Time to double down
After suffering for a year in a pretty toxic job, my wife made the smart decision to take a little career break to recover from burnout and figure out what she wants to do next.
The recovery period has involved watching a lot of English daytime antique shows while she soothes her soul doing arts and crafts or works on personal projects for her portfolio.
That means, at times, I’ve also been watching English antique shows.
Her favourite by far is Antiques Road Trip, a less po-faced spin-off of the globally recognised Antiques Road Show.
In Road Trip, two competing experts (sometimes accompanied by celebrities) are given a small budget and travel around historic UK towns and cities in search of items to sell at auction. The goal is to turn a profit to donate to UK charity Children in Need.
The show is weirdly entertaining, often funny, but it’s also very informative. And many a time, when a keen-eyed antiques expert picks up an interesting trinket, they might describe its origins as being from the ‘Arts and Crafts era’, which is less of an era and more of a movement that started in the 1880s and spanned many decades.
I’m only a casual history buff and this was a new term for me, but I was interested enough to enter it into DuckDuckGo (not Google, given Google fucking sucks), and what I found was very interesting to me, a fully badged AI hater.
Here are a couple of quotes direct from the era’s Wikipedia page:
“The Arts and Crafts movement emerged from the attempt to reform design and decoration in mid-19th-century Britain. It was a reaction against a perceived decline in standards that the reformers associated with machinery and factory production. Their critique was sharpened by the items that they saw in Great Exhibition of 1851, which they considered to be excessively ornate, artificial, and ignorant of the qualities of the materials used. Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner writes that the exhibits showed “ignorance of that basic need in creating patterns, the integrity of the surface”, as well as displaying “vulgarity in detail”.
Unlike their counterparts in the United States, most Arts and Crafts practitioners in Britain had strong, slightly incoherent, negative feelings about machinery. They thought of “the craftsman” as free, creative, and working with his hands, “the machine” as soulless, repetitive, and inhuman.”
So, the powerful machine of capitalism, in its relentless pursuit of profit, decided it would devalue and homogenise creativity into bland, ugly, or over-designed products that were also not fit for purpose.
Is it just me or does this sound eerily familiar?
And rather rolling over and going ‘oh well, this is inevitable, we may as well just go along with it’, the people of the 19th Century instead followed their creative passions even harder and made exquisite art out of sheer collective spite.
Imagine that, hey?
The results of saying ‘fuck you, I’m going to make cool stuff instead’, is that many years later, the fruits of their creative endeavours are no longer only considered to have artistic value, but also monetary value. Their works are desired, sought after by the middle and upper classes to use as social status items in their homes.
It’s funny then, that since 2023, the tech industry has been hellbent on destroying lives and careers using LLMs falsely called AI, and they hold a particular venom for those in creative careers.
But the industry you’re in doesn’t actually matter; whatever industry you’re working in is apparently ‘over’ because tech bros would love nothing more than to replace you with auto-generated slop that benefits only a few.
Things have gotten so bad in 2026 that fresh off being unable to pretend to enjoy his own company’s burgers, the CEO of money-making giant McDonalds—fucking McDonalds— has, alongside other CEOs, made effort to call out the new wave of corporate greed leaving us with less money to spend on the sorts of things corporations want us to buy.
If we can’t afford to live, then we can’t afford to spend. This is not sustainable.
These rich assholes really, really do not want us to not follow the line of our 1880s ancestors. They want us to simply accept that this is happening to us. Adapt, adopt, or die, but also die anyway.
However, learning about the Arts and Crafts movement has lit a fire in me, a hobbyist artist who fucking sucks at art.
At this stage, I should make clear that being bad at art is not the same as having never made something good. I have drawn and painted pieces I’m proud of, but they’re rare. They’re flukes. They’re good in spite of me, not because of me.
I suck because I have no style of my own (see for yourselves). Nothing I do is repeatable. I’m also stuck between two styles (painting and line-art illustration), and I’m good at neither.
This is okay, but I can’t repeat this!
I suck because I let failure set me back. I have a tendency to destroy; to tear up or delete, even though failure, much like with anything, is where you learn the biggest lessons. Failure has caused me to take long gaps between attempts, even though I love the peaceful, thoughtful process of drawing as much as I love the act of having finished pieces.
However…
The vow
With a deep hatred of LLMs and GenAI, and now inspired by my new knowledge of the collective, creative spite of the Arts and Crafts movement, I’m going to follow their lead and draw more, no matter how bad I am at it.
I am here and now vowing that I’m going to improve at art out of sheer spite at the industry that wants to kill both my hobbies and my career as a writer. I hope you’ll join me.
Just as in the 1880s, it’s clear no one wants what industry wants. GenAI is as unpopular now as it’s ever been. People I know who were evangelising it just months ago have seen the light and are now either fed up of it or mysteriously quiet. No AI providers are making money and, though it’s been slower to come than many expected, the AI bubble is surely soon to burst.
We’re so close, so let’s give it that final push with our own Arts and Crafts movement.
The way I see it, right now we’re pretty much fucked either way. If big tech gets what it wants and performs a huge turnaround, then we’re all going to be jobless or poor as the robots do our work. If, as expected, the bubble bursts, then we’re going to head into a pretty bad global recession and we’re all—you guessed it—going to be jobless or poor.
So if we’re going to be jobless or poor regardless, we may as well just strap in for the ride, do what we love, and make something of actual value along the way.
As the people did in 19th Century, let’s dig in deep and take a similarly collectively spiteful and rebellious response to what industry wants. Do pottery. Knit sweaters, ugly or otherwise. Crochet dolls. Ignore the jokes and start that podcast with your bros. Stream. Make videos. Write comedy. Make silly games. Start a website. Pick up a pencil or drawing tablet.
Do whatever it is that ignites your passions and create. Make what those running tech companies cannot make themselves, even after their widespread content theft.
Make the thing only you can make and put out into the world; it’s a far better option than compliance to those who are trying to do you harm, and you’ll feel more fulfilled than just letting it happen.
