Pod Insights a16z Podcast Technologies & Threads Through the Fabric of Our Lives About this episode with @vpostrel @smc90
In this deep dive conversation about The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, we cover everything from science and math across several fields; to commerce to management & measurement; to the always-meta narrative of HOW innovation happens…
Transcript 11,543 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Sonal? Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z Podcast. I'm Sonal Choksi and as your primary host, editor and showrunner here of the past seven years, I wanted to share some favorite episodes selected for you, not just by me, but by you, as they were very popular among listeners, too, as I get ready to make a change to other shows. The third of these three special rerun episodes is a conversation that originally took place in October 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, hence some initial sound issues, but they quickly get resolved, so make sure to hang on. And it's probably my personal single most favorite episode, which is a really hard thing to say after overseeing nearly, what, 700-plus episodes? But for me, it perfectly captures how I think of the signature identity of this show and my work, which is at the intersection of
0:45 Sonal? technology and humanity. And in it, we cover everything from science and math across several fields, to commerce, to management and measurement, to the always meta-narrative of how innovation happens. Again, this will be my last episode here for a while. The team will be putting this feed on hiatus while they relaunch it with a new host. So in the meantime, you can continue to follow my work, both here at A6 and Z and other projects on Twitter at SMC90. Thank you as well to our brilliant audio editors, expert guests, and several others here. But most of all, I want to say a most heartfelt thank you to you all for listening, sharing, engaging, and coming along with me and us on this
1:27 Sonal? journey the past decade. Stay tuned for more. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z Podcast. I'm Sonal. Today, we have the very first episode for a new book coming out November 10 by Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, which is all about the central role of textiles in the history of technology, science, commerce, civilization itself. But it's really a history and evolution of innovation across all kinds of fields, so there's something for everyone in this episode. Virginia has written several bestselling books, including The Substance of Style, a longtime favorite of mine, The Power of Glamour, which I excerpted when I was at Wired. She also wrote The Future and Its Enemies in the late 90s and was a
2:12 Sonal? former editor-in-chief of Reason and has been a columnist for various magazines and newspapers. And currently, she has a regular column in Bloomberg Opinion. But we're here today to talk about her soon-to-be-released book.
2:25 Speaker 01 And in the long discussion that follows, probably the longest we've done here, we both delve deep as well as lightly dip into a wide range of topics. The first segment covers fabrics from the genetics of cotton to the supply chain of silk, including early machines, early management techniques, what was considered expertise. We then cover the storage and transmission of knowledge, both explicit and tacit, including artifacts and manuals to notation and measurement, and especially mathematics, touching briefly on NASA's space program, needing in AI and the environmental impact of dyes. And in the last section, we go meta on how innovation happens.
3:07 Speaker 01 From the zeitgeist of the times to the dynamics of codifying and sharing knowledge and the industrial enlightenment to the demographics and symbols involved, we actually go deep on the story of evolution of and meaning of kentukla and other patterns in Ghana, to finally ending on the difference between cultures and civilizations. Because the through line that resonated most deeply with me throughout this book is that the story of textiles is one of human ingenuity, which is also what this podcast, the A6 and Z podcast, is all about. Please do also go ahead and rate us in your podcast app when you have a moment. And now let me welcome Virginia. Virginia, I'm so excited to have you. Welcome.
3:51 Speaker 02 Thank you.
3:52 Speaker 01 So I'm not going to ask you the obvious question, which is, why did you write this book? First of all, I know why you wrote the book because we talked about it over many, many long dinners.
3:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, right. I mean, this book wouldn't exist without you.
4:01 Speaker 01 Oh, one of my favorite things is you actually talk about the metaphors we use. And you call them heirloom metaphors, but tell me about some of these metaphors. I mean, you basically say we catch airline shuttles, we weave through traffic, we follow comment threads, like all our listeners have done all of those things.
4:17 Speaker 02 Right. Well, first of all, let's start with heirloom. So heirloom is a reference to a loom. And the reason that we have this word is that a loom was a piece of capital equipment. And so it would get passed down as a valuable thing.
4:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:35 Speaker 02 But some of the more fun ones are ones that we have no idea, like untenter hooks. When people would make wool cloth, and I've seen this in museums in England, after they would weave it, they would do what's called fulling, which is a combination of wetting it and pounding it and using what's called fuller's earth on it. And it felt it, it made it thicker and more waterproof. And then they would stretch the wool on these really vicious looking little hooks on a rectangular frame, like nails sticking out.
5:14 Speaker 02 And when you see these tenter hooks, you realize, oh, my goodness, that tension, that feeling of tension, I see why that metaphor came to be.
5:24 Speaker 01 Perfect. So your very first opening quote in the book is, "The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." And that quote is from Mark Weiser in A Computer for the 21st Century, which is like a paper he wrote in 1991. Tell me about why you started with that quote.
5:47 Speaker 02 I love this quote for two reasons. The first is that it's profoundly true. The most significant technologies are the ones that disappear. But the other is, you see what he did there?
5:59 Speaker 01 Well, I see what you did there.
6:01 Speaker 02 I don't even think he realized what he was doing. Maybe he did. It proves my point that this ancient ubiquitous technology is really important. And I want people to pay attention to it and to pay attention to all the ingenuity that goes into the fabric that surrounds us.
6:22 Speaker 01 A little known fact about that Mark Weiser quote, and I remember this when I was at Park and I was writing up like some language for Living Museum Project. And one of the things that I found fascinating is we had these quotes about how he also said that not only are the most profound technologies the ones that disappear, but that sometimes technology should be that when you leave a pencil behind in a meeting. You never go back and feel like, oh, no, I have to go grab that pencil. Like, you're fine discarding that pencil. Like, it can be discarded. And it's, and it's just, that is what he thought of as ubiquitous computing. And of course, it's the opposite with how technology has come out today in terms of, you know, we actually want to keep our smartphones, they're not like a pencil. But the idea that something can become so ubiquitous as to be discarded.
7:06 Speaker 01 I love that quote also evokes that, which I don't know if you're aware that it did. But you yourself in the book talk about how we suffer textile amnesia because we enjoy textile abundance. And I thought that was so profound.
7:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's perfect. I didn't know that about Mark Weiser, who also, by the way, uses in that article, the metaphor of seamlessness, which is another, another textile metaphor. And this really has mostly happened in my lifetime, I'm 60, where textiles have just become so abundant and so cheap that we really don't think about them. I mean, obviously, I'm really contrasting it to a pre-industrial period, where to make enough thread to weave the fabric in a pair of jeans would take something like 13 eight-hour days. And that's the fastest spinners in the world.
