7
A NEW ARTISANAL COMMUNITY
We can see the future of the artisan. What we don’t see we can build. That’s what we’re going to do now. Detect and devise. Fish out your red pencil and correct me as we go.
When I think of the future of the artisan, I think of the flourishing of communities outside the bigger cities, almost a parallel civilization. By 2030, these are substantial. Some people have come to call them the “Labs.” We don’t know why. But for some reason it sticks. (“Cantons” was in the running for a while. Then it died. “What?” someone asked. “You want us to sound like Switzerland?”)
The starter kit for this parallel world was all the stuff we’ve talked about so far, the sixty years that from the advent of the counterculture to the early twenty-first century. The steady repudiation of the industrial era, the rise of a new approach to craft, farming, food, restaurants, and markets, the advent of new patterns of sociality and community, the emergence of leaders like Alice Waters and Stewart Brand. The industrial economy was scaled down, made more local and, ironically, less and less industrial. A “walk to town” trend was bringing people into closer contact. Cities were being made to feel more like small towns. This parallel world was human scale and handmade. It was a world built by, and for, artisans.
By the start of the twenty-first century, everyone had heard of the artisan. Most people actually knew several by name. And there were lots of fellow travelers, people who were cultivating a beehive, a community garden plot, or a handcraft of their own. A shockingly large number of Americans were prepared to call themselves foodies. Farmer’s markets, health food stores, and craft fairs were now mainstream.
This was not what we could call a triumph. The artisanal option was visible, but well off its full ascendancy. It remained an add-on to American culture, interesting but still marginal. The artisanal movement was caught in what mariners call slack water, the moment between the rising and falling tide when the water just sits.
Then came COVID. By March 2020, American culture was grinding to a standstill. Schools and workplaces emptied out. Millions went home and stayed home. And within days, Americans, the lucky ones, began to stream out of the cities. They moved into small towns and the countryside. They were able to leave thanks to new technologies like Zoom, but the fact that there was someplace they wanted to go, that was all culture. That was the work of the artisans. The artisans had built a community outside the cities. A starter kit. A platform. The beginnings of an ecosystem. And now that there were new people with more money, it could grow.
The newcomers were water in the desert. Artisans had a larger audience. Many restaurants could sense a lifting tide. Farmers were feeling less marginal. Craftspeople had a sudden increase in “coreligionists” fresh from Michaels and Hobby Lobby. This meant new, more practiced patrons. People were feeling a little more flush. Adjustments had to be made, and some artisans simply couldn’t adapt. But for some people, the COVID era was a time to rise out of subsistence into something a little more secure.
Skeptics insisted this was a fleeting prosperity. “Don’t get used to it,” they warned. “People have been fleeing plague cities for centuries. And for centuries they have returned the moment it was safe to do so. COVID plenty was fool’s gold, and artisans who thought otherwise were kidding themselves.”
And sure enough, as vaccines rolled out and herd immunity grew nearer, you could see a return to the cities. Actually, a lot of people went back to the city and partied like it was 1999. People went a little nuts. “See,” said the skeptics, “the COVID bounce is over. The cities are back in business. And you are out of luck.” Things looked grim for the artisans. They had lost their stroke of good fortune.
Not so fast! After people got the Studio 54 moment out of their systems, they began to think again. Maybe they didn’t want to live in the city after all. They looked around them. What they saw was sad, dangerous, chaotic, and struggling. And some of them thought, Hmmm, this isn’t what I remember. And this isn’t what I want. Not for my family. And especially not for my kids. You could almost feel cities seizing up like ancient, exhausted mechanical engines.
There would be no simple restoration of the city after all. The whirlpools of crime and confusion would not let up. The city struggled mightily, but it could not escape its entropy. Life remained tippy and chaotic. Corporations tried calling people back to headquarters and an astonishing number said no. Urban economies faltered, public life shriveled, crime grew, and still more people left. The cities had stalled.
It turned out that the COVID “bounce” was a keeper. The small towns were getting richer. They were actually growing. And as cities pushed people out, the towns were pulling them in. Migrants came from everywhere. As 2020 unfolded, they came in such numbers it wasn’t clear where to put them. The towns were now flying like Jules Verne airships. City dwellers looked up in wonder.
You could see why the towns were doing so well.
The artisan economy was deeply embedded in a social and cultural world. This was a gestural economics. A little jar of jam suddenly turns up on your doorstep. Personal relationships flowed with generosity, as you woke up to discover someone clearing your driveway after a snowstorm. Your clothing was created by a friend. And that was weird. Passing the person in town who made your sweater and seeing them look with interest at the patches you added to the elbows. The café you went to for your morning coffee was also the place your daughter did spoken word on Thursday night. The Little League diamond was where people gathered to greet the sun and start the day.
Commercial transactions were set in a relationship, as if by a jeweler. The hardware store owner was also the volunteer ambulance driver. The librarian was teaching little kids how to read, teenagers how to talk about what they read, and parents how to write that novel they’d been planning for so long. In fact, the entire enterprise of education seemed to blossom. Everyone in town who knew anything was prepared to share it with others.
And everyone seemed to get better at teaching, better at the visualizations and a new TED-scale brevity. People took new pride in how local kids were flourishing intellectually. Inevitably, someone would look around at this community buzzing with knowledge and say, You know, we could actually create a college. (To which someone would reply, “Who says we’re not?”) And now that real colleges were collapsing intellectually and financially, this seemed like an increasingly urgent thing to do.
Business savvy, the toughest part for many artisans, was flowing freely. (So many of the newcomers came to town bearing new capabilities.) In fact, some towns were beginning to act like brilliant business incubators. Venture capital and angel investors started showing up. And someone had to take them aside and say, There’s a very good chance you don’t know how this place works, that business is community and that community is business. But listen, stick around, and maybe you’ll get the hang of things.
For would-be migrants, the overall effect was dazzling. Who wouldn’t want to live in this cauldron of creativity and initiative? More humane, more interesting, and you could make a living.
One of the things that defined these unnaturally alert communities was their loathing for “externalities.” As in, they didn’t want any. Externalities are the things that capitalism produces when it pollutes the air and water. In these newly prosperous towns, externalities were not allowed. And this meant people spent a long time thinking about recycling, sustainability, and producing clean water and air. They got quite good at it. And this added a layer of knowledge to the small-town consciousness.
To help with this effort, people decided to recruit engineers who could create the technologies necessary for carbon offsetting, hyperloops, and biofuel. They learned how to contend with microplastics, nuclear waste, chemical solvents, and other persistent pollutants. These men and women didn’t always look or act like artisans, but they were embraced as essential colleagues. And most of them mastered the artisanal approach in no time.
The Labs were buzzing with so many enterprises, these artisans discovered that one of the things they had to learn to make was consensus. At first everyone just looked at one another, as if to say, How in god’s name are we going to do what so few Americans seem capable of doing? In the end, this turned out to be a skill like any artisanal skill. You got better at it, the more you did it. You built it, you fixed it, eventually you perfected it.
And some people achieved “master craftsperson” status. The best of them were so good, Labs competed to bring them in. The best solution: to rotate these people from Lab to Lab, with issues set aside for their return. This was just one of the ways that the Labs were now serving as a laboratory for the rest of American culture, in this case cultivating a gift for conflict resolution that seemed to escape non-Lab Americans.
People kept asking, “So, are you guys a commune?” And the answer was “partly ‘yes,’ but mostly ‘no.’” There are things we share (dome) and things we don’t (grid). The dome, on the one hand, is the place we give freely. We don’t keep track. We ask people to give for the openhanded pleasure of giving. You gave to the dome for intrinsic reasons, not to get something in return. Grid, on the other hand, that is, consists of everyone’s small patch in the world, where they make their decisions and take responsibility for what happens there. This duality of dome and grid maximizes generosity and minimizes conflict.
So crafted, the Labs didn’t just grow; they evolved. They became more complex. They got better at doing the things they knew they needed, better even at things they never dreamed they could do. Artisans, it turns out, could do many things. They could even build worlds.
The Labs built worlds so well, solving so many problems of contemporary life, that lots of people wanted to live there, and they began to come in droves. Relatively speaking, the Labs were still only 15 percent of the US population. But people kept saying they were “where the energy was.” The Labs were flourishing while the rest of the American experiment felt like it was running out of gas.1
Actually, the rest of the American experiment no longer looked like an experiment at all. Especially the big, ugly, noisy, broken cities. These were haunted by crime and unemployment. They were the captives of vested interests and old orthodoxies that didn’t care they didn’t work. This became a standing joke at meetings in the Labs. If you needed an easy laugh, something to break the tension at a meeting, all you had to do was throw in the name of a big-city mayor. Everyone would laugh out loud and move on. “De Blasio” got the best laughs.
