#history — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #history, aggregated by home.social.
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Overnight success takes time. Regular viewers may notice our posts area little out of order - you can check all the episodes in the correct order on the website #gaming #History #graemeDavis #gamesWorkshop #whiteDwarf #dungeonsAndDragons #adnd #callOfCthulhu #bushido #imagineMagazine
https://www.tabletopsentinel.com/columns/when-dice-were-made-of-flint/when-dice-were-made-of-flint-10?utm_source=mastodon -
Wall Street showing Trinity Church, New York City (New York City, New York)
From Digital Collections of New York Public Library
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-…#NewYork #NewYorkCity #NYC #NYPL #US #USA #history #image #photo #photos #photography
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Wall Street showing Trinity Church, New York City (New York City, New York)
From Digital Collections of New York Public Library
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-…#NewYork #NewYorkCity #NYC #NYPL #US #USA #history #image #photo #photos #photography
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Wall Street showing Trinity Church, New York City (New York City, New York)
From Digital Collections of New York Public Library
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-…#NewYork #NewYorkCity #NYC #NYPL #US #USA #history #image #photo #photos #photography
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Wall Street showing Trinity Church, New York City (New York City, New York)
From Digital Collections of New York Public Library
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-…#NewYork #NewYorkCity #NYC #NYPL #US #USA #history #image #photo #photos #photography
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Wall Street showing Trinity Church, New York City (New York City, New York)
From Digital Collections of New York Public Library
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-…#NewYork #NewYorkCity #NYC #NYPL #US #USA #history #image #photo #photos #photography
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Some of the party "big-shots" and some of those who had helped them take over were therefore "purged." Many would-be partners in the dictatorship, including some industrialists, wound up in jail, in exile, or dead.
#fascism #uspol #history #propaganda -
I explored historical and archaeological evidence that supports the existence of Jesus as a real person who lived in first-century Judea.
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One thing people quickly learn about me is that my hatred of the Kennedy family is complete and all encompassing. Some people are shocked at the absolute zero respect I had for JFK, RFK, Teddy who are just all the worst things about money in politics and absolute scumbags, each.
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One thing people quickly learn about me is that my hatred of the Kennedy family is complete and all encompassing. Some people are shocked at the absolute zero respect I had for JFK, RFK, Teddy who are just all the worst things about money in politics and absolute scumbags, each.
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schilderij van interieur Andreaskerk door Henk Helmantel:
Gezicht op het koor van de #Andreaskerk #Westeremden met Paasliturgie 2024 - museum Helmantel #geschiedenis #history #toerisme #tourism #travel #fotografie #groningen #kunst #art #kerk #church info & album:
social.vivaldi.net/@fvb/1172809...
Frans van Beers (@fvb@vivaldi.... -
schilderij van interieur Andreaskerk door Henk Helmantel:
Gezicht op het koor van de Andreaskerk in Westeremden met Paasliturgie 2024 242 x 185 cmCollectie Museum Helmantel Henk Helmantel (geboren op 22 februari 1945 in Westeremden) is een vooraanstaand Nederlands kunstschilder. Hij wordt gerekend tot de stroming van de noordelijke realisten en de onafhankelijke realisten.
Woon- en werkplek: Helmantel woont en werkt in de historische weem (pastorie) naast de Andreaskerk in zijn geboortedorp Westeremden. Hij heeft dit pand in de jaren '70 en '80 zelf herbouwd en ingericht als woonhuis en atelier.
Stijl en Thema's: Zijn werk kenmerkt zich door een hoge mate van realisme. Het christendom staat centraal in zowel zijn dagelijks leven als in zijn kunst. Hij schildert vaak stillevens, kerkinterieurs (zoals de Andreaskerk), portretten en landschappen met een tijdloze, bijna klassieke uitstraling.
Bekendheid: Hij is internationaal bekend om zijn technische virtuositeit en de rustige, contemplatieve sfeer in zijn schilderijen.
Bron: Wikipedia - Henk Helmantel, Wikipedia - Weem.
#architecture #geschiedenis #history #toerisme #tourism #travel #fotografie #streetphotography #groningen #NL #kunst #art #acdseephotostudio #kerk #church album:
https://eu.zonerama.com/fransvanbeers/Photo/5142296/668230653 -
Interieur Andreaskerk
In het interieur van de Andreaskerk in Westeremden zijn vooral de fraaie muur- en gewelfschilderingen uit de 13e en 15e eeuw het meest opvallend. Deze middeleeuwse kunstwerken sieren de gewelven en muren en bevatten onder andere afbeeldingen van:
De zondeval
Johannes de Doper
De Heilige Laurentius
De kerk maakt ondanks vele veranderingen nog steeds een middeleeuwse indruk. Het interieur wordt gekenmerkt door het prachtig gemetselde en nog zeer gave Romaanse gewelf. Verder is er een koorhek dat het schip scheidt van het koor.De kerk is sinds 1973 in beheer bij de Stichting Oude Groninger Kerken en is vrij te bezichtigen. De naastgelegen weem (pastorie) is herbouwd door de kunstschilder Henk Helmantel, die ook een bekend schilderij heeft gemaakt van het interieur van de kerk voor de restauratie.
Bronnen: Stichting Oude Groninger Kerken, Wikipedia, Dorpsvereniging Orando Westeremden, Reliwiki.
#architecture #geschiedenis #history #toerisme #tourism #travel #fotografie #groningen #NL #acdseephotostudio #kerk #church #museum #helmantel #westeremden #religie #religion
click4 full screen & album:
https://eu.zonerama.com/fransvanbeers/Photo/5142296/668230346 -
expositieruimte in Museum Helmantel met het schilderij van de Andreaskerk in het midden. #architecture #geschiedenis #history #toerisme #tourism #travel #fotografie #streetphotography #groningen #NL #acdseephotostudio #kerk #church #museum #helmantel #westeremden #heem #kunst #art click4 full screen & album:
https://eu.zonerama.com/fransvanbeers/Photo/5142296/668416232 -
An abandoned Roman Catholic church in northern England. Constructed in the 1960s during a period of transition within the Catholic Church, the design features contemporary architecture and beautiful glasswork.
On the western wall, a dalle de verre features coloured glass set into a concrete frame depicting religious iconography.
The church closed nearly 15 years ago; the failing roof needs costly repairs,
#England #Urbex #AbandonedPlaces #History #Architecture #Glass #Glasswork
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Kreider-Reisner Aircraft Co Airport Hagerstown Maryland Postcard
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#EarlyAviation #Airports #Aviation #Avgeek #Travel #History #Maryland #Hagerstown #Postcards #Ephemera -
When you are afraid of facts... you lie.
