DIY
Fancy tools are nice, but knowing how things work is better.
“The children sat at their white tables, each wearing a pair of headphones. They were listening to the Central Arithmetic Master, who gave them sums to solve. They worked these out by pressing keys on the calculators in front of them. If the answer was correct, it appeared in blue digits on the small screen. If it was wrong, the digits were orange. The latter didn’t happen often, because the children didn’t need to work anything out themselves; the machines did that. Though of course you could always press the wrong key.”
From: The Robot from the Jumble Sale — Tonke Dragt (1967)
“No Google, dear people — can you imagine having to comb through an entire library looking for the right book, and then through that book looking for the right information? I’m afraid I wouldn’t have finished much of my education if I hadn’t been able to lean as comfortably on technology as I have.”
From: Aren’t We Making Things Just a Little Too Easy for Ourselves? — Lisanne van Marrewijk (2026)
“Interruption of food distribution in particular, which relies upon computer-based information networks for round-the-clock resupply, would have serious consequences within a matter of hours. Thirty years ago, the average British household contained enough food to last eight days; today the average is two days. It is no exaggeration to say that London, at any time, exists only six meals away from starvation.”
From: The Second Sleep — Robert Harris (2019)
I read The Robot from the Jumble Sale in a story book at primary school; I was seven. I thought it was a wonderful story, set in the future, in which a boy named Edu buys a dented robot at a jumble sale to do his homework for him. The trouble is, the robot is an antique and can’t do a lot of tricks, so Edu has to teach it. The joke — which the reader caught on to well before Edu did — was that he had now taught himself to read, write and do arithmetic. He no longer needed the robot, except for company.
As early as 1967, Tonke Dragt was writing about children who attended school for two hours a day to learn how to operate machines that then did the thinking for them. Ridiculous!
Even in 1980, when I read it, we found this absolutely hilarious. What foolish people! Poor children, incapable of doing anything themselves. Surely nobody actually wants that? Doesn’t every child insist: “I’ll do it myself!”?
Getting dressed, combing your hair, tying your shoelaces, reading a book:
“I’LL DO IT MYSELF!”
That proud feeling of self-sufficiency when you’d finally mastered something — you never forget it.
…or do you?
And yet here we are, in 2026, and I’ve just read an article by a Zoomer who cheerfully admits she can’t read a map, has no idea how a library card index works, couldn’t write an essay by hand to save her life; even typing on a typewriter strikes her as too much effort. She reckons anyone who can do these things must be over sixty.
*sigh*
Love, I’m 52. Gen X, not a Boomer.
And yes, I work on a Mac, I look things up on Google, I can vibe-code with AI. I don’t have a walking frame or incontinence pads — though I do have reading glasses, which irritate me quite enough already. But it’s the tools that have changed over the years, not my knowledge or ability.
Of course I use Apple Maps in the car, but the door pockets are also stuffed with paper maps and a Shell Road Atlas from 1998. Why on earth would I throw them out? What would I fill those pockets with otherwise? If my phone packs in, I can still find my way — even in the Netherlands, where I haven’t lived for four years.
I’m surely not the only one who’s felt a growing unease in recent years. Call it paranoia if you like. Our dependence on technology has kept pretty steady pace with the growing instability in the world. So I regularly find myself asking: Could I manage this if the power went out?
— Let’s leave aside for now what might cause that power cut. Political instability, climate disaster, quiet sabotage, zombie apocalypse. Whatever.
Can I make coffee? Can I cook a meal? Can I look something up? Can I fix things myself? — Assuming you’ve got enough food, water and batteries in the house, of course.
I’ve always resisted ‘smart’ appliances. I have as few electrical gadgets in the house as possible. If my grandmother could bake a cake without an electric mixer, so can I. If she could make coffee without an espresso machine, so can I.
I’m ridiculously proud of my little home library. Not just books with stories and books of poetry, but recipe books, dictionaries in seven languages, atlases, DIY manuals, reference books.
Google without internet is called a Library.
Over the past few years I’ve taught myself to cook and bake, to grow vegetables, to preserve fruit, to make soap and ink. Needlework isn’t for me — I once learned to knit, and the resulting swatch was stiff enough to put a dent in a skull — but I’d still like to learn how to sew and mend clothes one day. I can’t even darn a sock. Isn’t that silly?
DIY.
I want to be able to do things myself! There’s already so much I can’t do: I can’t fix a car, I’m a little nervous around electrics, I’m not about to knock together a chicken coop. Things my parents could do perfectly well, as it happens. Fortunately, there are plenty of people who can help me with those things and are willing to.
What I don’t understand is not wanting to be able to do it yourself anymore. Convenience is all very well — I understand that perfectly. But what if that convenience disappears? Do you still understand how things actually work?
We laugh at Edu’s classmates, who can’t read or do arithmetic on their own, but if you always consume your books as audio, you’ll lose the ability to read. What if your WiFi goes down? What if the batteries die, and no more power comes from the wall? Can you still work out how to get from A to B? How to fix your washing machine? How to bake a loaf of bread?
Ten years ago I already had students who couldn’t read for comprehension and couldn’t produce an intelligible piece of writing — at university level! They went green around the gills when I once held up a railway timetable book as the ultimate example of information design. They had no idea how it worked.
And that was before AI.
You hear the word ‘brain rot’ everywhere these days: if you don’t train your brain, no new connections form. All this ‘smart’ technology really is making us stupid, yes. And that’s where the tipping point lies: when our tools can do so much and take so much off our hands that we no longer understand how things are done, when we no longer grasp the underlying mechanics and logic — aren’t we then entirely at the mercy of the gods?
Somewhere, a dystopian novel is quietly ripening, in which I — cantankerous old bat with wild white curls and a walking stick — have to explain to the fit young kids how to read a technical drawing to locate the mains connection, and where in the library to find books on growing greens. How a typewriter works. And a duplicating machine. How to translate a text without Google Translate.
I think I’ll write it by hand.
Good practice.
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