert shorter keys similar to the black keys of the piano, which were used for the figures and punctuation marks. The figures ran from 2 to 9, the letter “I” being used for the first figure and “O” was used for the cypher. Added to these were the semi-colon, the dollar mark, the hyphen, the period, the comma and interrogation point, and a diagonal stroke which was used for the parenthesis. The keys being attached to the type bars and working in unison with the carriage movement enabled us for the first time to test the work of printing words and sentences. We were then in the midst of an exciting political campaign, and it was then for the first time that the well known sentence was inaugurated, — “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party;” also the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence, “When in the course of human events,” etc., which sentences were repeated many times in order to test the speed of the machine.

Charles E. Weller, “The early history of the typewriter“, 1918

The underlying equation is this:

SOME people recite history from above, recording the grand deeds of great men. Others tell history from below, arguing that one person’s life is just as much a part of mankind’s story as another’s. If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one.

Up to a point, Lord Copper, but the clue is buried in the word, “history”. History is stories, and stories have value.

Yes, history is made by, and of, people. Those “grand deeds of great men” mask for the most part an appropriation of the untold stories of other women and men who made such heroism possible. And yes, our planet’s soaring human population for all its potential harm, holds out the theoretical possibility of exponentially greater numbers of stories, depositing layers upon layers. Narrative capital is a natural resource that never runs out.

But here’s where I part company with the (small e and big E) economist’s approximation. The chart above assumes that units of history – like gold, coal or currency – are fungible. That’s to say one of a kind can be replaced easily by another. My contention is that stories are not fungible: each has value in its uniqueness.

Further, some of the very mechanisms currently sustaining population and economic growth actively militate against the production of new stories.

The 20th Century was the era of mass production – of any colour as long as it’s black. By its end it became the age of globalisation – of Coca-Cola and golden arches in every city on every continent. You can have everything you want at ever-cheaper prices – so long as what you want is the stuff that the invisible hand deems to produce. The gains have been spectacular. Without this Fordist approach to the production of food, medicines and other essentials the population bars on the chart would likely be back down at the level of all preceding centuries.

And as we entered the 21st Century we did so with the internet, the most insanely efficient copy machine the world has ever seen. We can take any text, picture, song or movie and, in seconds, copy – not transmit but copy – it from one side of the world to another. This too is a cause for celebration. We are better informed, better connected and better documented than ever before.

But all these extra people, their extra stuff, their bits and bytes, do not in themselves constitute new history. Innate human potential to write new stories needs to be nurtured, and in many respects our ancestors had it easier. Each handmade tunic encoded stories, more than a thousand Primark t-shirts. Their oral traditions could be mashed up more readily than a million-hit video on Youtube.

If we’re to realise the true historic potential of our time it will not be through mass consumption but mass creativity, turning everyone into a maker of things. And it’s up to us to make an internet where all are free to follow their own curiosities, not the predetermined paths of mass media. Only then will we reap the historic rewards held out by this hockey-stick growth curve.

“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.” – John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice