Saw this one coming

Better to have labored and lost a finger than never to have labored at all, or something like that.

If you were planning on buying a table saw at any point, now may be the time to budget for it and make your purchase.

“Why, Nate? What’s happening to table saws?” Fret not, dear reader, for I, Nate, am here to inform you.

A blade is a sharp thing. We know this. If you take a blade, shape it into a circle, attach it to a motor, and spin it around at approximately 3,100 revolutions per minute, you get a really fast sharp thing. This can be, as one might surmise, dangerous. Approximately 30,000 - 40,000 people discover this to be the case annually. Of those, about 4,000 result in amputation which is normally accomplished by the use of a much slower, tinier sharp thing.

Enter: the SawStop™. Observe as this fellow manages to escape with barely a nick, his wiener fully intact.

When the blade comes into contact with flesh, a brake cartridge is jammed into the blade with such enormous force and speed that it comes to a complete halt in 2.5 milliseconds. The system works by recognizing the difference between the electrical properties of flesh and wood, which it monitors by the electrical signal-induced blade (really, really fast and sharp and now zappy too). It is a truly remarkable piece of safety technology. But, as all remarkable technology does, it also comes at a remarkable cost to manufacture.

And the expense doesn’t end there. Not just any blade can conduct electricity, so SawStop or other specialty blades that are able to do so (and if you go off brand, make sure the hub and teeth are conductive too) will need to be used in order to get the benefit of the safety feature. Also, when you get caught slacking and touch the spinny zappy circle knife and jam that cartridge into it? Or if the equipment just gets zap happy and misfires the brake? You’ll have to buy a new blade, which currently retails at The Home Depot from $39-$59 each depending on the size. No sweat. Oh, forgot to mention: that cartridge? It’s a one-time use product, so you’ll have to purchase another one of those too, which is somewhere between $99-$120 on Amazon. Okay, seems fair in order to prevent a gruesome and possibly debilitating or career-ending injury. One final detail— table saws cannot be retrofitted with SawStop’s safety feature, so if you want it, you’ll have to buy a new table saw with a mid-range model clocking in at a cool $1,600.

A remarkable cost to manufacture has turned into an überremarkable cost for the consumer, as it so often does.

You might be thinking, “But Nate, there are plenty of examples of products that contain features that other products do not. If you don’t want to pay for the safety feature, then just buy a table saw that doesn’t have it.” True enough! As I hinted at the beginning, this may not be the case for long.

Power Tool Institute, Inc. (PTI), founded in 1968 as an organization for “building global understanding of power tools and for maintaining high standards of safety in the industry,” reports that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), an agency of the US federal government, published a supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking that would effectively require all table saw manufacturers to include the SawStop — or at least SawStop-like — safety feature on all table saws sold in the US. This would, as the CPSC acknowledges, double (or more) the cost of table saws, push manufacturers out of the table saw market, cause smaller manufacturers to go out of business entirely, drop table saw sales resulting in unemployment, and, PTI says, “ADDITIONALLY, THE GOVERNMENT COULD BE CREATING A MONOPOLY FOR ONE COMPANY (WHICH ORIGINALLY PETITIONED THE CPSC FOR THIS MANDATORY STANDARD), THAT CAN EITHER CHARGE UNREASONABLE LICENSING FEES OR REFUSE TO LICENSE. ALL OF THIS WHEN VOLUNTARY STANDARDS ARE WORKING.” The all caps are theirs, not mine. I would never yell at you.

In short, we may have a legislated monopoly on our hands (assuming they haven’t been lost to table saw accidents). The CPSC is required by law to rely on voluntary safety standards when those standards adequately address the safety hazards of a piece of equipment and there is likely to be substantial compliance. PTI, which represents nine major tool manufacturers including five manufacturers that produce table saws, argues that the existing standards tick those boxes. The CPSC isn’t so sure, hence the push to mandate the flesh detection tech pioneered by SawStop.

According to the CPSC, mandating this solution would “prevent or mitigate the severity of an estimated 49,176 injuries treated in hospital emergency departments or other medical settings per year. The Commission further estimates that net benefits would range from approximately $1.28 billion to $2.32 billion per year.”

According to PTI, this is hogwash. As is often the case, the presence of safety features normally leads to humans being far less careful than when they believe they are in some kind of danger. This is why people willingly jump out of a plane with carefully woven fabric strapped to their backs but aren’t likely to yeet themselves barebacked off a cliff. PTI combed the data provided by SawStop and according to their calculations, this illusion of safety with SawStop’s equipment has increased the likelihood of blade contact incidents by nearly five times. This is in spite of the fact that SawStop also includes a removable blade guard to prevent contact from happening at all. The implication? Because of the presence of flesh detection tech, users are foregoing use of the guard. Rather than saving $1.2B to $2.3B, the total societal cost might actually increase by another estimated $388M.