Then an interesting thing happened. The Labs grew out of their physical boundaries. Their generosity began in the near world, family, friends, neighbors. Lab-ness began to travel outwards, to embrace perfect strangers. The Lab’s empathy circle was expanding. The Labs stood ready to help even those who were not really much like Lab dwellers at all.
Some Labs were not defined by space or region at all. You could join some Labs (the “virtual” ones) and continue to live in Florida, Iowa, or Mexico. The Labs started as something geopolitical. Now it was launched as something thoroughly cultural and entirely mobile. It could go anywhere, and it did. This was a helpful corrective for those Labs that tended to act too much like a small town, refusing difference and departure. When the Lab moved into the world and the world poured in, both places were somehow oxygenated.
The Labs were even helping recraft the social architecture.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, many of the traditional differentiators in American society were beginning to look a little outdated. Did a degree from a great university really make a big difference in someone’s life? Not really. Did a high-powered job? Probably not. Did wealth? Did race? Did gender? Perhaps not. Social differences in the twentieth century might as well have been tattoos. Now they felt a little less permanent, more negotiable, and, in many cases, less special.
The Labs helped make it clear how easy it was to live without these differences, the tattooed ones. First, people questioned the differences. Then they ceased to believe in them altogether. Well, of course, there were “Porsche holdouts” from the 1 percent. These were the people who continued to protest their difference, their specialness. But where once they might have been admired, now Lab citizens were more likely to look at one another and murmur, “Who is he trying to convince? Protesting too much, much?”
If there was a hierarchy in the Labs, it favored people who knew how to do things. Honor belonged to the best artisans. But this standing did not accumulate. The fact that you were really good at raising goats, fashioning consensuses, or being an eco-engineer got you some admiration, and nothing more than that. It didn’t mean you had access to more wealth, power, or standing. You were just admired for being good at that one thing. There was a reputation economy, but it did not confer big houses or Porsches on anyone.2
So people with social standing took a hit. The Lab had built a world that did not need or revere them. They got back into their Porsches and roared out of town. Hey, where they were going, McMansions were plentiful and cheap! Nor did the Labs need corporations like General Motors, General Electric, or General Mills. This was not a world of brand messages. It was a world of personal meanings. Certainly, there was still a place for big corporations, but increasingly they serve the American economy in new ways.
Still, there was a problem. Artisans, being all about the tradition and continuities of their craft, are inclined to prefer a world that stays the same. As we have noted, this is a chronic problem and a serious one. The Labs could not afford to lose touch with the furious invention taking place in the world at large.
Something had to be done. The old artisanal dog had to be taught new tricks. So, by general consensus, an allowance was made to include crafts that had been previously discouraged or neglected. One of these was the design of indie sneakers. Sneakers are artisanal in some ways. For the indie producer, shoes are handmade in small batches. The trouble is that almost everything about shoes is an abomination from an environmental point of view, requiring materials and solvents that are terrible for the environment.3
Still, the good thing about sneakers is that they are deeply embedded in the world of street fashion that had effectively taken over the world of conventional fashion. If you could just solve the environmental problem, this was an opportunity. To have someone who could compete in this industry would give the Labs a very useful window on contemporary culture. The Labs reached out to Annie Mohaupt, the brilliant Chicago artisan who makes shoes for the more traditional fashion industry and who just happens to be all about the sustainability issue. Hey, presto. A solution to the problem, plus the presence of someone else who could help keep the Labs more fully “in the mix.”4
Another way to open the world is to embrace the world of small film production. The great thing about this world is how tidal it is. Films are made by communities of people who come to a town, stay for two to four months, and then leave. The Lab gets infusions of capital without the permanent installation of a company that may or may not share Lab values.
I did a little digging and discovered that the Hudson Valley Film Commission has managed to welcome five hundred film productions since 2000. This has brought in $250 million in regional development to Dutchess, Orange, and Ulster counties in New York State.5
This is a princely sum, but it also represents the infusion of creative people who can be relied upon to share some of their sophistication, even if they come and go a bit more than the true locals.
