Counterfeit Artisans

Brands as Potemkin Villages, and Hunger for the Real.

Image: CNN

One of my favourite peeves is people who market themselves as artisans. There’s a general rule: if you say you’re an artisan, you’re not. Being an artisan is about an approach to work, to life, and to craft. It’s not something you can be credentialed for, packaged up, or listed on a CV. It’s something recognised in the work itself.

The thought occurred to me as we wandered around our local city centre. I found myself noticing how much of what was being sold was being presented by people in the middle—traders, not makers. Not designers. Their brands are confections, and their business models are closely related to what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification: the gradual degradation of services and products as companies extract value from every relationship until nothing remains but a hollow shell.

The equivalent of a Potemkin Village created to fool the casual observer.

A Potemkin village is a false or misleading facade, built to give the appearance of something good or prosperous when the reality is quite the opposite. The term originates from a story that Prince Grigory Potemkin built fake villages to impress Catherine the Great during her 1787 visit to Crimea. Today, it refers to any impressive-looking but empty or deceptive construction or situation designed to conceal an undesirable reality.

Wikipedia

We walked past a well-known high street food and clothes retailer. I used to work for them decades ago. Back then, as now, they didn’t make their own products, but they maintained exceptionally close relationships with suppliers. They had major input into design. They differentiated themselves through customer service and genuine staff knowledge, following a clear strategy embodied by the founders. It wasn’t perfect, but it had integrity. It had provenance you could trace, and relationships that lasted decades. It was not marketing copy, but practice.

Decades on, the founders are long gone, replaced by private equity. The stores are devoid of staff, replaced by self-checkouts (with cameras “to ensure our safety”). Stock on display is meagre as we’re encouraged to shop online instead. Line selection is, I suspect, largely algorithmic and outsourced, and barely distinguishable from the other stores around it that are following the same business model. A business that once had a soul is now a digital husk, staggering from tactic to tactic in search of enough profit to keep distant shareholders happy.

Once you see it, it’s difficult not to see it everywhere: the price we’re paying for outsourcing in search of cost reduction. A few short decades after the temporary profit spasm, everything that matters in a brand—design, manufacturing, research, provenance—moves away. Brands, from clothes to cars, become no more than intermediaries, trying to capitalise on names they no longer control, being usurped by new brands from the very suppliers they once exploited. These new competitors have few of the legacy overheads and none of the delusions. They are not just worthy competitors; they are skilled insurgents.

The fates of these hollow brands are determined by the power of the story they tell, and those stories ring increasingly false. When your product is functionally identical to competitors but costs twice as much, your story isn’t heritage, it’s expensive bullshit.

It is what happens when leadership becomes financial arbitrage rather than product and service innovation: when executives use technology and optimisation to extract more value from existing broken systems rather than questioning whether those systems should exist at all. It’s sophisticated extraction dressed up as strategy.

And yet.

In the cracks and at the margins, something different persists. There are still people who make things. Who understand their materials. Who maintain relationships with suppliers not as cost centres but as collaborators. Who see constraints not as problems to outsource away but as creative provocations. Those who treat their work as a craft to be honed over decades, not a process to be automated away.

These are the actual artisans, whether they’re working with leather or code, strategy or ceramics. They understand something the enshittifiers have forgotten: that heritage isn’t a marketing claim, it’s the accumulated wisdom of practice. That provenance isn’t a premium price justification; it’s knowing where things come from and why that matters. That craft isn’t an affectation; it’s the disciplined application of judgment, honed through repetition and failure and care.

Which brings us to the question that haunts our current moment: What really matters when everything can be automated?

When AI can generate designs, when algorithms can optimise supply chains, when chatbots can handle customer service, when manufacturing can be done anywhere by anyone, what’s left? What can’t be copied, outsourced, or automated away?

The answer, I think, lies precisely in what we’ve been systematically destroying: the capacity for judgment, for taste, for knowing when the algorithm is wrong. The ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously. The skill of navigating by heuristics rather than rules. The wisdom that comes from skin in the game, from bearing the consequences of your decisions.

In other words: craft.

Not craft as nostalgia for pre-industrial methods. Not craft as artisanal marketing bullshit, but craft as a commitment to work that matters, the irreducible human capacity to make sound judgments in conditions of uncertainty, and to get better at it through practice.

This is what the New Artisans understand. And this is what we need to recover if we’re to build anything worth building in the decades ahead. Not just through writing about it, but through practising it together, exploring the edges beyond the safe boundaries defined by the risk aversion of organisations that fear their shareholders. Because when the enshittifiers have exhausted the seams they are mining, there will be opportunities for the genuinely new.

Writing about it is what I will do here.

Taking action is the work of the Athenor, where you will find an extended version of this post exploring ideas on how we utilise our commitment to craft in a world where deep value is threatened by AI-generated content.

The Athanor isn’t looking for credentials or corporate cultures. It’s looking for indiduals who treat their work as craft, honed through practice and consequence. Who have skin in the game. Who are curious across domains whilst possessing deep expertise in their own. Who see constraints as creative provocations, not excuses. Who understand that valuable conversations happen when you don’t know the answer in advance. The question isn’t whether you’re successful enough or expert enough, it’s whether you’re committed to treating your work as a craft worth refining over time, in the company of others doing the same.