Thanks for the opportunity to put this out. For anyone curious, this was mostly spurned on by reading Roy Lubove's excellent two-volume series 20th Century Pittsburgh.
The Herald published 741 artists and writers across its run. If any of you happen to know one of them, I'd love to hear what they think of this. Cannot express how much I appreciate that work--it's stuff like the Herald that's kept the region's identity alive through all the changes of the last fifty years.
I like your essay. It’s hopeful, not easy times but your piece reminds me humans exist and that the resistance against The Machine is real. I’m sure you’re familiar with Paul Kingsnorth writing. If not, the link above is an introduction.
Great post, thank you. As a potential parallel, I also noticed the prevalence of playing music among people in construction. My ex is always in metal bands and many of his co-workers play in some band or other. Lyrics are partly, though not wholly, "anti-Machine."
Yes, there are some unbelievable musicians in metal. And still live concerts! We saw these guys in Montreal during the COVID nightmare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR3c7-GT3g0
That was cathartic, like the Machine turned on the Machine.
I think that like so many things in Pittsburgh’s post industrial economy it is hard to criticize even top down cultural development without sounding backward. Is it bad we have a great orchestra? Ballet? Theater?
Likewise is it bad we have some world class hospitals? Prestigious universities? Banks?
No, not necessarily. But the ballet isn’t as real as sitting around with your neighbors and singing “Johnny Leave Her” until bedtime. And making the steel that built this country in Homestead is not less dignified but certainly more real than refilling my coke at the Eat’n Park in that is now on the same land as those mills in Homestead.
I'm reminded of the scene in Life of Brian where the zealots are sat around arguing about "what the Romans have ever done for us" and mentioning the roads and aqueducts. The Pythons were using that as a joke about how silly Irish independence movements were, which is the sort of mentality that you can only have if nobody's ever tried to exterminate your language and religion.
Obviously there's also a parallel to how we talk about technology today: Just about anything critical of modern society will be met with "well don't you use a phone?" or "do you want to die at 30?" and so forth. People of course ignore that this is an exchange: You get these things only in exchange for giving up an entire way of life.
Mercifully, I don't think the University of Pittsburgh has ever been dedicated to the extermination of the Pittsburgher like the British once were to the Irish, so I think there's a happier ending possible here than in Belfast.
De-industrialization caused not just economic loss for working class people, it left an economy that was significantly less robust, and raised national security issues, as we discovered during Covid—for example, is it a good idea that our only source of antibiotics is China?
Now that we have an administration who might be interested in bringing steel back to Pittsburg, why let the conversation be dominated by stories, poems, and songs? Working class people still need decent jobs—jobs with dignity, as factory jobs once provided.
The offering of the current economy to working class people is pathetic by comparison. My 35 years in construction was interrupted by endless forebodings of automation which never actually happened. It seems to me that we were swindled. De-industrialization was sold as an economic inevitability, just as AI and robotics are being sold now.
What about changing the way the government prioritizes profits for corporations over decent work for its people? We are the voters and current administration is sympathetic, at least. Some of this work could be done with tariffs. I’m not talking about socialism, I’m talking getting the government to change standards so that decent jobs are created here instead of overseas.
Thanks for the response. I agree that finding good, reliable work should be a priority, though I think your take relies on the idea that we can “redirect” the machine. I’m just not sure it’s even possible to put people over profits in the industrial/business world. The Michigan Supreme Court famously ruled in Dodge v Ford that corporations must act primarily in the interests of shareholders and not employees or customers, and that ruling now applies to a majority of public corporations in the United States.
The songs and poems aren’t a replacement for good work, but they do point to a method of preservation that lets us endure past the loss of work. If the system can’t be reformed, we need to find a way to operate outside the system. Preserving local culture and creating that sense of community identity is absolutely crucial for starting that outside-the-Machine movement.