"Trump escalates war on federal data"
#Lies #Disinformation #Corruption #Opacity #Truth #Sociology #Medicine #History #Facts #Sequestration #Government #USA #UN #EU #Economics #MAGA #Democrats
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/16/trump-data-census-eeoc-cdc-interference
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#science #history #environment #geology
Fossils of the Diplodocus have been found outside of the U.S for the first time. This suggests that the dinosaur roamed across a land bridge and ended up in Europe. The Jurassic Age dinosaur bones were found in Spain. Although a full skeleton wasn't found, enough bones were found to identify the dinosaur. It is also helping to understand how the world was at this time. https://www.livescience.com/animals/dinosaurs/fossils-of-iconic-long-necked-dinosaur-diplodocus-found-in-europe-for-first-time-and-it-may-have-traveled-there-via-land-bridge -
🏛️ ANCIENT MYSTERY: Tracing the Unknown Origins of the Enigmatic Nomoli Figures
📈 Trending with 100K+ readers! History just got more interesting! 📚
https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/unknown-origins-mysterious-nomoli-figures-002513
#AncientOrigins #History #Archaeology #Artifacts #Archaeological #HumanOrigins #Evolution #Incredible #Fascinating #Civilization -
#archaeology #history
A landslide in Italy has exposed a Picene burial thought to date back to 6th century BCE. The Picenes were related to other pre-Roman Italian groups and imported pottery, bronzes etc from Greece. Further work will be carried out to ascertain whether there are any more burials. https://archaeology.org/news/2026/09/15/landslide-exposes-pre-roman-burial-in-eastern-italy/ -
#archaeology #history
A landslide in Italy has exposed a Picene burial thought to date back to 6th century BCE. The Picenes were related to other pre-Roman Italian groups and imported pottery, bronzes etc from Greece. Further work will be carried out to ascertain whether there are any more burials. https://archaeology.org/news/2026/09/15/landslide-exposes-pre-roman-burial-in-eastern-italy/ -
https://www.evshift.com/527194/the-new-electric-id-3-gti-the-most-powerful-production-model-in-five-decades-of-gti-history/ The new electric ID.3 GTI. The most powerful production model in five decades of GTI history. #Decades #ELECTRIC #ElectricCars #ElectricVehicles #EV #GTI #history #ID3 #Model #powerful #Production #volkswagen #VolkswagenUK
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🐿️ ICYMI: In the #Yukon #permafrost, researchers found 700,000-year-old fossilized #dung from an #extinct ground #squirrel species.
These preserved #burrows contained ancient plant material, #bones, and the oldest #woollymammoth #DNA identified in #NorthAmerica, tracking how #prehistoric #ecosystems shifted over time.
👉 Learn more: https://seethis.tv/post/ancient-ground-squirrel-poop-becomes-a-treasure-trove-for-paleontologists
#animals #archaeology #biology #canada #climate #climatechange #data #discovery #evolution #fossils #genetics #history #paleontology #plants #poop #research #science #technology #tech #mammoth #tksst #video
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Movies of the day (4/8)
🎬 The Woman King(2022)
🎬 Pride & Prejudice(2005)
🎬 Pearl(2022)
🎬 Easy A(2010)
© TMDB
#TheWomanKing #PridePrejudice #Pearl #EasyA #Action #Comedy #Drama #History #Horror #Romance #Movie #MovieOfTheDay #OnThisDay #TMDB -
100 years ago today: #onThisDay #history #newYorkTimes
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Can an ancient virus be brought back to life? What 500‑year‑old smallpox DNA reveals
#Health #Smallpox #AncientDNA #Science #History #Virology #Chile #IndigenousHistory #PublicHealth #Archaeology #Evolution #Viruses #Mummies #Americas #Pathogens #The14Media
https://the-14.com/can-an-ancient-virus-be-brought-back-to-life-what-500-year-old-smallpox-dna-reveals/ -
The Rocky Interactive Horror Show Game, released in 1999
Released for: PC (Microsoft Windows)
Point-and-click; Puzzle; Adventure
Fantasy, Science fiction, Horror
aliens, adult, multiple protagonists, based on - movie, musical, based on - book, sexual content, countdown timer, sex change, lgbtq+From the Internet Games Database
https://www.igdb.com/games/the-rocky-interactive-h…#games #adventures #pointnclick #adventuregames #old #history #retrocomputing #retrogaming #retro #image #screenshots #1990s #90s #aliens #adult #multipleprotagonists #basedonmovie #musical #basedonbook #sexualcontent #countdowntimer #sexchange #lgbtqplus #win #fantasy #sciencefiction #horror
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#OTD (Sep 16)
Events in U.S. organized crime #history.#NiagaraFallsNY #Brooklyn #FortLauderdale #ChesterWV #NewYork #Mafia #MafiaHistory #Histodons @mafiahistory
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💫 AMAZING REVELATION: Were the Merovingians Descended from a Monster? Meet the Quinotaur
📈 Trending with 100K+ readers! Prepare to be amazed! 🎊
https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/merovingians-descended-quinotaur-007465
#AncientOrigins #History #Archaeology #Legends #Mythology #HumanOrigins #Evolution #Civilization #MustRead #Incredible -
The realm of Korinthia spans from rugged mountains hosting mysterious temples honoring little-known gods, to sunny islands in a wine-dark sea. Learn to connect your words in their tongue and make your journeys easier. #travel #history https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/greece/greek/conjunctions.html?s=mc
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Kosovo ex-president Thaci faces a war crimes verdict in The Hague.
A tribunal will rule if Hashim Thaci, a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), committed war crimes during the war of independence with Serbia.
#HashimThaci #WarCrimes #Kosovo #Serbia #Balkans #KLA #History
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Jaws: The Revenge
Release date: 1987-07-17
After another deadly shark attack, Ellen Brody decides she has had enough of New England's Amity Island and moves to the Caribbean to join her son, Michael, and his family. But a great white shark has followed her there, hungry for more lives.https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/580
#film #films #movie #movies #poster #posters #history #design #typography #horror #horrormovies
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Brian Drake, a farmer who is moving from the Pine Camp expansion area from a 130 acre farm. Near Leraysville, New York. (New York City, New York)
From Digital Collections of New York Public Library
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/35d4af20-…#NewYork #NewYorkCity #NYC #NYPL #US #USA #history #image #photo #photos #photography
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Computer Game Nostalgia, cover design for an imaginary book about childhood game nostalgia.
Maybe I'll write the book someday. 🙂
My one-man company name was Seven's Heaven at the time I made this (late-2000s).
