> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Author:: [[Richard Sennett]] > Reference:: Sennett, Richard. 2008. __The Craftsman__. Vol. 1. London: Allen Lane. > Date:: 2008 > Tags:: #warp > WeftLinks:: [[Creative value of craft]] > Claim:: [[Claim - Makers are creative]] > [!SUMMARY] Summary > Coding and pottery are both crafts because they are open-loop systems. ### Highlights >We’d err to imagine that because traditional craft communities pass on skills from generation to generation, the skills they pass down have been rigidly fixed; not at all. Ancient pottery making, for instance, changed radically when the rotating stone disk holding a lump of clay came into use; new ways of drawing up the clay ensued. But the radical change appeared slowly. In Linux the process of skill evolution is speeded up; change occurs daily. Again, we might think that a good craftsman, be she a cook or a programmer, cares only about solving problems, about solutions that end a task, about closure. In this, we would not credit the work actually involved. In the Linux network, when people squash one ‘‘bug,’’ they frequently see new possibilities open up for the use of the code. The code is constantly evolving, not a finished and fixed object. There is in Linux a nearly instant relation between problem solving and problem finding. Still, the ==experimental rhythm of problem solving and problem finding makes the ancient potter and the modern programmer members of the same tribe==. We would do better to contrast Linux programmers to a different modern tribe, those bureaucrats unwilling to make a move until all the goals, procedures, and desired results for a policy have been mapped in advance. This is a closed knowledge-system. In the history of handcrafts, closed knowledge-systems have tended toward short lifespans. The anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan contrasts, for instance, the open, evolving, difficult, but long-lasting craft of metal knife-making in preclassical Greece to the craft of wooden knife-making—a more precise, economical, but static system of fabricating knives that was soon abandoned for the problems of metal.