There was a time when people were known by what they crafted. Not in the modern branding sense, but in a deeply local and personal way. Bill the butcher. Brian the blacksmith. Allan the accountant. The person and the profession were intertwined because the work itself carried traces of the individual. A blacksmith’s work was not simply functional output. It carried touch, rhythm, judgement and feel.
The craftsperson left something of themselves within the work. Reputation spread not through advertising campaigns or institutional prestige, but through lived experience, word of mouth and direct relationship.
The artisan did not work for a brand. The artisan was the brand.
Industrialisation changed that relationship profoundly. As production scaled, work became fragmented into repeatable functions that could be standardised, measured and replicated. The local workshop gave way to the factory and eventually the corporation. Identity slowly migrated upward into institutions. Increasingly, people derived meaning not from the uniqueness of their contribution, but from the organisations they belonged to. The logo grew larger while the individual became interchangeable.
Even professionalism itself became homogenised through uniforms, business cards, standardised communication, office etiquette and corporate language. Humans adapted themselves to systems designed around efficiency, consistency and productivity.
What is interesting, however, is that industrialisation did not merely mechanise physical labour. It industrialised intellect itself. Much of modern white-collar work consists of repetitive informational processing: emails, administration, compliance, workflow management, reporting, data entry, meeting culture and procedural communication.
In many ways, the office became a cognitive factory. The worker no longer shaped material through embodied participation, but processed abstractions through systems. And while industrial society undoubtedly produced extraordinary abundance, it also flattened many of the sensory and experiential dimensions of life. The system optimised for scale, speed and standardisation, often at the expense of flavour, texture, locality and identity.
The tomato is a surprisingly useful metaphor for this.
Once upon a time there were hundreds of tomato varieties shaped by local climates, local soils, local tastes and seasonal rhythms. Industrial agriculture gradually reduced that diversity to a handful of commercially efficient varieties selected for transportability, shelf life and visual consistency. The result was abundance in quantity but contraction in experience.
The modern supermarket tomato is often perfectly formed yet strangely tasteless. Something similar appears to have happened culturally. Industrial systems created mass production, mass communication, mass branding and mass identity. They delivered scale but often at the cost of richness and distinction.
And yet beneath that industrial surface, another impulse appears to have remained alive. What I find fascinating is that many contemporary cultural trends seem less like fashionable lifestyle choices and more like pressure release valves for something deeply human that has been suppressed for generations.
People increasingly gravitate toward slow food, gardening, farmers markets, handmade pasta, live music, artisan bread, craft beer, boutique accommodation and local experiences.
Many of these activities were once considered ordinary, even mundane. Some were dismissed as unproductive domestic labour. Now they return as aspiration. Not because they are efficient, but because they feel alive.
Even language itself seems to be changing in response to this shift. In sport, commentators increasingly speak about a player’s craft rather than merely their skill. The distinction matters. Skill sounds technical and mechanical. Craft suggests intuition, rhythm, timing, touch and feel. It implies embodied intelligence rather than programmed execution. A player with craft senses space and flow. They improvise. They shape moments rather than merely perform instructions. This is kinaesthetic language. It reflects a growing appreciation for felt experience and embodied knowing rather than purely mechanical output.
The same linguistic movement appears within business culture.
Traditional corporate language was heavily industrial and militaristic: execution, targets, command and control, market capture, frontline staff and strategic domination. Increasingly those terms coexist with very different language: alignment, flow, storytelling, resonance, authenticity, collaboration, energy and culture.
Even business itself increasingly borrows artisanal terminology through phrases like crafted experiences, boutique firms, founder-led brands, creator economies and bespoke services. The machine metaphor appears to be weakening while the artisan metaphor quietly returns.
This is where AI enters the conversation in a surprisingly paradoxical way.
Most people assume AI represents the final triumph of industrialisation: infinite productivity, infinite scale and infinite automation. Yet there is another possibility worth considering. AI may industrialise the very aspects of human labour that industrial society already reduced humans into performing. Repetitive informational work. Procedural administration. Generic content production. Compliance systems. Standardised communication.
If machines increasingly absorb those functions, then the economic value of repetitive human cognition may begin to diminish. And if that happens, human value may shift elsewhere.
Toward what exactly?
Toward the things industrial systems have always struggled to replicate: taste, discernment, creativity, intuition, philosophy, emotional resonance, storytelling, presence and embodied expression. In other words, toward the return of the artisan principle. Not necessarily the literal return of medieval trades, but the return of the human signature within the work.
Once generic production becomes abundant, distinction regains value. And distinction often emerges through sensibility rather than scale.
Perhaps that is why so many people today seem to hunger not merely for products, but for experiences carrying evidence of human presence. People pay premiums for handmade goods, local food, live performance and founder-led businesses not simply because the products are superior, but because they contain traces of personhood.
The artisan leaves an imprint within the creation. Industrial systems attempt to erase those imprints in pursuit of uniformity. But the soul, it seems, continually yearns to reinsert itself back into the world.
Which raises the deeper possibility that what we are witnessing is not merely a lifestyle trend or market correction, but a broader cultural rebalancing.
The industrial age compressed human beings into units of production. AI may ultimately automate much of that productive machinery. And in doing so, it may force us to rediscover aspects of ourselves that industrial civilisation sidelined for centuries: flavour, craft, intuition, embodiment, creativity, rhythm and meaning.
Perhaps the future will not belong solely to those who can produce the most, but to those who can bring the most presence into what they create.