#mario #nintendo #PixelArt #GameDev #gaming #games #game #gamer #RetroGaming #RetroComputing #RetroGames #VintageComputing #retro #history #NES #DigitalArt #CharacterDesign #design #artwork #art #artist #arte #arts #GraphicDesign #MastoArt #FediArt #CreativeToots #ArtistsOnMastodon
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Today is Mexican Independence Day!
#MexicanIndependenceDay commemorates the beginning of Mexico’s struggle for independence from Spanish rule. In the early hours of September 16, 1810, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla issued the call associated with the Grito de Dolores, helping launch the independence movement.
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Mist Twst Cranberry
Flavor: Cranberry
Color: Red
Years available: 2016 - 2018
Mist Twst Cranberry was a Cranberry flavored variant of Mist Twist.https://the-soda.fandom.com/wiki/Mist_Twst_Cranber…
#drinks #drink #soda #flavor #color #discontinued #history #softdrink #softdrinks #retro #nostalgia
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⭐ MUST READ: Helicopter Hieroglyphs? Debunking the "Mystery" of the Abydos Carvings
📈 Trending with 100K+ readers! What do you think? 🤔
https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-writings/abydos-carvings-0080
#AncientOrigins #History #Archaeology #Artifacts #Archaeological #Mystery #Unexplained #HumanOrigins #Evolution #Educational -
“And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good”*…
Keyana Sapp maintains The Brand Ledger…
Tracking the brands that got worse on purpose — and the ones that didn’t.
The Brand Ledger tracks 397 brands, from the tools in your garage to the pans in your kitchen. Who owns them, what they used to be, whether they’re still worth buying. Updated as things change…
On his blog, Worse on Purpose, he considers what quality is and how it is degraded. He begins with the story of his (now 15-year-old) Gibson Les Paul Studio guitar (a la the one pictured above), an exemplar, for Sapp, of “quality”…
… Everyone owns something like this: the old pair of boots, the battered wrenches, grandma’s cast iron pan, the 400,000 mile truck that will not die, etc…
Objects that wear in instead of wearing out. The ones whose quality you can feel the moment you pick them up.
Now try to explain what it is you feel.
Some quality lives in the guitar, the boots and the pan. You are able to detect it intuitively within seconds. But try to put to words precisely what it is you detect and you’ll discover a dilemma.
Your first instinct is to point at the materials. It’s mahogany. It has real humbuckers, a set neck, the best nitro lacquer. But that answer collapses the moment you notice the description fits every guitar on that wall. Two instruments leave the same factory in the same month, matching spec for spec down the line, and one sings while the other sounds weak. Every guitarist knows this, which is why nobody buys the model, they buy the individual guitar, only after noodling on it for a while. The spec sheet names everything the guitar is made of, and whatever quality is, it is not on the list of materials.
Fall back on “I just like it” and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn’t just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.
That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.
Every investigation I’ve published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can’t check from the aisle.
That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen…
… In the late 1950s, a rhetoric instructor at Montana State College named Robert Pirsig noticed that his contract required him to teach “quality”. He asked around the faculty at the university and discovered that nobody could tell him what the word meant.
Teachers had been passing and failing students on the basis of quality for centuries without a definition. The problem ate at him for fifteen years, ultimately driving him to insanity. Pirsig’s best thinking on the nature of quality was eventually set down in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It stands alone as the most formative book I have ever read.
To illustrate the problem, Pirsig relays an experiment he ran with his students. He read four student papers aloud and had everyone rank them by quality on slips of paper. He ranked them himself, collected the slips, tallied the results on the blackboard, and set his own ranking next to the class average. His ranking and the students’ matched almost every time, across classes and semesters. A room full of undergraduates who could not define quality independently agreed on where it lived and where it didn’t.
So Pirsig landed on this problem statement:
“Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.”
Then he added the sentence that should be nailed above the door of every product team in America.
“Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.”
When colleagues demanded proof that an undefinable thing existed at all, he offered this subtraction:
Pull quality out of the world and street noise ranks with symphonies, slop ranks with dinner, and no made thing is worth choosing over any other. A world without quality would still function. You just wouldn’t want to live in it.
Similar threads have appeared across disciplines.
The architect Christopher Alexander encountered the same problem from a different angle. A career spent asking why some buildings feel alive and others feel dead ended in the same non-definition, a quality that in his words “is objective and precise, but cannot be named.”
What Alexander did about it is the useful part. If the thing itself could not be written down, the places where it reliably appears could be, so he and his collaborators catalogued 253 of them, pulled from centuries of buildings people love, and handed architects and builders a working method for producing quality in buildings and towns.
That is what every craft tradition is: a transmission system for the unnameable, carried in people rather than paper. It is why apprenticeship survives every technology invented to replace it: the judgment that produces quality transfers only by demonstration and correction, through thousands of supervised repetitions across years, from a person who has it to a person who does not yet.
That fact cuts both ways. The judgment that can only be carried in people is also the one thing no spreadsheet can measure.
Whatever resists definition resists measurement. Whatever resists measurement vanishes from the dashboard. And in a company run from dashboards, what vanishes from the dashboard vanishes altogether.
That blindness is not an accident of modern business. It was designed, it has an inventor, and the tragedy is that it was invented to do the opposite job. During World War II, a General Electric engineer named Lawrence Miles was tasked with scaling turbo-supercharger production for B-24 bombers from 50 a week to 1,000 while steel, copper and nickel were rationed to hell. He hunted substitute materials, and noticed the surprising fact that substitutes often made the part cheaper and better at the same time. In 1947 he formalized the method and called it value analysis. Identify the function a part serves, then find the best possible way to serve that function. Function first, cost second. Through this process, Miles built a machine for producing quality cheaper.
The method worked so well it quickly became universal. The Navy adopted it in the 1950s and renamed it value engineering. The Pentagon eventually wrote it into federal procurement rules. Miles’s 1961 handbook was translated into a dozen languages, and within a generation nearly every large manufacturer ran a version of the program. Continuous, itemized, never-ending review of everything a product is made of, scored in dollars saved. That framework is now as ordinary as accounting.
Unfortunately, his descendants now run the machine backward. The modern cost-down program starts from the spec sheet and asks what can be removed without a statistically significant change in buyer perception this quarter. The thinner steel passes the test. The glued joint passes. The plastic gear where the brass one was, the foam that loses a third of its resilience in two years etc…
Each change is approved in isolation, and each is too small for any buyer to notice on its own. That is the trick. No test compares the product to what it was ten years ago. Each product version is measured against last quarter’s, comes back as “no detectable difference,” and ships. So the degradation compounds beneath the threshold of every individual measurement, invisible at each step and enormous in total.
It is by this mechanism that quality, the unmeasurable property, erodes as a company places a greater insistence on measurement.
When we ask what quality actually is, only two answers exist. Either quality is objective, meaning a physical property located in the object itself. Or quality is subjective, meaning an opinion located in the person judging.
