I think it was Daniel Berlin who pointed this out a few months ago, but this is exactly the arc of the hand-tool woodworker.
If you need to furnish an office, you're going to rent or buy mass-produced office furniture. If you want to bang out custom pieces, there's a whole assortment of power tools to buy, from router tables to cut brain-dead dovetails to domino joiners. You don't really have to do much of the problem solving of the craft of woodworking at all.
But many of the most popular woodworking streamers now eschew all of that. They use hand-saws and bench planes and chisels, like people did in the 19th century. That is a serious way to do high-end woodworking; it's not like Luddism at all, and you can be more or less snooty about it. Nobody looks down on hand-tool woodworkers.
If you're good, you can make a living as a hand-tool woodworking craftsperson. As a hobby, there's a spectrum of strong (if contentious) arguments for being a hand-tool person too; like, if you're going to use a domino joiner, why not go all the way and just buy a kit?
What I think we're going to see over the next 10 years is the end of a way of working commodity corporate 9-5 W2 jobs in software development that blurred craft and industry. But that doesn't mean we're going to see the end of the craft!
If you need to furnish an office, you're going to rent or buy mass-produced office furniture. If you want to bang out custom pieces, there's a whole assortment of power tools to buy, from router tables to cut brain-dead dovetails to domino joiners. You don't really have to do much of the problem solving of the craft of woodworking at all.
But many of the most popular woodworking streamers now eschew all of that. They use hand-saws and bench planes and chisels, like people did in the 19th century. That is a serious way to do high-end woodworking; it's not like Luddism at all, and you can be more or less snooty about it. Nobody looks down on hand-tool woodworkers.
If you're good, you can make a living as a hand-tool woodworking craftsperson. As a hobby, there's a spectrum of strong (if contentious) arguments for being a hand-tool person too; like, if you're going to use a domino joiner, why not go all the way and just buy a kit?
What I think we're going to see over the next 10 years is the end of a way of working commodity corporate 9-5 W2 jobs in software development that blurred craft and industry. But that doesn't mean we're going to see the end of the craft!