The Artefact Fiction | To Die is Human - John Henry
How the ideas of artefact, identity, ego and medium are brought together in the simple, although almost certainly apocryphal story of John Henry. | Subscribers get full access.
The Artefact Fiction is a book about how we misjudge the world. How we over-identify with things as we’ve perceived them. And how we take that perception and that sense of identity and project it into the future.
The book came about through a single question which is still reverberating throughout the 21st century. Read more about the book here. I’m releasing sections of this over the spring and summer of 2024 here on substack.
We tell the story of industry disruption through the languages of economics, business and technology but the stories are lived by humans. We rarely explain what happens in industry disruption in terms of the humans, what they are doing and what they should be doing.
Numbers are easier to talk about. The story they tell is not irrelevant but a 10% drop in employment reverberates through lives in ways that “10% drop” doesn’t convey. We summarise in statistics but we live the world in emotions.
Trawling books on industrial and economic history, we find people hidden in statistics throughout history. Rather than list where they are hidden, in this post we will explore a particular story - which may be true or apocryphal.
Each age of disruption has similar economics but different humans with different jobs and different materials. Whether the story and the person we’ll explore is true or apocryphal it’s meaningful enough to be an avatar for many people in many ages.
More than that, the way that people have reacted to this character helps us understand how humans feel about the disruption of their industries - and eventually leads us to see a contradiction in how we idolise the people of one age while enjoying and world which killed off that age.
Each age seems to have its stories of the people left behind as the world changes. Each story’s protagonist somehow embodies the human need for certainty in what used to be true but isn’t anymore.
This is an extract from The Artefact Fiction - a book about disrupting humans. I’m releasing sections of this over the spring and summer of 2024 here on Substack.
Now to our story…
The story of John Henry is probably apocryphal. But it might be true. Or at least, it might be based on very similar true stories from around the same time.
Before we even consider whether John Henry lived, there is something interesting about any character which becomes myth or legend. Myths might be the embodiment of the stories people tell about their past and the past of their people. Whether the stories are true or not, when bundled up into a myth and persisted they create an identity or an idea which we hang culture off.
There are two culture which hang off the myth John Henry (if he is mythic): that of the woes of hard working labourers; that of the foolishness of resisting change.
As with any myth with multiple interpretations, there is truth in both. Those cultures don’t come out of nowhere and it requires more than just a mythic character to bring them into being.
The myth is like a cloud: the cloud is there because of the air pressure, moisture in the air, wind direction and height where all this is happening. The cloud is all we see, but all that air, water and movement is what’s needed to make it be there.
Without the air pressure to force the moisture to a particular level, and without the moisture to form a particular type of cloud there is no cloud. And all that air pressure and moisture is only there because of the shape of the land and the sea.
The weirdness is that in humans activity, things that are there are sometimes there for a reason. Even if the thing itself isn’t real.
The myth exists and persists because of wider ‘somethings’, whatever they are. The myth is a clue to other things. The story might be apocryphal but that doesn’t matter. Sometimes, the fact that it’s a story that’s told is more interesting.
And John Henry’s story isn’t just one that’s told. He’s a canonical character for country and blues songs. Dozens of them have been written.
I haven’t found myself putting together playlists to accompany my writing before. Mostly, I have diagrams, charts, data, dates or other histories. I have objects, people, ideas.
There’s a lovely circular nature to this: my writing is about industry disruption. It was inspired by the destruction of the music industry my a set of forces - some technical, some economic, some cultural.
That a (possibly) mythic character exists which embodies the idea of being disrupted allows the research to come full circle when songs are written about him.
(The playlist is at the bottom of this post.)
We begin our story with rocks.
Actually, it starts with slopes. Or a lack of them.
Trains are terrible at going up slopes.
In order to build a railway you need to make the ground pretty flat. It’s one of the weird ironies of any technology: in order for it to take over the world you have to first make the world neat for the technology.
In order for the railways (or railroads, as you call them over there) to get through certain parts of the country, the country had to be changed.
Tunnels had to be made. Through rock.
Rock is hard. To get through it….
To get through it, you have to smash it. In a time when the railroads had to be built, you had to find a way to smash your way through. And that required humans.
Humans were (cough*) recruited. Or, rather, they were coerced by taking them from prisons and elsewhere to dig these tunnels.
This is not simply digging.
In order to build a tunnel through rock you have to smash it. In order to do that, you need to bash it with something hard from the outside or put something explosive on the inside.
And it’s not just a few metres. These tunnels go on and on.
The story of John Henry takes place in the construction of railroad tunnels through mountains. In order to break through the mountains, thousands of men - often African-American, often prisoners - were used to smash the rock.
This was not simply a matter of breaking apart rocks which were separate from the mountain. They had to tunnel into the mountain itself.
In order to do this, teams of two - steel-drivers and shakers - would work other to drill many holes, each of the holes up to fourteen feet deep into the solid rock. Explosives would then be pushed into these holes, packed tightly and detonated to blast the rock apart, thus clearing the way.
John Henry was the steel-driver. The other role, the shaker, would hold the steel drill bit against the rock while the steel-driver would hammer. Between each hammering, the shaker would shake away the loosened rock.
You can imagine that, even if you’d been coerced into smashing these rocks that if you found you were good at it you would take some pride in the work. This is the work of animals, in the good and noble sense. This is humans using their physicality, their muscle and their team work. It’s work to be proud of.