8:05 Speaker 02 And that's just making the thread. That's not preparing the fiber to make the thread. It's not weaving, it's not dyeing, it's not any of the other processes. So we live in this world where fabric is everywhere and it's really cheap. And in fact, my friend Adam Benter has a great book called Secondhand that's in part about the secondhand trade in clothes, among other things, also electronics. And so we do take it for granted. We don't think about where it comes from. And we don't think about the labor or the ingenuity over thousands and thousands of years.
8:43 Speaker 01 This is exactly where there's parallels to technology. Because you point out, I never actually even thought about this, that The agricultural revolution was as much about fiber as it was food. But the industrial revolution did bring all these technologies. And as you point out, like the hours that goes into making thread, the cost reductions and everything that that then enables. That's exactly what's playing out with technology right now. If you talk about transistors being cheap and almost so ubiquitous as to be wasted, so abundant
9:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:10 Speaker 01 forgotten, which is why I love the quote you open with so, so much.
9:15 Speaker 02 So driving home the same point. The other thing that I do in that intro is Arthur C. Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
9:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's one of his three laws.
9:29 Speaker 02 Right, exactly. And what I say in the preface is, "Any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature." What I'm thinking about there is we know intellectually that it's not natural, that somebody made it, that there were machines involved and
9:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:50 Speaker 02 chemistry and all these things, but we never really think about. So that's what I was getting at. But there's also in the first chapter, which is about fiber, a very important point, I think, which is that there's no such thing as natural fibers. All of these, what I would call biological fibers, like cotton and wool and linen and silk are the product of many, many small concerted human interventions. They're basically genetically modified organisms. In some cases, it's extreme, like with silk. Others, like cotton, naturally doesn't grow
10:33 Speaker 02 in most of the major cotton producing parts of the world because they're above the frost line. And so if in that natural state, it would never make bolts. It would just freeze and that would be the end of it. But humans gradually modified it. And there's sort of mysteries of why they would do that.
10:53 Speaker 01 This is actually one of my favorite stories in the book, which is you kind of go on this genetics cleaving mission to figure out like the origination of how we were able to turn cotton into this more reproducible type of cotton, I guess, to grossly simplify it. I'd love you to quickly tell that story.
11:08 Speaker 02 So there are really two stories. One is a science story that's about the origins of cotton. Because there are around 50 cotton species around the world. And only one of them developed fiber originally. And that was a species that geneticists called A. And it came in Africa. And then somehow, this is the great mystery. Somehow it got to Mexico.
11:41 Speaker 01 Did it float? Did it go on a boat? Like, what happened?
11:44 Speaker 02 This is the mystery. So it got to Mexico and it crossbred with a native species there that didn't have fiber. And it produced what geneticists referred to as AD. The Mexican species was D. And this is what is known in biology as a polyphoidal plant, which is common in the plant world. It means it has twice as many chromosomes. And so therefore, there's a lot more room to breed it, get more variety. Well, I interviewed this cotton geneticist named Jonathan Wendell. And he said, when he was first studying cotton genetics, there were two theories. One was that this crossing the ocean thing happened back
12:27 Speaker 02 when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the continents were still stuck together. And the other was, oh, well, human beings must have brought it on boats. It was what he calls the Contiki hypothesis, after the explorer Thor Hirdahl early in the mid 20th century.
12:43 Speaker 02 But we now know from genetic research that it was neither of those, that somehow this cotton got from Africa to Mexico after the continents split apart, but long, long before there were any human beings. It could have gotten caught up in a hurricane, it could have gotten on a piece of pumice, we don't know, but we can use these genetic clocks to bracket roughly how long it was. So, we owe cotton to this weird, random, unusual event. And by the way, so unusual that it hasn't happened again. Right. It only happened once. It's two things that only happened once. One was
13:23 Speaker 02 that a species of cotton developed fiber. And then two was that it crossed the ocean and developed this rich genetic code that could be manipulated in various ways. So, then people come along. And there's old world cotton and new world cotton. In the old world, cotton was being raised in places like India that are in the tropics. But somehow, we know that cotton spread with the spread of Islam, and it spread into places that were too far north for the cotton to grow. It spread in places that had frost. Why is that? And my theory is it because they wouldn't have planted it there unless they already
14:07 Speaker 02 had cotton that would grow there. So, it must have come from places like India. And why would Indians raise cotton that could survive frost? It's a tropical climate. It's a tropical climate. They don't need to. So, my theory is it might have been a commercial consideration. That essentially, if your cotton bloomed first, you could get to market earlier and get a jump on the competition. And so, over time, there would be sort of competitive pressures to get cotton to bloom earlier and earlier. And then, once it bloomed early enough, like the cotton we have today, it would be good for planting farther north.
14:52 Speaker 02 Now, there is a competing theory, which is that it had something to do with controlling pests. But we don't know. This is one of the great mysteries of cotton. So, nowadays, most of the cotton in the world, 90%, is the species that originated on the Yucatan Peninsula, which is called Gassipium hercetum. And it didn't survive terribly well above the frost line late into the 19th century. And so I tell the story of this not so savory character who discovered a cotton in Mexico, and he brought it to the American South and that could grow above the frost line.
15:34 Speaker 01 You know, there's so many threads. And in fact, oh, my God, I keep saying that. And I saw it's not a pun, Virginia. I keep saying thread, and it's actually a word I really legitimately have.
15:41 Speaker 02 Totally. You can't, you can't avoid it.
15:43 Speaker 01 We're just gonna notice it all the time now. So a couple of quick notes on the story you just told about cotton. There's some details in your book about not only that Islam spread cotton, but you almost allude in that section that maybe the adoption accelerated because of cotton. That's one of the interesting ideas I noticed.
16:01 Speaker 02 It was a desire to get out from under certain landowners and, and sort of strike out on their own. And there were ways you could do that by raising cotton that were connected with also converting to Islam.
16:17 Speaker 01 So fascinating. And then the other thread, too, you talk about the British Empire in India, and people wanted Indian calico, but then the East India Company put limits on that. And then it kind of pushed other manufacturers like Italian to come up and step up to the plate. And then also, and this is so top of mind today, too, you talk about the kind of ugly part of this history, that it's the cotton gin and the history of slavery in the South, and even the observation that the South is not as un-tech savvy as people portrayed, you know, compared to, quote, the Yankee North. So I hope people pick it up and read it to find out more about this fascinating, terrifying history of all of that. What I want to focus on in this conversation, and this kind of follows how you organize
16:59 Speaker 01 your book, from fiber to thread to cloth, to dye, to traders, to consumers, is you describe the evolution of what allowed us to mass make cotton and the steps into that. Let's talk a bit about the supply chain and vertical integration and trade aspects. And that's kind of a big jump, but I think it's still a great jump to make.