This is not the only potential for injury. If it is true that the blade guard is not in place, then the user runs an increased risk of saw dust, splinters, and other roach-turd-sized particles of material being ejected from the blade and into their face or eyes. Kickback is always a concern. And let’s say the monopoly is approved. You know for a fact that folks that want a table saw will make their purchase in countries where no such regulation exists and then have the product shipped here. But beyond that, and far more likely, is the probability that people will just run to the local Big Box store to purchase a corded circular saw, use it in an inverted or some other goofball position, and end up carving themselves like a Thanksgiving turkey anyway. So it very well may be that in an effort to promote safety, the CPSC is actually creating circumstances that will generate more injury. As my friend Ben said, “When I know I’m doing something stupid, I’m safer; it’s when I don’t realize or think it’s stupid that I’m in trouble.”

All of this when there are already existing safety standards in place and, interestingly, there are questions regarding SawStop’s unresolved patent issues as outlined in PTI’s report.

Another problem that hasn’t been considered is the potential for what is called a “failure cascade,” when a small component that is tied into an adjacent component which in turn is connected to a larger part which then integrates into the main function of the equipment goes bad, breaking the chain and bringing the whole dang piece of equipment down. This tends to happen in tools, equipment, and machines that rely heavily on electronics for their operation.

Matthew B. Crawford

gives in an essay at the end of 2023 the example of a truck tail light that cost $5,600. Not a semi-truck. Not a monster truck. No— a 2018 Ford F-150 Limited.

N.S. Lyons

writes in his essay that complex systems — not merely “complicated” by normie standards but “composed of such a great quantity of component parts, in such intricate relationships of dependency and interaction with each other, that its composite behavior in response to entropy cannot be predictively modeled” — are prone to cascading failure. When a failure cascade begins, the domino effect cannot be reversed even by fixing the original issue. The entropy gremlin has already been let loose in the system and it is off invisibly gnawing on other components while you try to fix the only bit you know is broken.

Perhaps SawStop doesn’t have a cascading failure issue. But if the unresolved patent issues don’t get worked out and the mandate for flesh detection technology integration turns from “just buy the license from SawStop” into “oh shizzle, we’ve gotta design our own now lmao,” who’s to say that the hyper-electronified table saw a given manufacturer comes up with doesn’t become an example of failure cascades in some future essay?

Ignore for a moment the economic issues and the possibility of cascading failure. Forget that there is a monopoly cooking and the legal implications. Look away from the person accidentally ditching a digit or three. I suggest that this is all couched in a larger issue.

If you’ve read my newsletter for long enough, you will know how influential philosopher and tradesman Matthew Crawford has been on my thought. It was his book Shop Class as Soulcraft that first opened my eyes to the reality that the trades — and skilled practices generally — shape and tutor one’s interior life such that they increase their agency in the material world. The physical world becomes intelligible. I can order it and make of it something useful or beautiful. I can grasp a tool and build with it something good precisely because through learning how to use that tool I have a grasp on myself, and having hold of myself I can in some sense give myself to the world through my labor. The concern, then, isn’t just that when tools get expensive or complex or pricey to repair that it’s annoying (although it very much is). The concern is that there is discernable through all this a wider move towards restricting both personal autonomy and the possibility of the formation of self-giving human agents, a cultural cascading failure that has already been set in motion and of which table saws may be merely another casualty while the gremlins are off gnawing elsewhere. It is in this discussion that another of my influences, Ivan Illich, is helpful.

For Illich, the complexity that Lyons articulates is symptomatic of the second of what Illich calls “watersheds,” thresholds that can be approached and crossed in the development of tools. The first watershed is characterized by the increased effectiveness of producing desired effects in a domain of human need through the use of simple tools designed to accomplish the domain’s ends. Illich says they “make the most of the energy each [person] has” and put “personal energy under personal control” while fostering “creative intercourse among persons” and “intercourse of persons with their environments.” This is what makes a tool, in Illichian parlance, “convivial.” In a paragraph that might have been found in Crawford’s work, Illich says,

Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. (Tools for Conviviality, pg. 21)

The second watershed happens when, its designers high on success, a tool’s further development becomes significantly more costly while its application sees significantly diminished returns in its desired effects, which are largely no longer aimed at meeting human need but rather internally set standards. From this reflexive posture usually springs professionalization, certification, and the creation of an elite class of users. Iatrogenic disease, which by virtue of its unpredictable entropic effects, seems to me to be in medicine what the cascading failures are in technology; dehumanizing work conditions and poor urban design, along with other social injustices; monopoly: all of these are symptomatic of when tools — broadly conceived by Illich, containing hand tools, power tools, motors, large machines, as well as productive institutions that produce tangible commodities and productive systems for intangible commodities — have reached or surpassed their second watershed. When passed, the second watershed strips a tool of its conviviality. Finishing the paragraph quoted above, Illich continues,

