We do often learn about history of technology as being about guns, steel, hardware and hard objects. I have always felt like understanding technology is as much about soft objects: fabrics, home goods, cooking ingredients. Data decisions and software :)
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...there was so much societal strife eg riots and banning its import, I'm not a textile historian or expert but it's just fascinating to think about the moral weight assigned to clothing and technologies of its production. Many of the "luddite" threads you see are fairly oversimplified imho
@grimalkina i know i intentionally simplify it as a labor movement, but yeah, the part of the story after that reduced (largely unpaid!) labor and made clothing actually affordable instead of one of the most extreme home costs is one of the things that needs to be understood about it.
@pathunstrom yeah and as for what came before that transition it's always seemed sort of problematic to me to position workers of the British Empire as an isolated ideal of justice for labor without looking at the British Empire more broadly
@grimalkina @pathunstrom
Amanda Hickman & co’s successful 2017 proposal for a #FiberArts #emoji set 🧶 🧵🧷🪡 included some of these arguments
“…there are no glyphs for the making, mending, or maintenance of textiles
“Notably, the
available tool glyphs are all strongly associated with trades traditionally dominated by men (carpentry, construction, maintenance of machines)”
🧰🪛🔧🔨⚒️🛠️⛏️🪚🔩🪓🪠
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17249-craft-emoji.pdf
#EmojiNation
I try to either buy fabric from ethical and sustainable shops that source as directly from producers as possible (there is no perfect in the textile supply chain, there's just trying to find better) or buy discard/recycle, but every time I do I also think about other waste like shipping and climate
So many things that sound beautiful in one description (protect the local industry that makes wool!) are ugly in another (wage war on more comfortable fabrics that allow women to feel more comfortable every day and attempt to assert imperial control over who profits globally from innovation)
We do often learn about history of technology as being about guns, steel, hardware and hard objects. I have always felt like understanding technology is as much about soft objects: fabrics, home goods, cooking ingredients. Data decisions and software :)