17:19 Speaker 02 Well, one of the things that is the case in all types of textiles is that you have a long supply chain. Well, you have a lot of stages and there's a long delay between when you say raise the cotton and when somebody gets paid for the cloth. So one thing that is the case throughout textile history is that you have to have a lot of innovation around working capital, the different ways of people getting paid. So that's one aspect. Textiles force human beings to think at a very early stage in civilization about financial questions,
18:03 Speaker 02 about how do you pay for things where you're providing inputs rather than the final finished product? Because you could raise sheep and you shear sheep and you spin wool and you weave, but those things were not necessarily done in the same household, right? In some ways, the most interesting developments around the supply chain take place in silk for the reason that it is a luxury fiber and also because it's really complicated. So tell us about the silk and supply chain. Okay, so silk, I discovered while working on this book, a lot of people don't know
18:41 Speaker 02 where it comes from. So let's start there. Silk comes from silkworms, Bombix mori, which are basically caterpillars that have been bred over many centuries originally in China to feed on mulberry leaves and produce cocoons. And the eggs need tending, the caterpillars need tending, they need to be fed, they need to be given sticks to build their cocoons on. And then, once they make the cocoons, they're put into boiling water, which kills the insect inside and keeps it from emerging as a moth and breaking. There's a single
19:26 Speaker 02 filament that makes the cocoon. So, once you've done that, you need to get that filament off the cocoons. And so you have skilled people who know how to take filaments off of multiple cocoons and create thread. And there's a lot of tacit knowledge involved in that. And that's called reeling, because it goes on these big reels. And then... Often you, when you want to make stronger thread, you have a stage that's called throwing, where you twist two threads together to make a stronger one. And then you need to get that on bobbins, and that's just the thread.
20:10 Speaker 02 So one of the most amazing things that I discovered when I was working on the book are these giant factories, 24/7, hundreds of people that started in Italy and had their heyday in the 16th and 17th century. So this is before the Industrial Revolution. That was their heyday, but they started earlier. And they were organized around these very large, two-story throwing machines that were hydraulically powered. They would go down to the basement and there would be a source of water power. And they're all made of wood. They're precision machines. It's just amazing.
20:51 Speaker 02 There are museums throughout northern Italy where you can see them. So the machines are amazing enough, but it wasn't just the machines. They developed sophisticated management techniques. First of all, they vertically integrated. They didn't grow the cocoons. They went from cocoon to thread for export. And then that thread would go to Lyon, which was the silk capital in Europe. I think most of us, and I would include myself here, think about factories and management as starting with the Industrial Revolution, maybe starting with Wedgewood. And this is actually before that. Yeah. First of all, they are operating 24/7.
21:35 Speaker 02 And I asked a historian who covers them, like, what did they do for light? And he said they had torches. And I said, that doesn't sound very safe. And he said, no, it wasn't. And they developed measurement techniques. They developed standardized weights. They developed standardized tools for measuring things. One of the things they developed, which is used to this day, is the idea of measuring the fineness of thread by having a standard measure of length.
22:08 Speaker 02 And then how much the thread weighed, given that length, which gives you some idea that ratio can tell you how fine the thread is. I mean, when you wander into the textile world, one of the things that's really disorienting is they have all these weird ways of measuring things like Dernier. What is a Dernier? You know, you may have noticed that when you buy stockings. And it's from that idea of a certain amount of weight per, for a standard measurement. So they developed a lot of techniques like that. And this was proto-industry. So then the question comes, well, why isn't that the Industrial Revolution?
22:53 Speaker 02 You know, why isn't that the factory that changed? And the reason is that silk is a luxury. It's a niche market. It can't change the world. You don't make sails out of silk. You don't make sacks out of silk. You don't close your armies with silk. All of these uses for other textiles don't apply to silk. So a lot of techniques and machines were developed and they did influence later developments, but they weren't revolutionary in the way that transforming everyday textiles was.
23:26 Speaker 01 Isn't that so fascinating? Because it's such an inversion from kind of revolutionary tech today. Because in that world, you did need mass, both through the capital outlays that you described, you know, that the financing and everything required and the mass production of things. But in today's world, the inverse is happening where we have like sort of this elite niche, kind of more long tail driven economy in many ways because of the internet, of course.
23:48 Speaker 02 Another way of thinking of it is often new technologies start very expensive. I mean, who used original computers? It was big businesses. They were big expensive pieces of capital equipment and then they got smaller and smaller. Now we carry them around our pockets. You sometimes have sort of luxury items as the first.
24:11 Speaker 02 Way into a technology because you can finance it that way and justify higher price. Now, I don't want to push it too far. That actually applies in terms of silk versus other things more to the development of looms and the draw loom and jacquard and his famous punch cards, the one thing that all technology people know about.
24:35 Speaker 01 So you have this phrase, management measure machines. And those three words just popped out to me because that to me is the art of technology and startups as well, or any business enterprise. But then you do point out a fourth M, which is the role of the maestra, which I didn't know what that was.
24:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:52 Speaker 01 Tell us about the role of the maestra and how this thing, that's the why that's so significant in this supply chain and evolution from cloth to industry.
25:00 Speaker 02 So the maestra, that's the singular, is a woman with many, many years of experience at reeling, that is, taking these incredibly fine, I mean, they're, they're strong, but they're like less than a human hair, finds off of the cocoons and twisting them in together into a single thread and the very best could do, make thread out of just two. And keep in mind, these are natural fibers, they're biological, they are not totally consistent. So one of the skills is matching the, matching up these fibers so that they are as consistent as possible.
25:45 Speaker 02 Because that makes the best thread. So it's a really, really high skilled job.
25:50 Speaker 01 One might even call it pattern matching, but can you go?
25:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is pattern matching. It is a form of pattern matching, along with a lot of manual skills as well. And you learn how to do it because you spend many years as an apprentice, being the person who turns the reel that takes up the thread while the maestra is doing this and you're watching her. So you might spend 15 years doing that and acquiring all of that tacit knowledge. And these women were very well paid for the time because they were making a luxury product, but they thought about how to supervise people, they thought about incentives. So for example, the maestrae were not paid by the
26:36 Speaker 02 The amount they produced because they wanted to ensure quality, they were paid by the day or by the time.
26:44 Speaker 01 Oh, by the way, I underline that because I thought that was such a great example of incentive alignment, like modern management practice thinks about these very questions.
26:53 Speaker 02 Right, exactly. So they were thinking about incentive alignment.