Take the first answer seriously. If quality is a physical property of the object, then instruments should detect it. We can measure a guitar’s weight, its neck relief, its fret height, its finish thickness down to the micron. No instrument has ever measured whether it is good. If quality sat inside the object the way mass sits inside the object, quality control would be a solved engineering problem and a factory could certify goodness the same way it certifies tolerances.
Now take the second answer seriously. If quality is only an opinion, then a quality judgment reports a fact about the judge and no fact about the object. Two things follow. First, quality judgments should distribute evenly, because nothing in the object itself would constrain them. Second, no quality judgment could ever be right or wrong, because there would be nothing objective in the world for it to be right about.
Ultimately, both answers fail.
Pirsig’s blackboard example demonstrates the failure of the first: his classes converged on the same rankings, semester after semester, with no criteria handed to them. They agreed independently on some notion of quality, recognized it, but could not explain it.
The second fails on an experience everyone reading this has had: being wrong about quality. Nobody has ever been wrong about liking vanilla, because a preference claims nothing factual about the world. A quality judgment claims plenty. When I decided that Les Paul was good, I was predicting that the neck would stay straight, the frets would survive the abuse, and the guitar would still be worth reaching for in fifteen years. Every one of those predictions could have failed, and with other guitars, for other players, they have. Boots that looked right have come apart in one winter, and every buyer of a bad pair has said the sentence that pure subjectivism cannot explain: “I was wrong about those boots.”
So if quality is not an objective property, since no instruments can detect it, and it is not just a subjective opinion because we are able to make predictions about the quality of an object that are verified in time, then what is it?
Pirsig’s answer was that the question itself smuggles in the false assumption that quality must be located in one place or the other. He argued instead that quality is a feature of the relationship between the person and the object. Quality occurs when a person and a thing meet in use: the weight settling onto the shoulder, the wrench loaded to its limit and holding. Before they meet there is only a guitar and a player. Quality exists in the connection.
Apply this idea in the realm of consumer products, and the slow decline of quality starts making sense.
Every measurement a company takes lands on one side of the objective/subjective divide or the other. Spec sheets, tolerances, and materials testing measure the object alone. Surveys, star ratings, and focus groups measure opinions alone. And they sample the opinion at the wrong moment. A star rating gets filed in the first week of ownership, while the surface still shines, and the failures arrive in year three, when almost nobody returns to amend it.
Nothing measures the relationship, because the relationship only exists in use, in the hand, on the road and across years. So when quality drains out of a product, it drains from the one place no instrument points at. Both sets of numbers can hold perfectly steady while the thing between them disappears. That is how a product gets worse without a single metric moving. That is also how the people doing it stay convinced that nothing was lost.
What produced quality in the first place was care. Pirsig again: “Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares.”
A good object is a fossil record of care. Thousands of small selections made by people who could tell the good facts from the bad ones and picked the good, even when not doing so was cheaper or easier. The extra ounce of brass, the second coat of lacquer and the tolerance held a hair tighter than the drawing demanded. Every one of those selections survives for exactly one reason, which is that somebody with power over the object gave a shit.
That is why extraction works the way it does. When outside capital buys a great brand, nobody issues a decree that the product shall now be garbage. Instead, the people who previously made those thousands of selections either get laid off, retired out, or reorged into irrelevance, and the decisions migrate to a floor in an office building where nobody has ever actually used the product. Care cannot be exercised at that distance. Quality follows care out of the building, and the whole thing happens without any individual ever choosing badness directly. Absence does the job on its own…
…
… There are two ways to make money on quality. You can make a thing so good that people pay for it, keep it, and hand your name to their kids. That is the Miles road: quality found cheaper, profit as the receipt for care. Or you can buy the name after the caring is done, spend down four generations of accumulated trust, and be gone before anyone’s memory catches up…
Eminently worth reading in full. An ode to Pirsig: “On Quality,” from @worseonpurpose.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* Plato’s Phaedrus (which means, as Sapp observes, that the question of quality is at least twenty-four centuries old)
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As we interrogate enshittification, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that Buick Motor Company head William Crapo Durant incorporated General Motors in New Jersey…
Durant, a high-school dropout, had made his fortune building horse-drawn carriages, and in fact he hated cars–he thought they were noisy, smelly, and dangerous. Nevertheless, the giant company he built would dominate the American auto industry for decades.
In the first years of the 20th century, however, that industry was a mess. There were about 45 different car companies in the United States, most of which sold only a handful of cars each year (and many of which had an unpleasant tendency to take customers’ down payments and then go out of business before delivering a completed automobile). Industrialist Benjamin Briscoe called this way of doing business “manufacturing gambling,” and he proposed a better idea. To build consumer confidence and drive the weakest car companies out of business, he wanted to consolidate the largest and most reliable manufacturers (Ford, REO, his own Maxwell-Briscoe, and Durant’s Buick) into one big company. This idea appealed to Durant (though not to Henry Ford or REO’s Ransom E. Olds), who had made his millions in the carriage business just that way: Instead of selling one kind of vehicle to one kind of customer, Durant’s company had sold carriages and carts of all kinds, from the utilitarian to the luxurious.
But Briscoe wanted to merge all the companies completely into one, while Durant wanted to build a holding company that would leave its individual parts more or less alone. (“Durant is for states’ rights,” Briscoe said. “I am for a union.”) Durant got his way, and the new GM was the opposite of Ford: Instead of just making one car, like the Model T, it produced a wide variety of cars for a wide variety of buyers. In its first two years, GM cobbled together 30 companies, including 11 automakers like Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Oakland (which later became Pontiac), some supplier firms, and even an electric company.
Buying all these companies was too expensive for the fledgling GM, and in 1911 the corporation’s board forced the spendthrift Durant to quit. He started a new car company with the Chevrolet brothers and was able to buy enough GM stock to regain control of the corporation in 1916, but his profligate ways got the better of him and he was forced out again in 1920. During the Depression, Durant went bankrupt, and he spent his last years managing a bowling alley in Flint.
– source
In the early 1900s public outcry over weak government regulation of gasoline-powered horseless carriages was significant. Durant clocked this public anger, and rather than relying on government regulations to improve their safety, he saw it as an opportunity to create a company which could improve the quality and safety of this new class of transportation. Fast forward just over a century and General Motors seems to have fallen prey to the extractive impulse that Sapp describes: the company and its cars are beset by myriad quality issues.
#autoIndustry #automobiles #business #ChristopherAlexander #culture #enshittification #extraction #GeneralMotors #GM #history #LawrenceMiles #philosophy #products #quality #RobertPirsig #value #valueAnalysis #valueEngineering #WilliamCrapoDurant -
“And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good”*…
Keyana Sapp maintains The Brand Ledger…
Tracking the brands that got worse on purpose — and the ones that didn’t.