Industrial tools deny this possibility [of conviviality] to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. (Tools for Conviviality, pg. 21)

Let’s expand on monopoly. Illich sees monopoly, which is inherently industrial rather than convivial, happening in a few different ways. Even if a hand tool is convivial in its design and use, it can be artificially restricted by social arrangements like unions, codes, and market forces. Or a tool which otherwise would be convivial can become restricted through its monopolization by an industry and its licensing requirements, such as dental drills. “Also,” says Illich, “tools can be purposely limited when simple pliers and screwdrivers are insufficient to repair modern cars.” When an institution is approaching its second watershed it becomes highly manipulative, such as making formerly independent components of a system dependent on the other (in this we can hear echoes of cascading failure) or forcing people to adhere to the institution’s own inner logic which is not in human interest, serving the institutions purposes rather than the person’s. Illich gives this example, “People without cars have no access to planes, and people without plane tickets have no access to convention hotels.” Other tools that might bypass these monopolies by accomplishing the same purposes by other means are snuffed out, bullied from the market. Something like this seems to be happening with table saws.

Man working with a circular saw in a workshop. Blaz Erzetic. Unsplash.

There is yet another layer of monopoly for Illich. If we were to spatially conceptualize the former examples as possible iterations of monopoly at a horizontal level, then what comes next is elevated vertically and becomes totalizing. Illich’s own words will be helpful, and he starts by clarifying the usual, economic meaning of “monopoly.”

Generally we mean by “monopoly” the exclusive control by one corporation over the means of producing (or selling) a commodity or service. Coca-Cola can create a monopoly over the soft-drink market in Nicaragua by being the only maker of soft drinks which advertises with modern means. . . Monopolies of this kind have been recognized for a century as dangerous by-products of industrial expansion, and legal devices have been developed in a largely futile attempt to control them. (Tools for Conviviality, pg. 51)

Futile indeed, say the table saw manufacturers. This definition of monopoly sums up what came before. Illich points out that even if a bottle of the polar bear’s favorite pop is the only soft drink on the market, a person may still choose to quench their thirst with, say, a beer or a water. But what if all other safe-to-consume liquids were removed? What if “I’m thirsty” could only ever mean “I must drink a Coke”? What if no other libation were available? Now we have arrived at Illich’s “radical monopoly.”

By “radical monopoly” I mean the dominance of one type of product rather than the dominance of one brand. I speak about radical monopoly when one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition. (Tools for Conviviality, pg. 51)

As it pertains to the table saws, I detect something of the second watershed with the legal goal posts threatening to being shifted, the exorbitant pricing of manufacture that would attend it, the growing complexity of the equipment, the possibility of failure cascades, the potential for causing greater and more frequent and more societally costly injury even as it simultaneously purports to be implementing a safety feature that would reduce that cost. If I were to stop the analysis here, would I be stopping short? Is there a more totalizing, radical monopoly looming? I think there could be.

The problem isn’t simply that SawStop technology might have a legislated monopoly on the design and manufacturing of table saws, but that the construction industry as a whole is inching towards a radical monopoly over constructing anything at all. The professionalization of the trades has robbed the everyman of the opportunity to develop and exercise their agency both by making building code so technically tedious as to require hard-won institutionally granted expertise and certification, and now — demanding in the name of safety that tools be equipped with mandated features — by making the tools of such a cost that the average person would not purchase them, along with the other symptoms of a second watershed. I could see in the near future the possibility of table saws not even being available for purchase to the non-expert public, or completing the radical monopoly loop by making it compulsory that all building professionals purchase a table saw equipped with flesh detection technology in order to do the work at all under penalty of a hefty fine, suspension of licensure, or even imprisonment.

I am a plumber by trade so I have long been of two minds when it comes to my own sense of satisfaction at having a particular skillset that is of value to friends and neighbors and customers, while also being unable to shake the sense that my customers ought to have some mastery over their own homes. And many do! I have often relished the opportunity of teaching customers something about their own plumbing system that they could do for themselves with basic hand tools and a little know-how. Perhaps I am the bug in the system. Illich sums up the matter nicely when he says, “The establishment of radical monopoly happens when people give up their native ability to do what they can do for themselves and for each other, in exchange for something ‘better’ that can be done for them only by a major tool.” The “tool” in this case would be the construction industry. It seems to me that we are shifting ever closer to an arrangement that looks increasingly like what Illich has described here.

Even if the flesh detection technology isn’t legally mandated, it is only possible that it could be suggested because we live in a social milieu that is conducive to it. Radical monopoly of the construction industry has not happened, but it may yet and if it does, it will likely be under the guise of human safety. In exchange for that safety, all we will have to sacrifice is the possibility of virtuous personal autonomy and investing the world with meaning— even when it costs us a finger.