Thread by @leashless

I've been biting down very, very hard on the semantics of the relationship between people and their stuff, for more than ten years. It goes back to resiliencemaps.org and the questions about how things relate to eachother: laptop to charger to solar panel. I've been grinding

I finally cracked it tonight. The bit I'd never correctly priced is information asymmetries around tool use.

I'm mildly handy. If it doesn't need welding, I watch YouTube videos and figure it out. So, for me, tools have utility. I finally understood, this is not generally true.

What this means is that for most people, *use of tools is a social transaction* because they don't have the skills.

Accessing other people's *tools* also means accessing other people's *labour*. It's the absolute brake on the sharing economy: "how do I use this thing?" A camera?

And most people just don't have a head for *stuff*. My intelligence was shaped by Lego, dyslexia, and growing up in Scottish craft culture. My grandmother was a weaver, my grandfather a carpenter. There were always tools. And I was a smart kid. I soaked it all in, at some depth.

I know how to polish, sharpen, cut, glue, saw, drill, and learn the rest. So to me, tools-and-skills were always interwoven.

But for most folks, if it requires tools, *a specialist has to do that for them*. Things have people who fix them. Maintenance is a service. I'd missed it

I've literally been stalled on some parts of this problem for a decade because I misunderstood fundamental patterns of human tool use: most people are frightened of tools they don't know how to use, from color calibration through to belt sanders.

And now everything makes sense.

For most people, *objects are useless* because acquiring the skill to use the object is expensive. They don't have time. Trade is rooted in specialization, after all. And this is why middle class people mostly don't have power saws or shoe polish or rocket stoves. Skill gaps.

This also ramifies directly into the crushing shifts in the economy. People lost the skill o do DIY and shoe polishing, sewing, whatever as TV ate the time people used to learn this stuff in. Now we have "artisanal" because *having a hobby makes you a specialist vendor today!!!*

Industrial mass production (read: Chinese imports). E made the tools incredibly cheap, but the mainstream doesn't care because of the skill density problem. The tools are cheap, but the skills are still really expensive, and so the entire game stalls out without spread benefit!

I think I've figured this out just in time to build it into @mattereum from the beginning. *What can I use?* is a different question to "what can I have?"

Tools bind to skills, not just to other tools. Resilience Maps is all about mapping sociotechnical system, but needed depth.

Objects embedded in skill matrix milieux: can you operate the gear?

From audiophilia to sports cars, you have to know how to drive the machine. How long do the amps take to warm up? Where do I get this cleaned or fixed?

It's all embedded. And I'd misse this by being a big nerd.

It very precisely reframes and aligns the "object management matrix" stuff that I've been failing to build into resiliencemaps.org for a decade, and @mattereum with its social consensus among experts in defining objects.

The bloody things are socially embedded at root.

And what this nails down is that ever elusive relationship between objects, performance and subcultures. From riding saddles to throwing axes, "come and watch the clever things we do with our stuff" is how subcultures form around tools. Punk rock. Mopeds. Ultralite. All the same!

It's a pretty simple formula: tools + skill + performance = subculture.

And subculture = identity.

This is like scenius google.com/amp/s/www.wire… from Brian Eno.

The scene use the same tools.

New tools, new materials, new scenes.

How many new sports came from carbon fibre?

And of course, the internet is *packed full* of videos about how to learn skills so you can join subcultures (and find identity). Skateboard tricks. Make up. Bass guitar playing.

Buy the thing. Watch the video. Practice. Have an opinion. Join the subculture. It's a route into ID

I've literally been chipping away at this for *years*. I came up the other side of the hill with music: teens listen to music as a way of modelling what it will be like to be adult. Musicians help people form their adult identities in at least three ways.

But actually the entire thing pivots on identity. It's not just music. The things express stories. No PA, no garage concert. Yes, you need skills, but the skills are largely object manipulation or this much rarer category, talent (that's actors, singers, body-as-tool dancers.)

And, of course, this is the Second Hand Market problem: we buy *things* to try on identities. "Am I a mountain biker with mountain biker friends?" - can't find out without buying a bike, but no good language for passing the bike on when we decide we don't fit into bike culture.

How much of the waste and cost in our society is people searching for identity through objects, where they have the thing, maybe learn the skill, but decide the culture isn't for them (or age out of it.)

But we don't have an efficient language for selling on old roles-and-props.

Because that's what's really happening. You sell the pick up truck when you've been driving it to an office job for two years: no more construction for you, lad. Have kids, the windsurfer goes out. Shifting identities shift the material base we need to precisely express ourselves

Of course, this theory needs some work: music is about listening, and fans, not just about kids who want to be performers practicing at home. Some "membership" objects (the Rolex) don't have skills attached to them. There is complexity, but of course.

But as a primordial theory of why we acquire and get rid of things, and the way that things acquire symbolic meaning and become key to our identity, this spark seems good enough. Finally connects the music/identity formation work to the resiliencemaps.org work. A huge bridge

And, of course, this leads to a lemon market problem in second hand goods: only an experienced skateboarder can tell if a second hand skateboard is in good condition, so beginners have to buy retail even though they're the most likely to drop the hobby quickly as they move on.

So what we have is a mess around objects, identity formation experiments, information asymmetries and lemon markets around second hand goods, resulting in garages filled with the kid's crap, and a huge amount of inefficient environmental overconsumption.

What is that? 5% of GDP?