The Brand Ledger tracks 397 brands, from the tools in your garage to the pans in your kitchen. Who owns them, what they used to be, whether they’re still worth buying. Updated as things change…
On his blog, Worse on Purpose, he considers what quality is and how it is degraded. He begins with the story of his (now 15-year-old) Gibson Les Paul Studio guitar (a la the one pictured above), an exemplar, for Sapp, of “quality”…
… Everyone owns something like this: the old pair of boots, the battered wrenches, grandma’s cast iron pan, the 400,000 mile truck that will not die, etc…
Objects that wear in instead of wearing out. The ones whose quality you can feel the moment you pick them up.
Now try to explain what it is you feel.
Some quality lives in the guitar, the boots and the pan. You are able to detect it intuitively within seconds. But try to put to words precisely what it is you detect and you’ll discover a dilemma.
Your first instinct is to point at the materials. It’s mahogany. It has real humbuckers, a set neck, the best nitro lacquer. But that answer collapses the moment you notice the description fits every guitar on that wall. Two instruments leave the same factory in the same month, matching spec for spec down the line, and one sings while the other sounds weak. Every guitarist knows this, which is why nobody buys the model, they buy the individual guitar, only after noodling on it for a while. The spec sheet names everything the guitar is made of, and whatever quality is, it is not on the list of materials.
Fall back on “I just like it” and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn’t just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.
That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.
Every investigation I’ve published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can’t check from the aisle.
That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen…
… In the late 1950s, a rhetoric instructor at Montana State College named Robert Pirsig noticed that his contract required him to teach “quality”. He asked around the faculty at the university and discovered that nobody could tell him what the word meant.
Teachers had been passing and failing students on the basis of quality for centuries without a definition. The problem ate at him for fifteen years, ultimately driving him to insanity. Pirsig’s best thinking on the nature of quality was eventually set down in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It stands alone as the most formative book I have ever read.
To illustrate the problem, Pirsig relays an experiment he ran with his students. He read four student papers aloud and had everyone rank them by quality on slips of paper. He ranked them himself, collected the slips, tallied the results on the blackboard, and set his own ranking next to the class average. His ranking and the students’ matched almost every time, across classes and semesters. A room full of undergraduates who could not define quality independently agreed on where it lived and where it didn’t.
So Pirsig landed on this problem statement:
“Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.”
Then he added the sentence that should be nailed above the door of every product team in America.
“Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.”
When colleagues demanded proof that an undefinable thing existed at all, he offered this subtraction:
Pull quality out of the world and street noise ranks with symphonies, slop ranks with dinner, and no made thing is worth choosing over any other. A world without quality would still function. You just wouldn’t want to live in it.
Similar threads have appeared across disciplines.
The architect Christopher Alexander encountered the same problem from a different angle. A career spent asking why some buildings feel alive and others feel dead ended in the same non-definition, a quality that in his words “is objective and precise, but cannot be named.”
What Alexander did about it is the useful part. If the thing itself could not be written down, the places where it reliably appears could be, so he and his collaborators catalogued 253 of them, pulled from centuries of buildings people love, and handed architects and builders a working method for producing quality in buildings and towns.
That is what every craft tradition is: a transmission system for the unnameable, carried in people rather than paper. It is why apprenticeship survives every technology invented to replace it: the judgment that produces quality transfers only by demonstration and correction, through thousands of supervised repetitions across years, from a person who has it to a person who does not yet.
That fact cuts both ways. The judgment that can only be carried in people is also the one thing no spreadsheet can measure.
Whatever resists definition resists measurement. Whatever resists measurement vanishes from the dashboard. And in a company run from dashboards, what vanishes from the dashboard vanishes altogether.
That blindness is not an accident of modern business. It was designed, it has an inventor, and the tragedy is that it was invented to do the opposite job. During World War II, a General Electric engineer named Lawrence Miles was tasked with scaling turbo-supercharger production for B-24 bombers from 50 a week to 1,000 while steel, copper and nickel were rationed to hell. He hunted substitute materials, and noticed the surprising fact that substitutes often made the part cheaper and better at the same time. In 1947 he formalized the method and called it value analysis. Identify the function a part serves, then find the best possible way to serve that function. Function first, cost second. Through this process, Miles built a machine for producing quality cheaper.
The method worked so well it quickly became universal. The Navy adopted it in the 1950s and renamed it value engineering. The Pentagon eventually wrote it into federal procurement rules. Miles’s 1961 handbook was translated into a dozen languages, and within a generation nearly every large manufacturer ran a version of the program. Continuous, itemized, never-ending review of everything a product is made of, scored in dollars saved. That framework is now as ordinary as accounting.
Unfortunately, his descendants now run the machine backward. The modern cost-down program starts from the spec sheet and asks what can be removed without a statistically significant change in buyer perception this quarter. The thinner steel passes the test. The glued joint passes. The plastic gear where the brass one was, the foam that loses a third of its resilience in two years etc…
Each change is approved in isolation, and each is too small for any buyer to notice on its own. That is the trick. No test compares the product to what it was ten years ago. Each product version is measured against last quarter’s, comes back as “no detectable difference,” and ships. So the degradation compounds beneath the threshold of every individual measurement, invisible at each step and enormous in total.
It is by this mechanism that quality, the unmeasurable property, erodes as a company places a greater insistence on measurement.
When we ask what quality actually is, only two answers exist. Either quality is objective, meaning a physical property located in the object itself. Or quality is subjective, meaning an opinion located in the person judging.
Take the first answer seriously. If quality is a physical property of the object, then instruments should detect it. We can measure a guitar’s weight, its neck relief, its fret height, its finish thickness down to the micron. No instrument has ever measured whether it is good. If quality sat inside the object the way mass sits inside the object, quality control would be a solved engineering problem and a factory could certify goodness the same way it certifies tolerances.
Now take the second answer seriously. If quality is only an opinion, then a quality judgment reports a fact about the judge and no fact about the object. Two things follow. First, quality judgments should distribute evenly, because nothing in the object itself would constrain them. Second, no quality judgment could ever be right or wrong, because there would be nothing objective in the world for it to be right about.
Ultimately, both answers fail.
Pirsig’s blackboard example demonstrates the failure of the first: his classes converged on the same rankings, semester after semester, with no criteria handed to them. They agreed independently on some notion of quality, recognized it, but could not explain it.
