I did not like this book. This is interesting to me, because I agree with a lot of what it’s saying:
- I am amazed at the number of people working daily on jobs that do not meaningfully improve the world—or even make it worse. I think this is a hugely important problem.
- I have frequently been frustrated by the length of the chain between my own job and the real, non-computer world, and in fact this itch to work on something closer to the physical world was most of the motivation behind my recent job change.
- In high school I used to work in a machine shop and found the work very fulfilling. I am extremely thankful that my high school had a large Career & Technical Education department, allowing me to take construction (I built an Adirondack chair), two ceramics classes, a drafting class where we planned and constructed CO2-powered cars, and even welding class (for only one day due to a schedule conflict). I have huge respect for craftspeople and love to work with my hands to fix things and bring new things into the physical world.
But despite agreeing with Crawford’s general thesis, I found this book extremely off-putting. I found the tone hostile, the content rambling, the prose pretentious, and the arguments disjointed. I felt irritation and at times rage stir in me throughout the whole book. I wrote numerous angry or perplexed notes, many wondering if the author could possibly expect me to take him seriously. And I left the book fundamentally confused about how he would like the world to work.
I was first put off in the fourth paragraph of the introduction, where he claims:
the hardheaded educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as jobs of the past.
I may have reacted personally to this (my mom is a teacher), but I just don’t think this is true. Right away, it sounds like Crawford is placing blame on people who dedicate their lives to improve others’ in one of the most direct ways possible. He presents no evidence for this claim and does not discuss it again in the book. It feels like he just wanted to dig at teachers.
This admittedly may have set me off on the wrong foot: I generally don’t respond well to vague criticism of the education profession. But this was not an isolated example.
I was amazed by the number of groups that Crawford managed to blame in his diatribe. Not only did he complain about the managers and executives most directly responsible for the corporatification of work that he hates and the teachers mentioned above, but he also throws in disses to professors, school nurses, college admissions counselors, researchers, and his own dad. Maybe his point is that all of our institutions are complicit in degrading blue-collar work. But the way the book looked down on these latter respectable and thoughtful groups was gross.
Further, I saw little connection between the various subjects of his grouching—each section of the book felt basically like a new rant. In disses of these groups, the book repeatedly presented surface-level takes on controversial topics from ADHD medication (“by which I mean the use of psychiatric drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural bent toward action, the better to “keep things on track,” as the school nurse says”) to college admissions and DEI (“There is much talk of “diversity” in education, but not much accommodation of the kind we have in mind when we speak about the quality of a man, or woman: the diversity of dispositions. We are preoccupied with demographic variables, on the one hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other.”) and then immediately moved on, providing no discussion of his claim or connection to the rest of his thesis. Even those sections more directly related to his thesis, like a description of Crawford’s first (awful-sounding) “knowledge worker” job felt more like an isolated complaint than an example that moved his argument forward. Other sections where he described working in a shop often felt as much like an opportunity to complain about political correctness as a way to relate the joy of fixing a vehicle with your two hands (“You can tell dirty jokes. Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn’t quite so fragile.”). This made the whole book feel rambling rather than coherent.
Perhaps I would have appreciated Crawford’s various anecdotes if I felt any connection with him whatsoever. But it was again in the first pages of the introduction that any connection I felt on the basis of the subject matter began to erode away. He writes:
Through the portal of his helmet, I think I can make out the edges of a grin on the face of a guy who hasn’t ridden his bike in a while. I give him a wave. With one of his hands on the throttle and the other on the clutch, I know he can’t wave back. But I can hear his salute in the exuberant “bwaaAAAAP! blum-blum” of a crisp throttle, gratuitously revved. That sound pleases me, as I know it does him. It’s a ventriloquist conversation in one mechanical voice, and the gist of it is “Yeah!”
I attempted to ignore the fact that motorcycle maintenance may be the most stereotypically manly thing that I can think of, but it inevitably alienated me a bit every time he gratuitously mentioned that he is a manly man:
Having positioned the piston at the start of its intake stroke, you are ready to kick-start the bike. But first check to make sure there are no attractive women present to witness your display, nor any of your rivals, for it is likely to be a drama of strenuous impotence.
I know, male loneliness epidemic and all that, maybe it’s OK for men to have some banter among themselves—certainly, I know, it happens whether or not we write about it. Regardless, his prose is so ridiculous that I can’t help but have the word “performative” enter my mind when I read:
Many people would be reluctant to bestow the term “craftsmanship” on the work of an electrician, and reserve the word for those who make finely wrought objects. This seems a fair reservation, and I see no need to quarrel with it.
“I see no need to quarrel with it”? Why are we talking like the olden days?
Then there’s whatever this is…
I once attended a conference entitled “After the Beautiful.” The premise was a variation on “the death of God,” the supposed disenchantment of the world, and so forth. Speaking up for my own sense of enchantment, I pointed out, from the audience, the existence of beautiful human bodies. Youthful ones, in particular. This must have touched a nerve, as it was greeted with incredulous howls of outrage from some of the more senior harpies.
I was close to giving up on this book early because I was so turned off, but wanted to push through because I have heard so many good things about it. So I told myself that I just had a stick up my ass and should let Crawford enjoy his motorcycles, his sexual banter, and his wannabe-Victorian prose in peace, shut up, and read what he has to say. But this, too, led me to frustration. While I absolutely agree with most of the things he advocates for in the book (empowering employees to exercise thought and judgement in their work, ensuring that work has a directly visible and clearly beneficial objective, etc.), I just didn’t think he made very strong arguments.
Crawford certainly has a unique combination of experience, and I absolutely believe that these jobs had the problems he describes. But when he attempts to use his job third-party abstract-writer for academic papers with a 20-minute-per-paper quota—which sounds absolutely atrocious—as a stand-in for all knowledge work or uses the job he was given as a think tank director as representative of corporate leadership in general (“the tie I wore started to feel like the mark of the slave”), his arguments felt like complaints about his own experiences rather than compelling, well-supported critiques that are applicable to a wide audience.
I also had a hard time understanding what he was actually arguing for. He seems to detest the very idea of large organizations and of work that is abstracted from the physical world. He wipes out jobs that involve any kind of system modeling, for example, as selfish, with this:
Substituting mathematical strings for shoelaces entails a bit of self-absorption, and skepticism, too: the world is interesting and intelligible only insofar as we can reproduce it in ideal form, as a projection from our selves.
But he seems to be ignorant of the fact that the very motorcycles that he loves fixing would not exist without a history of large corporations full of engineers and business people working—with models!—on many small tasks in order to bring a motorcycle to market. If everyone worked on something that they could own end-to-end, as Crawford seems to idealize, complex projects would simply be impossible. Though he claims that this point is not that everyone should work in trades, it’s hard to see what else he thinks people should do when he claims nearly every other profession is fundamentally awful.
I started this book hopeful that it would have some useful insights that would help me think through my own qualms as a worker in corporate America feeling like many of the highest-paying jobs are pointless. But instead I found a guy who loves complaining and loves motorcycles, with no nuanced analysis and certainly no solutions.
I know a lot of people love this book. And I don’t think it was worthless—since reading the book, I have found myself thinking especially about the routinization of everyday jobs that Crawford identifies in the book and mapping many of my daily frustrations onto that trend. Perhaps I’ll reread it in a few years, more mature and in a forgiving mood, and I’ll love it too. But for now, it was not for me.