26:56 Speaker 01 So you mentioned the ratio and this sort of mathematical problem solving that was already happening with the threading that the maestra did, the thinness, the thickness, et cetera. You also mentioned, you know, in the book as well, you open with this idea that technology means so much more than electronics or machines, which I love, and that is exactly what the book is about. But also, to me, the theme of this book, and in fact, of the article that you did for Eon Magazine, the one that I set you up with for with Ross for, is that the story of textiles is one of technology and science. And so now let's switch to talking about the math. You have this great quote that spinning trains
27:38 Speaker 01 the hands, but weaving challenges the mind. Like music, it is profoundly mathematical. Weavers have to understand ratios, detect prime numbers, and calculate areas and lengths. Manipulating warps turns threads into rows and rows into patterns, points into lines and lines into planes. Woven cloth represents some of humanity's earliest algorithms. It has embodied code. I love this, Virginia. So talk to me and tell me about the math of textiles and more of the story there.
28:15 Speaker 02 First of all, I have to note that in researching the book, I learned how to weave on a hand loop.
28:22 Speaker 01 I did not know that. That's so fair.
28:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It challenges me because I'm not very good in three dimensions, and you have to think in three dimensions, even though you're producing two dimensional stuff. It is kind of complicated. One point that I make in the book is that weaving is the original binary code, by which I don't blame Jakarta and his punch cards. That came long, long after. It's all up, down, on, off, one, zero. That is woven into the cloth itself. And then also, there's this idea of math as the science of patterns. And I talk in the chapter about Andy and weaving and the use of symmetry. And the people who are doing it aren't necessarily thinking, I'm following algorithms.
29:09 Speaker 02 It's sort of like the old thing about, I'm speaking prose. But it is profoundly mathematical. And one of the really interesting speculative theories that I talk about, it is the idea that Greek arithmetic might have originated by the challenges of working on warp-weighted looms. Because you have to know about prime numbers, especially on those types of looms and the techniques that they use. And another thing which I didn't get into the book, Judy Fraeder, who ran the place that I went to in India where I learned how to do printing and dyeing.
29:50 Speaker 02 She makes the point that in creating these complex printed fabrics in India, there's a tremendous amount of ratios because you want to get the repeats exactly right. You need to be able to think mathematically to get things to look right.
30:08 Speaker 01 That's fantastic. One note in the later part of the book is you talk about this 1976 study from Dan Egmond. And it talks about Abacus manuscripts and books and how he emphasizes their practicality. And the classical view of mathematics inherited from the Greeks was the study of abstract logic and ideal forms, whereas the Abacus books treat math as useful, which I thought was so fascinating. Because when I think of the fundamental challenge of learning and teaching mathematics, which is like my old world of work and research, that is the challenge right there.
30:44 Speaker 02 Yeah. So first of all, these Abacus manuscripts have a very misleading name. Yeah. They're the opposite of Abacus manuscripts. In fact, they're teaching people how to do pen and paper calculation, not how to use an abacus. And there's a history, which I explained about why they're called that. But you had in the early modern period in Italy, the development of these schools where people who were going to be merchants would go when they're kids. To learn how to do arithmetic, sort of in between calculation and algebra. They do all these word problems, which if you were solving them today, you would set up with
31:27 Speaker 02 variables and unknowns. And this was driven by essentially the need of textile merchants to this new type of arithmetic, which was incorporating the Hindu Arabic numbers and the zero, all of these things that were moving away from using Roman numerals. So these are business problems. A lot of them have to do with the currency conversions, with lengths. And if you get this much money for this length, then how much would you get for this length? All of this sort of thing. But it's the cloth trade driving a kind of mathematical education. And one thing that's interesting is that these teachers were
32:11 Speaker 02 the first Europeans to make a living just by math.
32:15 Speaker 01 Oh, right.
32:17 Speaker 02 Schools, and they would also hire out as consultants, particularly for various construction projects where they would be doing more sort of geometrical calculations. So that was driven largely by the textile trade.
32:31 Speaker 01 I love that. I can't even tell you on so many levels. So knitting is such an interesting thing to me because a lot of people describe how knitting is technology. And so I'd love for you to say more about the, the science and math of knitting.
32:44 Speaker 02 Well, the interesting characteristics of knitting mathematically have to do with its three dimensional qualities. So there's an actual mathematical paper called Any Topological Structure Can Be Knitted. And there are pictures in the book of things like Klein bottles that have been knitted. From a practical business point of view, this is very important because we are at a
33:13 Speaker 02 Technological moment where 3D knitting, which has been around for several decades, is becoming more and more important. And it's driven by the mathematical characteristics of knitting, the computing power and the shift where after millennia of being completely dominant, weaving is losing its market to knitting. Knitting is a relatively new way of making fiber. It started around 1200, whereas weaving goes back at least 9,000 years, probably more.
33:52 Speaker 01 And why is knitting taking over weaving? That was so surprising.
33:55 Speaker 02 So it's taking over weaving mostly because it's more comfortable, because it stretches in multiple dimensions. Also, a lot of the athletic wear that drives technological innovation in the textile and apparel industries, athletic wear and outdoor wear is knitted. A lot of it is just this drive for comfort, which has only been accelerated by the pandemic.
34:21 Speaker 01 You make a funny note in the book about what you're wearing while you're writing it. And of course, I chuckled because every time I met up with you, we'd wear nice clothes.
34:28 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, this is what I said. Everything I'm wearing, except my jeans, my underwear, shirt, sweaters, socks, even my sneakers is made from knitted fabric. But this incredible expansion of knitting feeds into the business side too, where, okay, we have this ability to do three dimensional knitting. It has historically not been as economical as making big pieces of cloth and cutting and sewing. But it does allow us to make more to order so that your inventories are in thread rather than in finished garments or cloth. It allows more variety.
35:11 Speaker 02 There are advantages to it and you can knit an entire garment.
35:18 Speaker 02 With no seams. Traditionally, most of the knitting that you have in your closet is pieced together, sewn together, just like woven fabrics.
35:28 Speaker 01 I don't know if you realize that you said that the comfort quality of knitting is that it's essentially seamless. And that, of course, goes back to the Mark Weiser quote, because earlier you said that the other word in his big paper was seamless.
35:40 Speaker 02 It can be seamless. And that is, in fact, what Shimaseki, who is the company that first innovated this three dimensional knitting, although they're not the only company to do it now, they sold it as the seamless garment.
35:56 Speaker 01 Got it. And by the way, because our listeners are very curious, and this is what I love about everyone, the paper, if they're interested, that you referenced is, quote, "Every topological surface can be knit approved." And the journal, the full name is a Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, and it's from June 2009. And the authors are Sarah Marie Bel Castro and Carolyn Yakel.
36:16 Speaker 02 Thank you.
36:17 Speaker 01 And it was also in Math Horizons in November 2006. So those are the sources. By the way, on the 3D notion of knitting, have you heard of this project called Skynet, which is basically a neural net that generates new patterns for knitting? Have you read about this?
36:31 Speaker 02 I haven't.