The second fails on an experience everyone reading this has had: being wrong about quality. Nobody has ever been wrong about liking vanilla, because a preference claims nothing factual about the world. A quality judgment claims plenty. When I decided that Les Paul was good, I was predicting that the neck would stay straight, the frets would survive the abuse, and the guitar would still be worth reaching for in fifteen years. Every one of those predictions could have failed, and with other guitars, for other players, they have. Boots that looked right have come apart in one winter, and every buyer of a bad pair has said the sentence that pure subjectivism cannot explain: “I was wrong about those boots.”
So if quality is not an objective property, since no instruments can detect it, and it is not just a subjective opinion because we are able to make predictions about the quality of an object that are verified in time, then what is it?
Pirsig’s answer was that the question itself smuggles in the false assumption that quality must be located in one place or the other. He argued instead that quality is a feature of the relationship between the person and the object. Quality occurs when a person and a thing meet in use: the weight settling onto the shoulder, the wrench loaded to its limit and holding. Before they meet there is only a guitar and a player. Quality exists in the connection.
Apply this idea in the realm of consumer products, and the slow decline of quality starts making sense.
Every measurement a company takes lands on one side of the objective/subjective divide or the other. Spec sheets, tolerances, and materials testing measure the object alone. Surveys, star ratings, and focus groups measure opinions alone. And they sample the opinion at the wrong moment. A star rating gets filed in the first week of ownership, while the surface still shines, and the failures arrive in year three, when almost nobody returns to amend it.
Nothing measures the relationship, because the relationship only exists in use, in the hand, on the road and across years. So when quality drains out of a product, it drains from the one place no instrument points at. Both sets of numbers can hold perfectly steady while the thing between them disappears. That is how a product gets worse without a single metric moving. That is also how the people doing it stay convinced that nothing was lost.
What produced quality in the first place was care. Pirsig again: “Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares.”
A good object is a fossil record of care. Thousands of small selections made by people who could tell the good facts from the bad ones and picked the good, even when not doing so was cheaper or easier. The extra ounce of brass, the second coat of lacquer and the tolerance held a hair tighter than the drawing demanded. Every one of those selections survives for exactly one reason, which is that somebody with power over the object gave a shit.
That is why extraction works the way it does. When outside capital buys a great brand, nobody issues a decree that the product shall now be garbage. Instead, the people who previously made those thousands of selections either get laid off, retired out, or reorged into irrelevance, and the decisions migrate to a floor in an office building where nobody has ever actually used the product. Care cannot be exercised at that distance. Quality follows care out of the building, and the whole thing happens without any individual ever choosing badness directly. Absence does the job on its own…
…
… There are two ways to make money on quality. You can make a thing so good that people pay for it, keep it, and hand your name to their kids. That is the Miles road: quality found cheaper, profit as the receipt for care. Or you can buy the name after the caring is done, spend down four generations of accumulated trust, and be gone before anyone’s memory catches up…
Eminently worth reading in full. An ode to Pirsig: “On Quality,” from @worseonpurpose.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* Plato’s Phaedrus (which means, as Sapp observes, that the question of quality is at least twenty-four centuries old)
###
As we interrogate enshittification, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that Buick Motor Company head William Crapo Durant incorporated General Motors in New Jersey…
Durant, a high-school dropout, had made his fortune building horse-drawn carriages, and in fact he hated cars–he thought they were noisy, smelly, and dangerous. Nevertheless, the giant company he built would dominate the American auto industry for decades.
In the first years of the 20th century, however, that industry was a mess. There were about 45 different car companies in the United States, most of which sold only a handful of cars each year (and many of which had an unpleasant tendency to take customers’ down payments and then go out of business before delivering a completed automobile). Industrialist Benjamin Briscoe called this way of doing business “manufacturing gambling,” and he proposed a better idea. To build consumer confidence and drive the weakest car companies out of business, he wanted to consolidate the largest and most reliable manufacturers (Ford, REO, his own Maxwell-Briscoe, and Durant’s Buick) into one big company. This idea appealed to Durant (though not to Henry Ford or REO’s Ransom E. Olds), who had made his millions in the carriage business just that way: Instead of selling one kind of vehicle to one kind of customer, Durant’s company had sold carriages and carts of all kinds, from the utilitarian to the luxurious.
But Briscoe wanted to merge all the companies completely into one, while Durant wanted to build a holding company that would leave its individual parts more or less alone. (“Durant is for states’ rights,” Briscoe said. “I am for a union.”) Durant got his way, and the new GM was the opposite of Ford: Instead of just making one car, like the Model T, it produced a wide variety of cars for a wide variety of buyers. In its first two years, GM cobbled together 30 companies, including 11 automakers like Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Oakland (which later became Pontiac), some supplier firms, and even an electric company.
Buying all these companies was too expensive for the fledgling GM, and in 1911 the corporation’s board forced the spendthrift Durant to quit. He started a new car company with the Chevrolet brothers and was able to buy enough GM stock to regain control of the corporation in 1916, but his profligate ways got the better of him and he was forced out again in 1920. During the Depression, Durant went bankrupt, and he spent his last years managing a bowling alley in Flint.
– source
In the early 1900s public outcry over weak government regulation of gasoline-powered horseless carriages was significant. Durant clocked this public anger, and rather than relying on government regulations to improve their safety, he saw it as an opportunity to create a company which could improve the quality and safety of this new class of transportation. Fast forward just over a century and General Motors seems to have fallen prey to the extractive impulse that Sapp describes: the company and its cars are beset by myriad quality issues.
#autoIndustry #automobiles #business #ChristopherAlexander #culture #enshittification #extraction #GeneralMotors #GM #history #LawrenceMiles #philosophy #products #quality #RobertPirsig #value #valueAnalysis #valueEngineering #WilliamCrapoDurant -
“And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good”*…
Keyana Sapp maintains The Brand Ledger…
Tracking the brands that got worse on purpose — and the ones that didn’t.
The Brand Ledger tracks 397 brands, from the tools in your garage to the pans in your kitchen. Who owns them, what they used to be, whether they’re still worth buying. Updated as things change…
On his blog, Worse on Purpose, he considers what quality is and how it is degraded. He begins with the story of his (now 15-year-old) Gibson Les Paul Studio guitar (a la the one pictured above), an exemplar, for Sapp, of “quality”…
… Everyone owns something like this: the old pair of boots, the battered wrenches, grandma’s cast iron pan, the 400,000 mile truck that will not die, etc…
Objects that wear in instead of wearing out. The ones whose quality you can feel the moment you pick them up.
Now try to explain what it is you feel.
Some quality lives in the guitar, the boots and the pan. You are able to detect it intuitively within seconds. But try to put to words precisely what it is you detect and you’ll discover a dilemma.