It’s in this context we introduce the villain of the story: a steam powered machine.
The setup for the story is in the introduction of a steam powered drilling machine - a machine built to turn steam power into tunnels. The machines would take the back-breaking work of the steel-drivers and replace it with steam power.
The steam machine could do the work of the men. It could work for hours. It didn’t need wages and didn’t need breaks (probably).
The story goes that John Henry is challenged to compete with the machine, seeing whether man or machine can make the most progress. He accepts the challenge, solidifying his sense of pride as a steel-driving, rock-breaking man.
It is this point in the story that we see John Henry as typifying the way all humans identify with their artefacts. John Henry was not a steel-driving man as a job, it was part of his identity. The songs sing about this.
And so the competition commences. Man versus machine.
The man, John Henry and the machine then raced to obliterate as much rock as they could as fast as they could. John Henry, using his muscles and the machine hammering away just the same, but using its steam and steel.
John Henry won, so the legend goes.
But in a poetic and illustrative punchline, having won against the machine he then died.
This story is gives us a perfect framework for seeing how people identify with the artefacts they create. We are not just people who happen to do a job. Even if we are coerced into doing the job, the job becomes us.
The songs that have been written about John Henry reinforce our human need to create rock-solid identities which define us, define our lives and, sometimes, define our deaths.
This is not simply a story about someone getting a bit enthusiastic about making a point. We can use this human want and need to create an identity as a way of seeing how and why industry disruption pans out the way it does.
The songs
John Henry has an impressive catalogue of songs. A quick search on Spotify gives hours of listening.
I’ve made a playlist of the songs that come up when searching for John Henry. Have a listen.
Working ourselves to death
This story is used to illustrate why we work ourselves to death over the wrong things. Why we put our heart, soul, muscle and last ounce of our our life into something which proves a point only to be pointless moments later.
That this competition happened is certain, either literally with one man competing against one machine or metaphorically with the market for steel-driving men competing with the market for steel-driving machines.
What is particularly illustrative about this story are the factors which come together and perfectly reflect what we have seen in our exploration of heroes, survivor bias, artefacts, mediums and other aspects of industry disruption.
The first factor is that, in the long hindsight we have and being so far into the future from the introduction of steam power (so far, that we have seen the disruption of steam power itself) it feels obvious that John Henry would fail.
It seems ludicrous that he had a hope.
This makes the moral of the story easier to see, but perversely harder for people to apply to themselves.
This leads to the tragic heroism.
At some point, perhaps all heroes fail.
John Henry might be from a distant age in which muscle and machismo got the job done, but there must be some echo of him and that attitude today in whatever we do. Tragic heroism is not the reserve of the people of the past.
John Henry saw his strength and his hammer as defining him, defining what it meant to be human. He proved his point, and lost.
He won but, assuming the telling of the story in which he then dies, only by exhausting everything that was human about him.
We are very attached to the idea of being human as being special.
When I started writing this section (in 2023), articles were popping up daily listing the things which artificial intelligence won’t do - all the creative, human and special things which makes us, us.
John Henry feels like a warning against something.
Perhaps, first, John Henry is a warning against human exceptionalism - the idea that humans are inherently above replacement. That our pride and determinism sets as apart from what anything else - animal or machine - will be able to do.
Perhaps it is also a warning against specialism - the idea that we attach our ego to a particular activity or medium. John Henry gives up his life to prove something which is dear to him, in which he has pride and a sense of self but the machine just coldly hammers away and wins.
There is no gloating by the machine. The machine can do our work but takes no pride in it. It doesn’t post about its achivements, it doesn’t mention the stories of what it got done to its friends.
What mattered deeply to humans doesn’t matter to machines. They just do things.
Perhaps this makes it all worse.
The idea that everything we humans have poured our sense of self, identity and ego into can, in a moment, be replaced by a cold, emotionless machine. In that moment, everything we have assumed about our role in the world, about what makes us who we are and gives us context about the world disappears.
This is what I call the Artefacts. These are the things we make or use which define us. For John Henry, his artefact was the steel-driving and the rock, but also his ability to use the tools to smash the rock quickly. He pitted himself against the machines speed.
When we attach ourselves to a specific measure of worth, we run the risk of working ourselves to death. These measures are often invisible, hidden either by them being obscure or, more often, by our egos.
John Henry’s ego hid the fact that what he was doing did not define him has a person, yet he put everything into proving that it did define him. The machine won, but the machine doesn’t care about winning.
When we over-identify with our artefacts we run this risk. We over-identify by thinking that the things we make or use are so intrinsically part of us, that we might die without them. Or we might die defending them.
The tragic heroism of John Henry can be seen everywhere.
Every time a company says “we are a chemical company” or “we are a logistics company”, they are aping John Henry. They are over-identifying with artefacts which might become irrelevant.
Every time someone says “I am a programmer” or “I am a carpenter”, they lay the groundwork for becoming John Henry.
The models of industry disruption talk about economics, supply, demand, business and technology. This is not what causes disruption.
What causes industry disruption is people behaving like John Henry.
People working themselves to death.
This is part of The Artefact Fiction | A book about Disrupting Humans. I am releasing chapters over the spring and summer of 2024.
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