The camaraderie that followed a breakdown of technology reminds us why craft is so important in our world today.

It’s broken.

I was staying in a hotel next to the conference venue for the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial. The hotel was in a cluster of cafes and restaurants on the well-groomed Curtin University campus. Everything was new, efficient and anonymous.

I was on my way to breakfast.  I was thinking about the previous day’s workshop on the Value of Craft, where makers and knowledge workers spoke passionately about the importance of craft in many domains of life. I was eager to rejoin the fray after eggs and coffee.

I pressed the lift button on the seventh floor. No response. I looked at the screen above. Both lifts remained stubbornly on the first floor. There was a malfunction. No problem, I was happy to walk down the stairs to the second floor. Not so easy. On the way down, I found that all the doors leading off the stairwell were locked. So I had to go out into the street and back into the hotel. The bored-looking man at the reception desk had no idea what the problem was, but a call had gone out to the lift company. I guessed it was a software glitch.

But here’s the problem. We had no way of returning to our rooms. The doors on the stairwell were all locked to the outside.

I walked up the internal stairs to the second floor where a few intrepid diners had also found a way to breakfast. We shared some light-hearted banter about how dependent we were on technology. Eventually, a young man from the hotel appeared and said the doors were now open. We all thanked him greatly. On my way up, I found he had wedged pieces of cardboard under the doors to keep them propped open.

There was something victorious about this moment. The inscrutable black box of lift software had been circumvented by a pragmatic human intervention using materials at hand. What had been an anonymous hotel suddenly took on a personality. Silent guests were now talking with each other. Team human had won.

This is exactly what we’d been talking about in the value of craft workshop. Making things by hand offers a critical sense of agency in a world that increasingly disempowers us.

Marian Hosking talking about the creative value of craft, with Bic Tieu.

We are drawn into technology because of the powers it grants us. In our hands is a device that immediately connects us to anywhere in the world. Yet at the same time, it has turned our public spaces into lonely spectacles of individuals gazing at screens. It’s only when things go wrong that we can snap out of technology’s thrall.

Imagine the day when the Internet goes down. We’ll have to ask strangers for directions. We’ll have to negotiate change when buying goods in hard cash. We’ll need to share “real time” with each other.

There should be one day of the year when we all go offline. This could be an exercise to prepare for the inevitable catastrophe, as we do fire drills in buildings. But I suspect that it would take on a carnival atmosphere as we rediscovered ways of being together.

Ironically, our screens are filled with just such a scenario. I think particularly of the Station Eleven series based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel. As pandemic has wiped out much of the world’s population, leaving no one to maintain technology. Life is tough but out of it comes a revival of Shakespeare plays, which tour around different enclaves. “Survival is not enough” becomes the mantra.

There’s also a Museum of Civilization, which consists of relics of our world today, such as smartphones, laptop computers, high-heeled shoes and credit cards. What we take for granted today becomes a source of wonder.

A new voice at the Value of Craft workshop was Richard King, representing Melbourne’s Arena magazine. Arena has been providing a critique of technological capitalism since 1963, making it older even than the World Crafts Council. In his recent book, Here Be Monsters, King argues that the true source of alienation in our world is not the machine, it is we who turn those machines on. This includes the quantified lifestyle of health trackers and the managerial obsession with data collection. As he writes, “We are the spiders on the web, not the flies in it.”

The day when that web tears, and technology fails, may be something to celebrate, rather than dread. It puts us back in control. Technology becomes a means, rather than an end in itself. The presence of craft in our world today reminds us of who we are.

On my way back to the conference, I say “Cheers” to the man at the hotel desk. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile.

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on the other hand