36:32 Speaker 01 Oh, you would love this. I'm going to send you an article about it. It's on Janelle Shane's work, and she does a lot of creative AI type experiments. But she basically took the knitting forum Revelry, and she trained a neural network on a series of 500 knitting instructions, and then she generated new instructions, and that the Revelry community has actually attempted to knit. It's just one of my favorite stories of online thing.
36:55 Speaker 02 I'm not surprised it exists.
36:57 Speaker 01 One of my other favorite stories is, and this is an Instagrammer I follow who's Shannon Downey, because I'm super into all the fabric textile artists, and she basically had heard about this unfinished quilt.
37:09 Speaker 02 And that, you know, they found a box full of fabric and discovered it was a massive quilting project that was just begun and it was mapped out. And so, so many people on the internet joined up to quilt this quilt and it's called Rita's Quilt and they just completed it. In that case, it's more technology for collaboration than for creation, but it's a segue to my next question, which is, let's talk about the artifacts and really this theme of, of record keeping and the transmission of textile knowledge. That's like another really interesting theme in your book. And so I'd love to probe on that a bit. So traditionally textile knowledge is transferred through apprenticeship, either formal, like there were these apprenticeships in Europe,
37:53 Speaker 02 they were highly regulated and such, or informal within families or villages or whatever. But you have a shift in the early modern period in Europe. There's more documentation in China earlier, but you have a shift in the early modern period where there's this idea in the air that it's a good thing to share knowledge as opposed to keeping it secret. Yeah, it's in the zeitgeist. It's in the zeitgeist and it's very important in the history of technology and science. And the touchstone example is Dieter Rose Encyclopedia, which in fact includes a lot of documentation of how various looms work and source of some of the illustrations
38:38 Speaker 02 of my book. But in my research, I found a couple of less well-known examples. One is the first dye manual, which is called the plecto. It seems to come from some word for envelope. And essentially we had an Italian guy who went around over a long period of time, prizing various recipes out of dyers. And he published the first dye manual, sort of like a recipe book. It tells you use this much of this and this much of that. So that's one. And then the other one, which is very interesting because it reminds us how important notation is, is the first weaving manual. Nowadays, if you go online, Ravelry has these
39:23 Speaker 02 weaving drafts, which is a form of notation that tells weavers how to set up a loom, which threads to raise, in what order to create pattern. Well, somebody had to invent that notation.
39:38 Speaker 02 And probably it was invented for personal use and it was secret. But there was a guy who was very frustrated that they would have to import textiles to get the good patterns. And he was like, no, we can do just as well. The problem is people are too secretive about the knowledge and they aren't teaching other people. So he put together a manual that was the first weaving manual. And there is a site called handweaving.net where they've turned a lot of these instructions into instructions for today. But this is a theme throughout the book that there is
40:18 Speaker 02 a tension because making textiles requires a lot of tacit knowledge, a lot of the kind of knowledge that's very difficult to write down and articulate, to talk about the maestra reeling cocoons. I mean, it would be very hard to convey that to another person. But there are other types of knowledge that can be codified. And so when there is this move toward codification, that really helps jumpstart a lot of technological progress because you're able to have people from outside fields to understand what's going on in other fields and maybe apply that in other ways.
41:01 Speaker 02 Or you just get people better able to understand the state of the art in technology and perhaps innovate on top of that. And then the notation that develops for organic chemistry is really important also. I don't use it in the book, but I do talk about the development of organic chemistry out of the dye industry.
41:22 Speaker 01 It was funny because all my friends in college were taking OChem, you know, the shorthand for organic chemistry. I remember just kind of enjoying the notational aspects of it. So basically, the notation, the manual encoding helped make the notation more standardized and common as well. And then there was a zeitgeist move of making the knowledge and artistry and weaving more public. You quote Ziegler, who did that original handbook, that quote, "I hold that it would be possible to produce many more artists in all branches of technology, if only there were no shortage of publishers," which I loved because what it told me is that that manual was basically the printing press moment of the textiles industry.
42:00 Speaker 02 Exactly. And this resonates so much with today in terms of all the riches we have available online, which includes not only printed stuff, but videos, which are incredibly important in people learning how to do things. But it also goes to the tensions that we have around copyright. The history of textiles is full of industrial espionage. I have a few examples in the book, but people are constantly trying to keep stuff secret and other people are trying to get it because it's very valuable.
42:36 Speaker 01 I'm glad that you shared that in the book. And I don't know if you know this, but I actually interviewed Joel Mokier on this podcast a number of years ago. Yeah, the podcast is called Knowledge Builds Technology and Technology Builds Knowledge. And it was about the Republic of Letters and its role in what he calls the Industrial Enlightenment.
42:54 Speaker 02 And I use that term a lot. Joel's work is really great. And I'm very influenced in my understanding of this zeitgeist moment by his work because you have this moment where you have craftsmen intersecting with codification, intersecting with scientists, and each feeds the other in ways that were not previously happening. And that really allows a certain kind of scientific and technological takeoff, particularly technological takeoff, because it gives people where to look for new advances and also just shares things across borders,
43:36 Speaker 02 shares things across class. You get to tap a lot more knowledge.
43:41 Speaker 01 You know, one of the things that fascinated me on the history of the knowledge transmission of of patterns and record keeping is the idea of storing things in song and in the cloth.
43:51 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
43:52 Speaker 01 And you talk about that in the book, and I thought that was so beautiful, yet so ephemeral. And so one thing I wonder, when you talked about how it's really important that we now have videos for so many, do you worry about the artifacts of the future and how future historians might come back into our time and look at some of this? I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, but I was intrigued by this idea, simply because you opened the book talking about how over half of the tablets that were uncovered on Crete when they were doing excavation of the ancient Minotaur labyrinth area, they were textile tablets.
44:26 Speaker 02 Right.
44:28 Speaker 01 And will future generations have those concrete artifacts? I'm very seduced by that idea of best morality and permanence.
44:34 Speaker 02 Well, I am a great supporter of the Internet Archive. I think it's incredibly important organization.
44:40 Speaker 01 We had Mr. Kale on the podcast.
44:41 Speaker 02 It's incredibly important. So do we lose this kind of traditional knowledge? One thing that's interesting is since about the 1970s, there's been a tremendous appreciation and recording of people's traditional knowledge about traditional crafts. And what interests me the most about that is not just that it happened and there's some really interesting stories about how it happened in different places, particularly Peru, but also that when you have a living textile tradition, it's very different from what people in developed countries sort of think it ought to be. It, you know, it's not static.
45:25 Speaker 02 It's not producing the same thing that the ancestors produced. It's subject to all the kinds of changes that affect all of us. And you have People adopting and adapting their traditional techniques for the world they actually live in, which is the 21st century world. And I tell some stories from Guatemala. And I've also written about some stories from Chiapas in Mexico. That was not the book. It's in our article. It's online. All of these things are on my website also.