Thanks for your response. The Trump administration has committed to reshoring American manufacturing with tariffs etc. It seems to me that we ought to be willing to push them in the direction they are already inclined to go. It also seems common sense that recovering at least a portion of the manufacturing we once had is entirely in the national interest, especially in terms of national security. Until this latest election, the interests of working people, as a class, have been completely neglected for decades, since I was a young man, in fact. The trauma of moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy has not been sufficiently detailed and documented, and the shame of it continues to this day. Service work is by definition not as good for the human spirit as manufacturing (making) work, and we should not lose sight of the difference. The economy we have right now is not good enough to support healthy stable families, and that should be the main goal, it seems to me. I am all for poems and stories. I am also for an artist’s autonomy, but I never want to get to the point where i merely accept the wrongs committed and the lies that were told—because the country has never recovered from deindustrialization. The harm is ongoing.
The steelworker was the displaced man of the land when industrialization took over. One could argue the rural cultural fabric destroyed for the sake of the industrial culture was a far richer one. But in a generation after leaving the land no one remembers this. In Pittsburg they remember the steel mills, not the hills and hollars, the mule and the plow. Cultural amnesia, some term this phenomenon.
The world never de-industrialized, it merely shifted the deck chairs. And now the deck chairs are shifting to the forces of entropy, no one is driving this current bus, culturally nor otherwise. Industry pulled out of America in fact in response to the early onset of entropy.
Darwin pointed out that survival goes to the most adaptable. The men driven from the land by the onset of modernity who became steel workers for instance. I suspect many of them forgot that part. Of course, in a time of decline and fall, you reach a point where there is no capital W "Work" to shift to. The path of best adaptation becoming much less obvious. When we become good enough at survival, there is once more excess, and with excess, there can be culture once more. This is the order of things.
Thanks for the opportunity to put this out. For anyone curious, this was mostly spurned on by reading Roy Lubove's excellent two-volume series 20th Century Pittsburgh.
The Herald published 741 artists and writers across its run. If any of you happen to know one of them, I'd love to hear what they think of this. Cannot express how much I appreciate that work--it's stuff like the Herald that's kept the region's identity alive through all the changes of the last fifty years.
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkingsnorth?r=fcfps&utm_medium=ios
I like your essay. It’s hopeful, not easy times but your piece reminds me humans exist and that the resistance against The Machine is real. I’m sure you’re familiar with Paul Kingsnorth writing. If not, the link above is an introduction.
Thanks, Buddy S.
Our entire project rests heavily on Kingsnorth’s work. You can read our introductory essay to our project here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/thesavagecollective/p/welcome-to-the-savage-collective
Cool! Thanks
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkingsnorth/p/the-tale-of-the-machine?r=fcfps&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
This is the link I encourage other like minded people to read.
Great post, thank you. As a potential parallel, I also noticed the prevalence of playing music among people in construction. My ex is always in metal bands and many of his co-workers play in some band or other. Lyrics are partly, though not wholly, "anti-Machine."
Yes, my son (13) has recently gotten very into metal. I was very surprised with how sophisticated and anti-Machine bands like Pantera are.
Show him Toxik, Voivod, and Queensryche if you want him to see some fascinating let’s say “nonspecialist” takes on the Machine.
Yes, there are some unbelievable musicians in metal. And still live concerts! We saw these guys in Montreal during the COVID nightmare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR3c7-GT3g0
That was cathartic, like the Machine turned on the Machine.
Fantastic article.
I think that like so many things in Pittsburgh’s post industrial economy it is hard to criticize even top down cultural development without sounding backward. Is it bad we have a great orchestra? Ballet? Theater?
Likewise is it bad we have some world class hospitals? Prestigious universities? Banks?
No, not necessarily. But the ballet isn’t as real as sitting around with your neighbors and singing “Johnny Leave Her” until bedtime. And making the steel that built this country in Homestead is not less dignified but certainly more real than refilling my coke at the Eat’n Park in that is now on the same land as those mills in Homestead.
