For a stretch of time so long it dwarfs our sense of scale, we made things by hand. It was only in the last several hundred years that we turned machines into an external self and asked them to take over. And, boy, did they take over. “Satanic mills” ran all day and night, turning the factory into air you couldn’t breathe and noise you couldn’t stand. Increasingly hand-made was a reminder of “the world we have lost,” as Peter Laslett called it, the world before the advent of the industrial. It was the marker of the world before the machines came.
– excerpt from Return of the Artisan