45:55 Speaker 01 Great. I'll link to some in the show notes as well. One last question on this thread. I did think it was interesting that you talked about how programmers first wrote code using punch cards and this idea of how NASA produced rope memory.
46:08 Speaker 02 So there are two intersections between early computer memories and weaving. The first, which was the dominant form of computer memory before the development of silicon chips, was core memory. And essentially what you had was weaving. You had threads, copper wires going horizontally, intersecting with ones going vertically, just like cloth. And then at each intersection, you would have a ferrite donut. They were tiny, tiny, tiny.
46:50 Speaker 02 And by sending a certain electrical signal down the right thread, so to speak, you could flip the core from positive to negative, and it would be a one or a zero. And that's how essentially RAM was done.
47:11 Speaker 01 RAM is in random access memory, right?
47:13 Speaker 02 Random access memory. That was before silicon. That was like from the 50s to the 70s. That was how computer memory for most purposes was done. In the Apollo program, they needed to do essentially ROM, read-only memory.
47:32 Speaker 02 In a very stable and very compact and lightweight form, relatively lightweight. And essentially what they did was called rope memory. Instead of having the intersection of the warp and weft, so to speak, with a core that could flip, they would just, they would write the program on punch cards. They would debug it, they would get it all working and then they would code it into wires that either went over or under depending on if it was a one or a zero. And so it was literally software you could hold in your hand. It was this physical embodiment.
48:14 Speaker 02 I mean, I guess the punch cards are a physical embodiment too, but this was much more compact. And that was used in, in the Apollo program.
48:21 Speaker 01 And what is rope memory but the code that runs the space program? It's a perfect thread to end this section of how to store knowledge, transmit knowledge. I also love, throughout your book, there's actually a few semiconductor analogies slathered about. I finished Andy Grove's High Output Management book recently for the first time. And people have been telling me about it for years and I finally read it this year. And I was so struck though, by how much semiconductor manufacturing actually applies to creative work too. And it's just so fascinating when you see all the analogies from semiconductors to textiles as well. And in some of these creative crafts as well. So I just think that's fantastic. We don't have time to go into the dye chapter. You already pointed out how the dye industry was one of the earliest applications of some of the organic chemistry notation.
49:06 Speaker 01 But the one interesting fact that I wanted to quickly flick on in this chapter, which was really counterintuitive and quite surprising to me, especially because Mark, Andy McAfee and I did a podcast on his book, More from Less, is that people have this assumption that the past was more environmentally conscious than now. And in fact, that's not true.
49:26 Speaker 02 Yeah. One thing that people don't realize, particularly when they talk about natural dyes, is they're very messy, very smelly, indigo particularly, which is a wonderful, wonderful dye. But it stinks and it's not even the stinkiest dye that I talk about in the book. So there's that. And then the other thing is dyeing uses a lot of water. And I was really struck by this when I took dyeing classes in India in Adipur, which is in Kutch, which is a desert area. So
50:00 Speaker 01 It's in Gujarat.
50:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is.
50:01 Speaker 01 My home region.
50:02 Speaker 02 So it's not like water is plentiful, but I came from California, Southern California, and we were in a drought. And so I was hyper conscious of the use of water and they're just using tons of water, throwing the water in the yard, throwing the water in the yard. And this was not particularly polluting, but it really struck me, the combination of the history of dyes as this kind of thing that you wanted outside town. People didn't want to be next to dyers with this use of water even today. And I think when we think that in the olden times, everything was environmentally benign, that's partly a
50:42 Speaker 02 matter of scale. When you have large scale production, you're going to use more of everything. But it's really the very modern plants. And I talk about a dye house I visited in L.A. that are using really precise measurements and be looking for innovative ways to save on water, save on energy, save on time, save on labor, just the, all the economic factors as well as the environmental factors that that's where you really get the innovation that becomes environmentally more benign. It's not by going back to the past.
51:24 Speaker 01 It's sort of this yearning for a past that never was.
51:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
51:28 Speaker 01 The technology is the way forward. And if we do want to do a lot of these great things, to know some kind of meta theme questions around innovation. So you actually have a chapter at the end called innovation, which made me chuckle because actually your entire book is about innovation.
51:44 Speaker 02 The whole book is about innovation.
51:46 Speaker 01 Actually, my editor, right editor, but her idea, we were talking about this last chapter, she said, why don't you call it innovators, which is parallel to traders.
51:56 Speaker 02 There are innovators in every chapter.
51:59 Speaker 01 It's not orthogonal, both the warp, the West. So let's kind of come full circles. You'd say that to weave is to devise, to invent, to contrive function and beauty from the simplest of elements. And I thought that was profound because I think that is exactly what innovation is. It's transforming something into something else, or taking building blocks like Legos or words or code and turning them into something else. Or Chris Dixon in his post described how code is the encoding of human thought. And in your book, you actually have a line in the chapter on fiber where you you talk about Hardy's work and how when you twist things into forming ropes and knots, that it demonstrates an infinite use of infinite means and requires a cognitive complexity
52:42 Speaker 01 similar to that required by human language. So I want to ask you about more of the how versus the what, which is you say that this is a story of innovation, things that are both famous and forgotten, incremental improvements and sudden leaps, repeated inventions and once forever discoveries. So I'm going to have you do very lightning round style. Give me an example in the meta story of innovation of an example of something famous, even still famous today.
53:08 Speaker 02 The invention of nylon by Wallace Carruthers. Nylon is the first polymer fiber. And in fact, Carruthers is the person who figured out what polymers, which also come in protein forms. He figured out that these really were these giant molecules and he demonstrated it. But nylon is the first synthetic fiber and the first polymer. And I tell the story. The inventor is less famous, but nylon is famous.
53:34 Speaker 01 And give me an example of a forgotten. I mean, I guess your whole book had a lot of these, but a forgotten one.
53:39 Speaker 02 So the person that I would really love to know who invented it is somewhere in China, there was probably a woman was involved in the silk, in silk production, who figured out what we now know as know as the belt drive. And the particular application was what is called in spinning a spindle wheel as opposed to spinning wheel. She figured out how to take a big wheel and put a thread or a belt. Onto a little wheel and you could turn the little wheel many times by turning the big wheel. Basically, what this person figured out was you could turn that not load bearing
54:18 Speaker 02 wheel on its side and attach it to another wheel and then you could have it turn faster. And this is incredibly important in the history of textiles and it's incredibly important in the history of machines. And we have no idea who did it, although we have a reasonable idea of what kind of person it was and where it was.
54:41 Speaker 01 Okay, so that's famous and forgotten. So now let's do incremental and big leaps. So give me an example of an incremental improvement that was important in advancing the fabric of civilization.