I'm reminded of the scene in Life of Brian where the zealots are sat around arguing about "what the Romans have ever done for us" and mentioning the roads and aqueducts. The Pythons were using that as a joke about how silly Irish independence movements were, which is the sort of mentality that you can only have if nobody's ever tried to exterminate your language and religion.
Obviously there's also a parallel to how we talk about technology today: Just about anything critical of modern society will be met with "well don't you use a phone?" or "do you want to die at 30?" and so forth. People of course ignore that this is an exchange: You get these things only in exchange for giving up an entire way of life.
Mercifully, I don't think the University of Pittsburgh has ever been dedicated to the extermination of the Pittsburgher like the British once were to the Irish, so I think there's a happier ending possible here than in Belfast.
De-industrialization caused not just economic loss for working class people, it left an economy that was significantly less robust, and raised national security issues, as we discovered during Covid—for example, is it a good idea that our only source of antibiotics is China?
Now that we have an administration who might be interested in bringing steel back to Pittsburg, why let the conversation be dominated by stories, poems, and songs? Working class people still need decent jobs—jobs with dignity, as factory jobs once provided.
The offering of the current economy to working class people is pathetic by comparison. My 35 years in construction was interrupted by endless forebodings of automation which never actually happened. It seems to me that we were swindled. De-industrialization was sold as an economic inevitability, just as AI and robotics are being sold now.
What about changing the way the government prioritizes profits for corporations over decent work for its people? We are the voters and current administration is sympathetic, at least. Some of this work could be done with tariffs. I’m not talking about socialism, I’m talking getting the government to change standards so that decent jobs are created here instead of overseas.
Thanks for the response. I agree that finding good, reliable work should be a priority, though I think your take relies on the idea that we can “redirect” the machine. I’m just not sure it’s even possible to put people over profits in the industrial/business world. The Michigan Supreme Court famously ruled in Dodge v Ford that corporations must act primarily in the interests of shareholders and not employees or customers, and that ruling now applies to a majority of public corporations in the United States.
The songs and poems aren’t a replacement for good work, but they do point to a method of preservation that lets us endure past the loss of work. If the system can’t be reformed, we need to find a way to operate outside the system. Preserving local culture and creating that sense of community identity is absolutely crucial for starting that outside-the-Machine movement.
Thanks for your response. The Trump administration has committed to reshoring American manufacturing with tariffs etc. It seems to me that we ought to be willing to push them in the direction they are already inclined to go. It also seems common sense that recovering at least a portion of the manufacturing we once had is entirely in the national interest, especially in terms of national security. Until this latest election, the interests of working people, as a class, have been completely neglected for decades, since I was a young man, in fact. The trauma of moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy has not been sufficiently detailed and documented, and the shame of it continues to this day. Service work is by definition not as good for the human spirit as manufacturing (making) work, and we should not lose sight of the difference. The economy we have right now is not good enough to support healthy stable families, and that should be the main goal, it seems to me. I am all for poems and stories. I am also for an artist’s autonomy, but I never want to get to the point where i merely accept the wrongs committed and the lies that were told—because the country has never recovered from deindustrialization. The harm is ongoing.
The steelworker was the displaced man of the land when industrialization took over. One could argue the rural cultural fabric destroyed for the sake of the industrial culture was a far richer one. But in a generation after leaving the land no one remembers this. In Pittsburg they remember the steel mills, not the hills and hollars, the mule and the plow. Cultural amnesia, some term this phenomenon.
The world never de-industrialized, it merely shifted the deck chairs. And now the deck chairs are shifting to the forces of entropy, no one is driving this current bus, culturally nor otherwise. Industry pulled out of America in fact in response to the early onset of entropy.
Darwin pointed out that survival goes to the most adaptable. The men driven from the land by the onset of modernity who became steel workers for instance. I suspect many of them forgot that part. Of course, in a time of decline and fall, you reach a point where there is no capital W "Work" to shift to. The path of best adaptation becoming much less obvious. When we become good enough at survival, there is once more excess, and with excess, there can be culture once more. This is the order of things.