Your first instinct is to point at the materials. It’s mahogany. It has real humbuckers, a set neck, the best nitro lacquer. But that answer collapses the moment you notice the description fits every guitar on that wall. Two instruments leave the same factory in the same month, matching spec for spec down the line, and one sings while the other sounds weak. Every guitarist knows this, which is why nobody buys the model, they buy the individual guitar, only after noodling on it for a while. The spec sheet names everything the guitar is made of, and whatever quality is, it is not on the list of materials.
Fall back on “I just like it” and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn’t just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.
That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.
Every investigation I’ve published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can’t check from the aisle.
That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen…
… In the late 1950s, a rhetoric instructor at Montana State College named Robert Pirsig noticed that his contract required him to teach “quality”. He asked around the faculty at the university and discovered that nobody could tell him what the word meant.
Teachers had been passing and failing students on the basis of quality for centuries without a definition. The problem ate at him for fifteen years, ultimately driving him to insanity. Pirsig’s best thinking on the nature of quality was eventually set down in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It stands alone as the most formative book I have ever read.
To illustrate the problem, Pirsig relays an experiment he ran with his students. He read four student papers aloud and had everyone rank them by quality on slips of paper. He ranked them himself, collected the slips, tallied the results on the blackboard, and set his own ranking next to the class average. His ranking and the students’ matched almost every time, across classes and semesters. A room full of undergraduates who could not define quality independently agreed on where it lived and where it didn’t.
So Pirsig landed on this problem statement:
“Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.”
Then he added the sentence that should be nailed above the door of every product team in America.
“Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.”
When colleagues demanded proof that an undefinable thing existed at all, he offered this subtraction:
Pull quality out of the world and street noise ranks with symphonies, slop ranks with dinner, and no made thing is worth choosing over any other. A world without quality would still function. You just wouldn’t want to live in it.
Similar threads have appeared across disciplines.
The architect Christopher Alexander encountered the same problem from a different angle. A career spent asking why some buildings feel alive and others feel dead ended in the same non-definition, a quality that in his words “is objective and precise, but cannot be named.”
What Alexander did about it is the useful part. If the thing itself could not be written down, the places where it reliably appears could be, so he and his collaborators catalogued 253 of them, pulled from centuries of buildings people love, and handed architects and builders a working method for producing quality in buildings and towns.
That is what every craft tradition is: a transmission system for the unnameable, carried in people rather than paper. It is why apprenticeship survives every technology invented to replace it: the judgment that produces quality transfers only by demonstration and correction, through thousands of supervised repetitions across years, from a person who has it to a person who does not yet.
That fact cuts both ways. The judgment that can only be carried in people is also the one thing no spreadsheet can measure.
Whatever resists definition resists measurement. Whatever resists measurement vanishes from the dashboard. And in a company run from dashboards, what vanishes from the dashboard vanishes altogether.
That blindness is not an accident of modern business. It was designed, it has an inventor, and the tragedy is that it was invented to do the opposite job. During World War II, a General Electric engineer named Lawrence Miles was tasked with scaling turbo-supercharger production for B-24 bombers from 50 a week to 1,000 while steel, copper and nickel were rationed to hell. He hunted substitute materials, and noticed the surprising fact that substitutes often made the part cheaper and better at the same time. In 1947 he formalized the method and called it value analysis. Identify the function a part serves, then find the best possible way to serve that function. Function first, cost second. Through this process, Miles built a machine for producing quality cheaper.
The method worked so well it quickly became universal. The Navy adopted it in the 1950s and renamed it value engineering. The Pentagon eventually wrote it into federal procurement rules. Miles’s 1961 handbook was translated into a dozen languages, and within a generation nearly every large manufacturer ran a version of the program. Continuous, itemized, never-ending review of everything a product is made of, scored in dollars saved. That framework is now as ordinary as accounting.
Unfortunately, his descendants now run the machine backward. The modern cost-down program starts from the spec sheet and asks what can be removed without a statistically significant change in buyer perception this quarter. The thinner steel passes the test. The glued joint passes. The plastic gear where the brass one was, the foam that loses a third of its resilience in two years etc…
Each change is approved in isolation, and each is too small for any buyer to notice on its own. That is the trick. No test compares the product to what it was ten years ago. Each product version is measured against last quarter’s, comes back as “no detectable difference,” and ships. So the degradation compounds beneath the threshold of every individual measurement, invisible at each step and enormous in total.
It is by this mechanism that quality, the unmeasurable property, erodes as a company places a greater insistence on measurement.
When we ask what quality actually is, only two answers exist. Either quality is objective, meaning a physical property located in the object itself. Or quality is subjective, meaning an opinion located in the person judging.
Take the first answer seriously. If quality is a physical property of the object, then instruments should detect it. We can measure a guitar’s weight, its neck relief, its fret height, its finish thickness down to the micron. No instrument has ever measured whether it is good. If quality sat inside the object the way mass sits inside the object, quality control would be a solved engineering problem and a factory could certify goodness the same way it certifies tolerances.
Now take the second answer seriously. If quality is only an opinion, then a quality judgment reports a fact about the judge and no fact about the object. Two things follow. First, quality judgments should distribute evenly, because nothing in the object itself would constrain them. Second, no quality judgment could ever be right or wrong, because there would be nothing objective in the world for it to be right about.
Ultimately, both answers fail.
Pirsig’s blackboard example demonstrates the failure of the first: his classes converged on the same rankings, semester after semester, with no criteria handed to them. They agreed independently on some notion of quality, recognized it, but could not explain it.
The second fails on an experience everyone reading this has had: being wrong about quality. Nobody has ever been wrong about liking vanilla, because a preference claims nothing factual about the world. A quality judgment claims plenty. When I decided that Les Paul was good, I was predicting that the neck would stay straight, the frets would survive the abuse, and the guitar would still be worth reaching for in fifteen years. Every one of those predictions could have failed, and with other guitars, for other players, they have. Boots that looked right have come apart in one winter, and every buyer of a bad pair has said the sentence that pure subjectivism cannot explain: “I was wrong about those boots.”
So if quality is not an objective property, since no instruments can detect it, and it is not just a subjective opinion because we are able to make predictions about the quality of an object that are verified in time, then what is it?
Pirsig’s answer was that the question itself smuggles in the false assumption that quality must be located in one place or the other. He argued instead that quality is a feature of the relationship between the person and the object. Quality occurs when a person and a thing meet in use: the weight settling onto the shoulder, the wrench loaded to its limit and holding. Before they meet there is only a guitar and a player. Quality exists in the connection.
Apply this idea in the realm of consumer products, and the slow decline of quality starts making sense.
Every measurement a company takes lands on one side of the objective/subjective divide or the other. Spec sheets, tolerances, and materials testing measure the object alone. Surveys, star ratings, and focus groups measure opinions alone. And they sample the opinion at the wrong moment. A star rating gets filed in the first week of ownership, while the surface still shines, and the failures arrive in year three, when almost nobody returns to amend it.