54:53 Speaker 02 All the incremental improvements in the quality of cotton, for example, and not only breeding cotton that could grow above the frost line, but making it more disease resistant, making it a longer fibers, more durable, all of those kinds of incremental improvements.
55:12 Speaker 01 Now, give me an example of an opposite incremental improvement, a sudden leap.
55:17 Speaker 02 The invention of antiline dyes, synthetic dyes, which set off essentially organic chemistry.
55:24 Speaker 01 Okay, a teeny bit more on that one.
55:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, so there was a 19 year old student called William Perkin, who was fooling the around. He was trying to actually synthesize something that would be like quinine, the malaria drug. And he didn't get what he wanted, but he noticed that this precipitate in his beaker was kind of purply and he tried dyeing silk with it and it worked really great. And then he said, hey, this is a business. And like many, many entrepreneurs before Enstens, if he'd known what was going to be involved and taking his bright idea in turning it
56:06 Speaker 02 into something that could actually be a company, he might never have done it, but he did.
56:14 Speaker 02 Because they had to invent all kinds of machinery and ways of producing large chemical sources, stuff like that.
56:21 Speaker 01 I love.
56:21 Speaker 02 And there's actually a whole book about that called Moov, but I tell the essentials of the story.
56:27 Speaker 01 That's a story that I remember learning from Xerox PARC, which is when you have material science type innovations, like the piece, the component is one tiny, tiny piece of the puzzle. It's actually the broader ecosystem that you build around it. That's actually the true innovation. And I was on the front lines of watching a lot of the, the architecture and orchestration and attempts at that.
56:48 Speaker 02 And this is also why, I mean, a lot of textile innovation falls under material science today. And this is why people publish about some cool new textile idea. And it never sees the light of day because it's not viable, either as a business or in some cases, just as an actual textile. And I tell some stories about the twenties and thirties, things that people were fooling around with because rayon was around. And they had this idea that you could take natural materials and transform them because rayon is made basically from wood and turn them into fibers. And so they were trying like everything.
57:29 Speaker 01 Right.
57:30 Speaker 02 Eggs and milk. And I talk about the, the milk fibers, which were very big in Italy, very backed by Italy's government and stuff. And, and why they didn't maintain themselves after the war.
57:44 Speaker 01 Well, that goes to the next lightning round one, which is repeated inventions, because today there is a resurgence in kind of wood based and like bamboo based fibers as alternatives to cotton, for instance, and other fibers. So what would you put on your list of a repeated invention? Something that was invented over and over again, many times throughout history of textiles?
58:03 Speaker 02 Well, the simplest one is the drop spindle, which is essentially a weight with a hole in it with a stick. And the weight maintains the, the angular momentum and lets you draw out fiber and spin it. And it was invented in slightly different forms all around the world.
58:21 Speaker 01 And now, what is an example of a not a once in a lifetime, but once and forever kind of discovery? Does that mean invented by human ingenuity? It can be discovered by human ingenuity?
58:33 Speaker 02 I mean, certainly, we talked about the idea that cotton only happened once, but that's not really human ingenuity.
58:42 Speaker 01 That's why I was giving you an out, actually, because they did discover.
58:45 Speaker 02 I actually used my only once, which was the spindle wheel. But you would think with all this spinning all around the world, you would think that people all around the world would have figured out ways to do it faster, but it actually only happened once. It happened in China and then it spread from there.
59:01 Speaker 01 It's interesting that you speculated that it was likely a woman's. The thing that actually struck me personally is this idea of the role of women and taking back the power of sort of women as some of the original coders or original scientists. A lot of critics today tend to emphasize that there's this implied domesticity and subordination of the era's images of spinning women as in doing weaving. And you talk about how that may not necessarily be the case.
59:26 Speaker 02 Right. In the chapter on spinning, I start with a paired set of portraits that are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. And it's a husband and wife. The woman is spinning and the man is a businessman. He's got his account books. He's got some money, symbols of their trade. And these are actual real people. We have a pretty good idea who they were. They're not types, but these could also be the iconographic symbols of industry and commerce. Before smokestacks became the images of industry in the, say, 19th century.
1:00:09 Speaker 01 Right.
1:00:10 Speaker 02 The symbol that people used to symbolize industry was a woman spinning because this was the epitome of sort of productive labor.
1:00:23 Speaker 02 That's making something as opposed to commerce, which is trading something. And so you would have these very common images. And that's because it was an incredibly important activity. Cloth consumes enormous amounts of thread and there was never enough thread. That is why, in fact, it made such a big difference when you have the Industrial Revolution. Why does it start with thread? Because thread is incredibly in short supply always. And it's this input into all these different kinds of uses of cloth. Everything from sacks to sails for the British Navy, to all of these kinds of things. Really important.
1:01:05 Speaker 02 And so women's work, it was domestic, but then a lot of men's work was domestic too. And it's not a symbol of subordination in these portraits. It's a symbol of equality. And in fact, if you look at the construction of the portrait in sort of a deep art analytical sense, like their hands are in exactly the same positions. It's commerce and industry as equally important.
1:01:32 Speaker 01 And by the hands, you mean that there was a certain curl you described?
1:01:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
1:01:37 Speaker 01 It wasn't just someone posing. It was the precision of an actual weaver who knew the art.
1:01:43 Speaker 02 She is actually positioned like she knows the art. And then his hands are more artificially posed with the coin and with the book and stuff. But they mirror the positions of her hands.
1:01:57 Speaker 01 So then the last tension is that you open the book talking about how this is so ubiquitous across cultures. And in fact, and you describe the words that we use. You talk about French words like métier. You talk about non-European words, like in the Mayan language, the terms for weaving designs and hieroglyphics, both use the same root. In Sanskrit, the word for sutra, which now refers to like a religious scripture. It originally denotes a string or a thread. You talk about the word tantra. Which is tied to tantrum or warp or loom. The Chinese word juzi, meaning organization or arranged, which is also the words for weave. And chenji, which means achievement or result, which originally meant twisting fibers together. So basically, you really outlined how this is so ubiquitous
1:02:42 Speaker 01 throughout multiple cultures. So now I'm going to just have you tell me one last story, which is the story of kentocloth. I think what's really fascinating to me about the kentocloth chapter is my mom is born and raised in Uganda, which is not originally from right. The whole entire family is from Uganda.
1:02:58 Speaker 02 All right.
1:02:59 Speaker 01 And so I grew up, they come to the US.
1:03:04 Speaker 02 I remember when that, I remember when that happened.
1:03:07 Speaker 01 It was before I was born. My grandparents, her parents got relocated to the UK. My aunt went to Sweden. But I grew up surrounded by African fabrics. And then we have this political moment where people are using kentocloth as a symbol. The thing that I want to focus on, and especially by the way, because it also to me tied together your other books, and that includes both glamour and particularly the substance of style.