A third possibility is a laboratory that creates synthetic creatures, aka synths. These are creatures that simulate a human being. The first generation are merely CGIs (computer-generated images). But even these are evolving rapidly, and some now serve as fashion models, including creatures like Shudu Gram and Miquela Sousa. The Canadian model Sinead Bovell looks on:
Miquela Sousa is a 19-year-old Brazilian American model, influencer, and now musician, who has amassed a loyal following of more than 2 million people on Instagram. She’s collaborated with Prada and Givenchy, has been featured in a Calvin Klein video with Bella Hadid, and she just released a song with singer-songwriter Teyana Taylor this past spring. Impressive stuff, but there’s one thing that’s keeping real-life me at ease: Miquela… is a computer-generated image (CGI).6
As these creatures evolve, they will be equipped with AI (artificial intelligence) and then released into the world. They will start by living online. We will interact with them in game space and on various forums. We will come away from some conversations wondering, Wow, was that a real person or a synth? But they can also be dropped into the “real world,” thanks to Augmented Reality software. Eventually, they will be equipped with a physical presence. The endgame here is not a facsimile of a human. We are looking for verisimilitude. As Bovell notes, “their creators aren’t just designing them as avatars, but also giving them entire backstories, personalities, and causes to champion.” What an extraordinary craft this would be. Imagine a Lab that creates synths. It would require (and develop) deep cultural knowledge and deep technical knowledge. A good Lab wants both.
We have found a way to make a river run through us. In the case of sneakers, we get to see what is happening at the bleeding edge of fashion innovation. In the case of synths, we can participate in the bleeding edge of digital innovation. In the case of filmmaking, we can watch and listen as people craft content for a still broader audience. All of this is good for us.
One Lab will surely specialize in mapping the future. As the world gets more turbulent, every organization needs navigational advice. In some versions of this profession, there is grand talk of AI, robots, big data, immense databases. That’s not my experience. For many purposes, reading the future will require an artisanal approach, with data being pooled, curated, and analyzed piece by piece and each insight assembled, buffed, and polished by hand. Here, too, we end up with something we can sell to the world that has the added benefit of producing a stream of intelligence we can use for ourselves. Call me if your Lab needs a map.7
Labs will need to find the middle course. Some of our truths are incontrovertible: human scale, handmade, raw, local, historical, and unbranded. We oppose “externalities.” We are careful of the planet. We are committed to sustainability. These are our fundaments.
But some of what and who we are will have to change as the world does. We can’t expect to just slide into the future. We are going to have to build and rebuild ourselves as we go. This should be possible. After all, we are good at crafting things. Why not a world of constant renovation, by ourselves, for ourselves?
But I get it. Asking artisans to build the artisanal world, that’s tough. We already have a job. Hands are full. Minds preoccupied. Asking an artisan to invent the future is like asking an artist to build an art museum in which her work will hang. Committee meetings? Fundraising? Exhibit design? “No. No. No. You don’t get it,” says the artist. “I’m a dream catcher. Things come whistling, murmuring, shimmying into my head, and it’s my job to get them into the world. I can’t be going to committee meetings!”
Too bad. If we want to survive, we will have to learn to change constantly. More important, if we want to make ourselves a real alternative to the mainstream, we will have to change constantly. No, it wouldn’t be easy. But check out our roster. We have an anthropologist prepared to act as an artisan. And artisans prepared to act as anthropologists. What could possibly go wrong?
The future of the artisan could look like this. Thousands of communities of artisans spread across the country. When I see them in my mind’s eye, they look the way towns do when you see them from an airplane at night. A small cluster of orange glowing in a black landscape, suspended there like a galaxy in the heavens.
These tiny communities, with the help of millions of Americans, had managed to take on and defeat the dietary-industrial-cultural system that stood astride the twentieth century organizing identity, aspiration, and standing, telling us what we wanted, who we thought they were, and where we stood in the world.
The artisanal revolution helped demolish conspicuous consumption. It punctured luxury. It has ridiculed the symbol systems signaling distinctions and standing. Yes, of course, we still make distinctions, we still use money and symbols to “front,” as the kids used to say. But this is now a rear-guard action, a kind of theater in which we are all actors, unconvincing and unconvinced, at the end of a very long run. Not much enthusiasm, precious little conviction, mostly Mousetrap exhaustion.8
Taking down the industrial-dietary-cultural complex took sixty years and the efforts of an Alice Waters and Stuart Brand, millions of hippies and foodies, all those farmer’s markets and craft fairs, and people saying no to a vast and reckless diet of sugar, fat, salt, nicotine, and alcohol. We managed to beat back fast food, prepared food, and sometimes even breakfast cereal. It took thousands of crafty people who manage to bring new imagination and creativity to the world of goods.
Was it hard? It was pretty hard. Was it the artisan’s biggest challenge? Not really. That starts now. Taking down the industrial-dietary-cultural complex was the warm-up. But now we must take on a more formidable enemy. Our task in the future is to take on the future.