I’ve read Thomas Thwaites’s The Toaster Project twice and continue to get insights out of it—I’ll cut to the chase now to just say that it is fantastic. As I describe below, Thwaites’s project informs the larger project of The Given World in important ways by exemplifying the kind of analytical approach a theology of “how things work” must take. (Which is not to say that The Toaster Project is itself theological, other than in the sense that it explores the implications of mass production upon our concept of the human).
The Toaster Project stems from work Thwaites undertook while at design school. His premise is that he wants to build a toaster entirely from scratch. He explains his reasons, which he also delightfully admits were developed after he had already settled on the toaster. As the book proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that he has stumbled upon a truly brilliant idea.
After all, how does one go about building a toaster? Just what is it? The question immediately invites us to reflect upon all of the myriad objects we encounter in our daily lives about which we have likely little to no idea (1) how they work, (2) how they were made, (3) who made them, (4) what they made them out of, (5) where they made them, and the list goes on. To encounter an object like a toaster, especially after reading Thwaites’s book, is to experience a radical alienation, or rather, it is the experience of encountering a pervasive alienation in which we have already been living.
Thwaites writes in a voice that is fun and light-hearted. His account of the meetings he had with a mining professor are particularly hilarious. Although, by the end of the book, I am not sure it would be possible to use the information Thwaites has assembled to build a toaster of one’s own, his account of the challenges he encountered along the way highlights the sheer complexity of the task. This complexity is particularly obvious when it comes to obtaining materials like plastic or metals, which require operations at an immensely large scale to perform in a cost-effective way. Even when avoiding the use of certain materials (which Thwaites is forced to do in a couple of instances), the overall cost of Thwaites’s homemade toaster vastly exceeds the one from the store.
Wondertoast
The end result of Thwaites’s book is not that he discovers a way to escape late capitalism or overcome the dread toaster-making industry. Instead, his efforts have revealed several hidden implications of being able to buy a $5.00 toaster at the Superstore down the street (actually, since he’s from the UK, that should be in pounds and refer to the local Argos).
As I continue the project of trying to develop a theology of how things work, these revelations appear to have significance. In my post on barcodes, I drew attention to the different kind of world that grocery stores pre-barcodes represented. This different world is not necessarily better or worse than the present one; however, it is different. It is out of those differences that theological reflection becomes possible. (Having said that, I am also trying to be cognizant of the pressure for theological reflection to collapse into merely aesthetical, ethical, or missional analyses).
The alternative world that Thwaites’s toaster makes possible is one where appliances like a toaster don’t cost $5; they cost $2000 (or more). Also, the toaster would bear the marks of the person who made it; in Thwaites’s case, the toaster looks like something out of a horror movie, all lumpy and misformed. Ultimately, that alternative world is likely one that would ask whether a toaster is actually a necessary object at all.
One of the most fascinating sections in Thwaites’s book is where he talks about the history of so-called labour-saving devices like the toaster. He describes the challenges that electrical companies had when they first got started in the early 1900s. To manage the significant gap in demand for electricity experienced by new electricity customers, who would use electricity a lot in the evening but almost not at all during the day, “a way to increase demand outside of peak hours was needed, and electrical appliances proved successful at doing just that.” Toasters did not fill an actual need. After all, as Thwaites observes, bread on a stick over a fire will work too.
Manufactured demand (which Thwaites calls “the story of the twentieth century”) is another name for treating people as objects rather than persons. Theologically speaking, this orientation towards human beings fails to treat them as imagebearers. Of course, manufactured demand is just one mechanism within the much larger system of late capitalism, which would require much more space than is available here to analyze.
There is a moment in the book where Thwaites describes how he and a friend went to search for one of the components in the toaster: mica. They travel to Scotland, where Thwaites has been told there is a long-since abandoned mica mine. It’s a thrilling section, where Thwaites and his friend nearly get lost in the Highlands without mobile coverage. Ultimately, they are unable to find the mine. But, as the sun begins to set and Thwaites begins to despair of returning home, he realizes that he can simply cut sheets of mica from the rock face with his knife. It’s a wild moment and, for me, raises a less pessimistic way of approaching technology.
I think my barcode post displays this sentiment somewhat as well, but doing a deep dive into any technology can be a really exhilarating experience. The ingenuity of people, the astonishing qualities of the created world, the sophistication of the processes involved in production: all of these qualities emerge almost unbidden from an encounter with technology. We get to experience “wonder” in a manner that I think perhaps people experienced more often a century ago. As G.K. Chesterton observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.” (Interestingly, I first read that quote in an essay that Thomas Thwaites linked to: Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil,” which I will be writing another post about.) If we slow down sufficiently to consider the objects around us, to allow the mist that envelopes them to settle, we may discover a wonder in them that opens up a path back to reality.
The problem with objects like the toaster is that they occlude their operations. Surrounded by these objects—both individual ones that you can hold in your hand and much, much larger ones that are more like huge networks of occlusion (what I call “a site of dislocation” elsewhere)—we occupy a space of abstraction. Such abstraction makes possible evil conditions such as “manufactured demand.” Yet it is possible to discover a path out of abstraction—a path that reveals rather than occludes: Thomas Thwaites’s book forges such a path.