1:03:29 Speaker 02 Which I was very resonant on that one.
1:03:32 Speaker 01 Very resonant on that one, because you talk about how fashion is totemic.
1:03:35 Speaker 02 So West African weavers have for a long, long time, made cloths that are called strip cloths, which is that they weave four to six inch wide strips, which are then sewn together into a complete cloth that's then wrapped around the body in various ways. And this is ancient. And in fact, I talk in the book about how strip cloths were even used as currency.
1:04:00 Speaker 01 Cloth as coin, that was so cool.
1:04:02 Speaker 02 Kentocloth is actually fairly recent. Dates back to the 18th century, probably 19th century. We don't know exactly when it originated. And in Ghana, there's great.
1:04:19 Speaker 02 Contestation between two ethnic groups, the Asante and the Away, about who invented it, because it's the national cloth and source of great pride. And I talk about the research that's been done that suggests that its distinctive weave pattern was probably developed by the Away, but quickly adopted by the Asante, who then put on their preference for bright colors, which is very much what we associate with kente cloth. And what makes kente cloth distinct is not the patterns, although they are distinct and interesting. It's the way it's woven. It is woven in alternating sort of squares
1:05:04 Speaker 02 of warp faced and weft faced weaving. So that it's something you could not produce a total kente cloth on an industrial loom. It has to be woven in these strips, and those strips have to be put together. There's a special loom that was invented to make this kind of pattern. Kente cloth is very interesting technologically or artistically, because it requires a great deal of forethought and planning. So that's interesting. Now, what makes it particularly interesting, and of course, resonant in the US, is how it went from being a kind of cloth for particularly Asante aristocrats, to then when Ghana became independent
1:05:48 Speaker 02 and you had the sort of Pan-African idea, it became a symbol of sort of Africa in general, the African diaspora. Muhammad Ali went to Ghana and he wore kente cloth. It was a big deal. The president of Ghana was photographed in Life magazine shaking hands with Dwight Eisenhower on a state visit to the US, and he was wearing kente cloth. And in moving from Africa to the United States, its meaning and even its physical characteristics changed.
1:06:23 Speaker 02 First of all, the Asante elite were not related to the ancestors of African Americans. Their ancestors were the ones who sold into slavery. But textiles mean what people want them to mean, how people use them, and their meanings evolve. And so what you had was, first of all, you had this transformation in the 1960s of kente cloth from being a symbol of a tribal elite and a national elite to being a symbol of African pride and the African diaspora. And then you started to have people who are famous, like W. B. Du Bois, that would put
1:07:05 Speaker 02 a little kente cloth in their stalls that they wore with their academic robes. And then at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, students adopted, as Black students, to symbolize their pride and their academic achievements and their racial identity. And they started wearing, not a whole piece of kente cloth, but essentially something that amounted to one of the strips that it was made from. And this spread to becoming a widespread custom, particularly at graduations. And this is what a living textile tradition does, because people want many different things out of textiles.
1:07:45 Speaker 02 And one of them is an expression of their identity and also who they want to be, who they aspire to be. And then you have kente cloth also go from being always a woven pattern into being frequently a printed pattern for all kinds of things, where it takes on this kind of new meaning and new purpose. So kente cloth has had many different incarnations, and it has different incarnations in Ghana. I mean, the top weavers of it make new patterns all the time.
1:08:23 Speaker 01 There's a Ghanaian fabric maker that created a fabric featuring the Ghanaian president because he made lots of frequent televised speech appearances during the pandemic. Printed spectacle floating against the swirling red, white, and green background, which I thought was fabulous. And it even had symbols like padlocks for signifying lockdowns and plane propellers for the borders that are closed. It just goes to show how culture evolves so quickly in so many ways, and people find meaning. I've also been fascinated growing up, you know, going to India, that pattern, the history of patterns like Ikot, like it's part, it's, it's I love Ikot. I do too. And it's widely used in Turkey, but then some of the techniques are, you know, rooted in Shibori in Japan, but Shibori, it's Yeah, it's something that they have their own kind in Guatemala.
1:09:07 Speaker 01 Oh, I love that. But the other thing that I think is really beautiful about this is this not only a story of things being reinvented or invented multiple times all across the world in different ways, but it's also a story of borrowing and reborrowing and building on because, you know, Shibori started in India, then went back to China, Japan, and then went back to China. It was just like all over the place. I just got that Yeah, right. messed up, but it, the technique just kind of comes back. And last time I went to India, it was totally in vogue to buy like salvados that had like modern Shibori and like cool new colors like neon, which I think Yeah. so cool. Like this is a story of culture and technology. But you also talk about how this is actually not about culture, but about civilization? And how there's actually a difference between the two?
1:09:50 Speaker 02 You can have multiple cultures within a civilization and you can have a continuous civilization where the cultures changed. And I'm not using it in a like civilization, good barbarism, bad kind of way. I'm using it to describe essentially a survival technology that humans have as a way of transmitting ways of protecting themselves against hostile world and hostile people. And then the second idea of it is that it's cumulative. It builds and that cumulative nature can be broken or it can continue. The example I use is
1:10:30 Speaker 02 think about Western Europe in 1980 and think about Western Europe, or as it was known at the time, Christendom in 1480. That is a continuous civilization, but it culturally couldn't have changed more. The politics were different. The people's understanding of the natural world was different. How they dressed was different. How they spoke was different. Every aspect that constitutes culture.
1:11:01 Speaker 02 Had significantly changed, but this cumulative civilization had continued. And what I've argued in a new article out in Reason where I develop the idea about civilization in the current context is that sometime in the recent past, we, for the first time ever, developed a world civilization. We had a coming together of East and West into a single civilization that hadn't been the case ever in human history before. So when I talk about the fabric of civilization, I'm talking about the continuous building
1:11:45 Speaker 02 up of knowledge and techniques and technology that helps knit together, to use a textile metaphor.
1:11:54 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:11:55 Speaker 02 Different civilizations.
1:11:56 Speaker 01 So this is a great note to end on because while you talk about how this book is about the fabric of civilization, which is cumulative, it has layers, it's about survival, you know, plot protects us. What you end the book on in your afterword is this beautiful quote, which is that this heritage does not belong to a single nation, race, or culture, or to a single time or place. The story of textiles is not a male story or a female story, not a European, African, Asian, or American story. It is all of these cumulative and shared, a human story, a tapestry woven from countless brilliant threads. And that is the essence of this book.
1:12:37 Speaker 01 The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel. Thank you for joining this episode of the A6MC Podcast.
1:12:44 Speaker 02 Thank you.
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