Inherent in the idea of conviviality is a sense that creativity is a core human need. I find it so interesting how much “creativity” has changed over time, how fluid and subjective it is. In the hunter gatherer days there’s a repeated motif (potentially apocryphal) of every hunted animal worshipped as its own god or spirit; in this world it feels like hunting was a deeply creative and personal act. Livestock domestication converted this hypothetically creative process into something generic, fungible, scaleable. Much greater magnitude of production, but the casualty is a sense of artisanal meaning. This seems to be the repeated pattern. An artisanal, personal, non-fungible relationship to creation turns into a generic, impersonal, fungible relationship, the upside is scale, and the downside is meaning. A craft turns into a ware.
In the Innovator’s Dilemma, technology over time has an inherent fidelity vs cost trade off, but an unintuitive outcome of this trend is that at certain points cost becomes so low it unlocks newfound fidelity. Crafts makes way to automation which destroys fidelity in order to achieve scale (craft → ware), but eventually automation becomes so inexpensive it makes way to something like 3-d printing, which unlocks newfound configurability, creativity, once again (ware → craft).