Technician milestone

Last week I finished my first scratch-build of a guitar amplifier. It's an almost-clone of a famous circuit from the 1960s and 70s, the Hiwatt DR504. If you want to read about the actual amp, you can look at the Electronic States posts about it. I didn't build the wood cabinet, and someone else made the nameplate for it, and the chassis was pre-made and drilled. Most of my labor was spent on wiring (which involves a lot of decision-making and luck, believe it or not). I do feel that I "built it" in the sense that I made the major decisions about how it would look and sound and work, and then realized the plan through a manually-intensive fabrication process. I thought I understood the circuit on the schematic, but there is another logic in the thing itself, and the messy imperfection of its physical components, that forced me to really understand it. The process merged both the factual and kinetic knowledge of it... I realize now that it's rare and exciting to have both kinds of knowledge about a thing.

It feels a bit like a coming-of-age, however late, to work this thing through from an idea to a pile of parts on a table to a functional and elegant machine. I've spent a lot of the last few years restoring broken things to working order -- amps of all sorts, hi-fi gear, guitars, basses, drums, bicycles, a steam heating system, plumbing... But in none of those cases can I say that I was the primary conceiver or the architect. I don't want to compare it to having a child; that's reductive and silly (machines aren't people, and besides, it's easier to create a child -- though not to raise one -- than build an amp).

But I also can't help feeling a certain pride at how this work self-interprets. It feels good. I've touched on this idea before while gushing over Matthew Crawford's work. He describes the unique "psychic satisfactions" of manual labor as rooted in the freedom from interpreting one's work for other people. Meaning, building an amp is not like writing a paper. When you write a paper, someone gives it back to you with a grade on it, but who knows if that grade is really reflective of the actual quality of the content, or if it's just your spot on the bell curve? After finishing any project of "knowledge work," you must engage in yet another labor of interpreting that work for others -- why it is worth their attention, why it is good or necessary, arguing for the work's place among competing peers. The argument is as much directed at the self, anxious that work might be mere noise, as at others. But when you build a machine, it either works well or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it's your fault. If it does, you need not be anxious that your work was somehow vain. The thing is there and it functions. It speaks of itself about your competence.

I have been out of college for almost 5 years, and I still have nightmares about having to take exams for which I haven't studied at all. I sometimes struggle to find the point in much of the abstract labor I did then. I don't have nightmares about mechanical and electrical failures.

Since most of my work is still abstract, relational, and conceptual (I'm not just talking about jobs, I would include artistic production and being married, for example), the contrast between anxiety around abstract labor and security around manual labor is more acute as time goes on. It's hard to understand whether there's something inherent in "knowledge work" that produces anxiety, or whether I've just been socialized into insecurity by a confluence of cultural and educational factors and the imperative to be "savvy" and "competitive" as a worker. There's also often a nagging sense that being that kind of high-achieving worker has more to do with gaming the system, through silver-tongued self-interpretation of impossible abstraction, than with actual competence. It's possible that manual labor offers existential security because machines don't lie. The technician does not have the luxury of spin.