At a higher price you can still find craftsmanship. But now, as always, you have to afford it.
And regarding consumerism, it's not only consumerism. Washing machines and fridges and freezers and microwaves changed the way we lived. Especially washing machines and fridges made our lives much easier and better.
I'm also not a Luddite, so if it seems I'm making a vast anti-tech argument, I'm truly not. It's easy to get drawn into a futurism vs tradition argument, but I don't want to take either side in that debate. I love tools and I love inventions that amplify a human being's power and effectiveness. But there are tools that are miserable to use, produce horrible results, but are just enough to be acceptable and offer The Business enormous cost savings (or sometimes just the illusion of it). I don't have the energy to try and write a manifesto right now for which tools fall into either camp, but maybe some day.
I like writing code, and I think a lot of other people do too. But it's not just that I like writing the code and want it to be as low-level and arcane as possible. Give me a language that lets me be more expressive and accomplish more and I'll be all the more happy to adopt this tool and incorporate it into my craft.
But, imagine The Business decides that coders writing code is just too expensive, so we've purchased an AI that dials into all the conference calls stakeholders have regarding a project, and subsequently it can generate all the code necessary to meet the requirements. Well, kind of. After sitting in on the meetings, it can instantly generate the code that would have taken a dev team a whole quarter, and then send it over to QA. The only catch is that code is spaghetti and the defect rate is really high. Still, The Business only needs 25% of the coders that it used to have. But their job is a little different now. They don't write code per se. They just QA and fix bugs. The code is horrible, there's no design or architecture to speak of, it's hard to debug, and fixing defects is mind-numbing. But, at the end of the day, the low quality product is still good enough to sell, everyone else in the industry is doing it too, and besides, the cost savings is too huge to ignore.
No one has to "write" code anymore. Did our lives get easier and better? What is the ultimate end of easiest and best? No one has to do a thing and minimally acceptable food shows up when we're hungry while we continually slurp down personalized, proceduraly generated sitcoms?
And regarding consumerism, it's not only consumerism. Washing machines and fridges and freezers and microwaves changed the way we lived. Especially washing machines and fridges made our lives much easier and better.