In his book, The Technological Society (1954), Jacques Ellul presents the difference between the pre- and post-industrial revolution as follows:
The pre-industrial era is the reign of the tool and of craftsmanship. The foremost property of tools is to be generic, versatile, and adaptable. It is up to the craftsman to develop his skills to make the tools follow his intent, so the hand will make up for the limitations of the instrument. This concept is still well known to musicians today: you have to practice, learn, try, fail, retry… there are no shortcuts. Ellul emphasizes the idea of parsimony that comes with tools: resources are limited, so your toolset is pretty much defined by what you can afford, carry, master, and build locally. Trends change slowly and are local, because they use local resources and adapt to local needs, and tools follow the same pattern.
The industrial era is the reign of the machine. It comes from a culture of standardization and massification. The machine is much more productive because it is specialized for one task, but it is useless for everything else and can rarely be adapted to another use. When production needs change, the machine is replaced by another because it is good for nothing. This is not a parsimonious scheme anymore, and it is allowed because resources are much cheaper and mass production allows economies of scale. Then, humans become the servants of the machine, and handcrafts become a luxury.
Productions that use to be made at home or in small shops, in a family context, are moved to big factories, where there is enough room for machines. By the way, that had very concrete effects on how we organize our daily life, including when and how many times we eat 1 , as well as sleeping patterns 2 . So it is not a stretch to say that the industrial revolution also deeply changed the way we think, what we consider normal or evident.
That spoke to me because it’s how I had been developing color-editing tools, intuitively, since I started: trying to build generic tools that relied on the fewest assumptions to stay versatile, while giving fine-grained control over image parameters, and ultimately relying on craftsmen’s abilities rather than on half-broken, unvalidated, auto-magical tools that only work in ideal cases.
Digital photography : automating or enjoying the process ?