A rough guide to making a medieval manuscript

You could argue that the art of cave painting or tablet engraving was lost to make way for manuscripts written on papyrus and that was lost to make way for the printing press and so on.

Losing craft for efficiency will happen as civilizations advance, but one thing to keep in mind is the amount of craft that went into sending an email. It can be at the level of writing an email server with a high uptime and a client that reads them reliably. It can go down to bits and byte. And that doesn’t account for the crafting of the hardware that those software run on or the effort that went into the infrastructure to carry those signals.

The trend is that each individual that has an idea to share has to put less effort into sharing their own idea, but that doesn’t mean that what we built no longer requires craft. The tragedy is that we don’t see and appreciate the monumental craft that went into making email work in the first place. I’d argue that whole process requires more craft, but the sender and recipient of the emails don’t have to understand it.

EDIT: grammar

Maybe this is a good example of a long-tail problem? As interesting technologies are supplanted, the number of practitioners drops, levels out at a low number for some time, and then eventually goes to zero. Then the hard part is—if people still care—extending that tail as long as possible.