The young software engineer pays $300 for a hand-forged kitchen knife. The marketing executive spends weekends learning pottery. The financial analyst takes up letterpress printing. These aren’t hobbies.
They’re acts of spiritual resistance, though the participants might not describe them that way. The current fetishization of handmade goods represents something more urgent than nostalgic aesthetics. It marks the revenge of tangible creation in an intangible world, the reassertion of human agency against algorithmic existence.
To understand this revenge, we need to recognize what provoked it. The average knowledge worker touches nothing all day except keyboards and screens. They produce no physical objects, transform no raw materials, leave no visible mark on the world. Their labor disappears into cloud storage, their achievements exist only as metrics on dashboards.
Even their successes feel abstract: increased engagement, improved conversion rates, optimized workflows. They go home exhausted from work that leaves no physical trace.
This isn’t new. William Morris faced the same crisis in Victorian England. The Arts and Crafts movement he founded in the 1880s responded to industrial production’s dehumanization of work. Morris watched skilled craftsmen reduced to factory hands, their knowledge replaced by machines, their creativity crushed by efficiency. He didn’t just mourn this loss; he built an alternative.
His workshops produced furniture, textiles, and books that were simultaneously beautiful objects and political statements. Every hand-printed page argued that human creativity couldn’t be mechanized without losing something essential.