Nothing measures the relationship, because the relationship only exists in use, in the hand, on the road and across years. So when quality drains out of a product, it drains from the one place no instrument points at. Both sets of numbers can hold perfectly steady while the thing between them disappears. That is how a product gets worse without a single metric moving. That is also how the people doing it stay convinced that nothing was lost.
What produced quality in the first place was care. Pirsig again: “Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares.”
A good object is a fossil record of care. Thousands of small selections made by people who could tell the good facts from the bad ones and picked the good, even when not doing so was cheaper or easier. The extra ounce of brass, the second coat of lacquer and the tolerance held a hair tighter than the drawing demanded. Every one of those selections survives for exactly one reason, which is that somebody with power over the object gave a shit.
That is why extraction works the way it does. When outside capital buys a great brand, nobody issues a decree that the product shall now be garbage. Instead, the people who previously made those thousands of selections either get laid off, retired out, or reorged into irrelevance, and the decisions migrate to a floor in an office building where nobody has ever actually used the product. Care cannot be exercised at that distance. Quality follows care out of the building, and the whole thing happens without any individual ever choosing badness directly. Absence does the job on its own…
…
… There are two ways to make money on quality. You can make a thing so good that people pay for it, keep it, and hand your name to their kids. That is the Miles road: quality found cheaper, profit as the receipt for care. Or you can buy the name after the caring is done, spend down four generations of accumulated trust, and be gone before anyone’s memory catches up…
Eminently worth reading in full. An ode to Pirsig: “On Quality,” from @worseonpurpose.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* Plato’s Phaedrus (which means, as Sapp observes, that the question of quality is at least twenty-four centuries old)
###
As we interrogate enshittification, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that Buick Motor Company head William Crapo Durant incorporated General Motors in New Jersey…
Durant, a high-school dropout, had made his fortune building horse-drawn carriages, and in fact he hated cars–he thought they were noisy, smelly, and dangerous. Nevertheless, the giant company he built would dominate the American auto industry for decades.
In the first years of the 20th century, however, that industry was a mess. There were about 45 different car companies in the United States, most of which sold only a handful of cars each year (and many of which had an unpleasant tendency to take customers’ down payments and then go out of business before delivering a completed automobile). Industrialist Benjamin Briscoe called this way of doing business “manufacturing gambling,” and he proposed a better idea. To build consumer confidence and drive the weakest car companies out of business, he wanted to consolidate the largest and most reliable manufacturers (Ford, REO, his own Maxwell-Briscoe, and Durant’s Buick) into one big company. This idea appealed to Durant (though not to Henry Ford or REO’s Ransom E. Olds), who had made his millions in the carriage business just that way: Instead of selling one kind of vehicle to one kind of customer, Durant’s company had sold carriages and carts of all kinds, from the utilitarian to the luxurious.
But Briscoe wanted to merge all the companies completely into one, while Durant wanted to build a holding company that would leave its individual parts more or less alone. (“Durant is for states’ rights,” Briscoe said. “I am for a union.”) Durant got his way, and the new GM was the opposite of Ford: Instead of just making one car, like the Model T, it produced a wide variety of cars for a wide variety of buyers. In its first two years, GM cobbled together 30 companies, including 11 automakers like Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Oakland (which later became Pontiac), some supplier firms, and even an electric company.
Buying all these companies was too expensive for the fledgling GM, and in 1911 the corporation’s board forced the spendthrift Durant to quit. He started a new car company with the Chevrolet brothers and was able to buy enough GM stock to regain control of the corporation in 1916, but his profligate ways got the better of him and he was forced out again in 1920. During the Depression, Durant went bankrupt, and he spent his last years managing a bowling alley in Flint.
– source
In the early 1900s public outcry over weak government regulation of gasoline-powered horseless carriages was significant. Durant clocked this public anger, and rather than relying on government regulations to improve their safety, he saw it as an opportunity to create a company which could improve the quality and safety of this new class of transportation. Fast forward just over a century and General Motors seems to have fallen prey to the extractive impulse that Sapp describes: the company and its cars are beset by myriad quality issues.
#autoIndustry #automobiles #business #ChristopherAlexander #culture #enshittification #extraction #GeneralMotors #GM #history #LawrenceMiles #philosophy #products #quality #RobertPirsig #value #valueAnalysis #valueEngineering #WilliamCrapoDurant -
A monument to a madman stands in the desert. Nothing beside remains: round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. #travel #history https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/egypt/luxor.html?s=mc
-
Banská Bystrica (Slovakia), 1935
Banská Bystrica: Metalworking School
Regional Geography, Buildings, Secondary Industrial Schools
Graphic, Local Postcards
[publisher unknown]From Digital Library and Digital Archive of Slovak National Library
https://dikda.snk.sk/view/uuid:d0dfd6e8-d11a-44c2-…#Slovakia #Slovensko #SVK #SK #history #image #photography #photo #postcards #postcard #map #maps #retro #photos
-
Addams Park (0262) Views - Landscapes - Construction progress photographs, 1954-04-21, Chicago, Illinois
(1954-04-21)
Vacant lots-Illinois-Chicago; Industrial facilities-Illinois-Chicago; Streets-Illinois-Chicago; Automobiles-Illinois-Chicago; Trucks-Illinois-Chicago; Street lights-Illinois-Chicago; Utility poles-Illinois-Chicago; Cityscape photographs
Chicago Park District Records: PhotographsFrom Digital Collections of the Chicago Public Library
https://cdm16818.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collec…#Chicago #Illinois #US #USA #history #image #historical #photo #photos
-
Addams Park (0262) Views - Landscapes - Construction progress photographs, 1954-04-21, Chicago, Illinois
(1954-04-21)
Vacant lots-Illinois-Chicago; Industrial facilities-Illinois-Chicago; Streets-Illinois-Chicago; Automobiles-Illinois-Chicago; Trucks-Illinois-Chicago; Street lights-Illinois-Chicago; Utility poles-Illinois-Chicago; Cityscape photographs
Chicago Park District Records: PhotographsFrom Digital Collections of the Chicago Public Library
https://cdm16818.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collec…#Chicago #Illinois #US #USA #history #image #historical #photo #photos
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On this day in 1976, Armenian champion swimmer Shavarsh Karapetyan saves 20 people from a trolleybus that had fallen into Yerevan Lake.
On this day in 1979, two families escape from East Germany to the west in a homemade hot air balloon.
On this day in 1992, on ‘Black Wednesday’ the British pound is forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism by currency speculators and forced to devalue against the Deutschmark.