On the slowness of good tools

Every tool I own that I would replace immediately if it broke is slow. The film camera, obviously. The dip pen. The bench supply with the analogue meters that I keep meaning to upgrade and never do.

This is a suspicious observation to make about your own possessions, because the alternative explanation is simply that I am slow and have chosen tools that flatter me. I want to argue against that, and I am aware that wanting to argue against it is not evidence.

The honest version

Here is what I think is actually happening. A slow tool puts a gap between the intention and the result, and the gap is where the decision lives. Thirty-six frames means the thirty-seventh thing I see does not get photographed, so the first thirty-six have to be chosen. The choosing is the work.

A fast tool does not remove the choosing. It relocates it — to afterwards, to the edit, to the moment where you have four hundred frames and no memory of what you meant by any of them.

Where the argument fails

It fails for anyone who is actually good. Watch someone competent with a fast tool and there is no relocation at all; the choosing happens at full speed, continuously, invisibly. The gap I need is scaffolding, and scaffolding is what you use while you are still building.

So the honest form of this essay is not “slow tools are better.” It is: I am not good enough yet to go quickly, and I have arranged my hobbies so that I do not have to admit it very often. Writing that down is the first time I have.