on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
It’s impressive when you can carry a multitool every day for years and then realize that it doesn’t work. It sort-of works, but you’re fond of it and loyal to it because you got used to it. If you’re freed from it for a while, then the spell breaks.
If you’re a regular user of multitools, I think it’s a good idea to switch them quite often. You need to remain aware that they don’t work well. If you really believe that they work well, you’re actually *training yourself* not to work well. You don’t have them because they work well; you have them because they’re portable and therefore available.
Obviously a tool that’s very small and compact, and also cheap, isn’t going to work well, almost by definition. But really good tool-steel is so cheap now that it’s silly to have flimsy screwdrivers that bend, and files that lack the metallic capacity to file properly. We’re drifting into a pretend-realm of kid-toys rather than tools there, and although I understand very well that pocket-tools are often make-believe and fantastic, in modern technological circumstances they ought to be make-believe and fantastic in a more performative way.
It’s become cheap to be serious about it. You have to go out of your way to have a tool be that flimsy and lousy. It’s become perverse to be inferior. Just go ahead and build and sell one that can function.
It’s clear that the really-small tool category is considered toylike and inferior by its manufacturers (which is why they often dabble with that product category, and often give up). But from a user perspective, if a tiny tool is all you have, it’s all you have. It’s painful to be in an emergency situation where the only tool at hand is not just dainty, but also trashy.
I suspect that a very high-end, ultra-rugged, metallically capable tiny tool, made of the likes of diamond, silicon carbide and/or damascened titanium, would do very well in the modern multitool market. Yes, it still wouldn’t work well. But, people would accomplish more with it, and they would suffer less.