A history of humanity is a history of the long slow decline of the hand.













For millennia, the mouth was subservient to the hand. Even the human sense of “taste”, which is intrinsically tied to the mouth, has etymological roots in the hand-bound sense of touch, “tastere”.

This tension between hand and mouth is evident also in infancy. The mouth and the hand are interchangeable. A baby brings its hands to its mouth, in a confusion of communication. Which one to use?

At some point, the mouth wins out. A child grows up, learns the art of speech, and tames the hands wilder peregrinations.

Civilizations grow into largely rhetorical ones, hands reduced to a minimum of work, as passive decoration.












Eventually, the hand became something to be controlled. The hand was vulgar, the mind was king.

We learned to tame our hands, fearing that the hand had a mind of its own, had an agency and propinquity counter to our intentions.

The hand was a propagator of violence.

A vector of disease.

A licentious perversion.

We learned to clasp our hands, to signal to others that our own hands had been defanged.

We invented myriad contraptions to keep our hands at bay. For men, it was largely through the design of clothes, and a vast proliferation of pockets, in which to stash an errant hand.

For women, the glove became an essential accessory for being seen in public.












Elsewhere, we learned to eradicate all traces of the hand. The hand was no longer something to be celebrated, but to be denied.

Fingerprinting, an early forensic activity, rendered our digital imprint the most culpable of evidence. Criminals would pay extra mind to cover up the end, and wipe away any trace of a hand in a crime scene.

In design terms, things were no longer hand-made – craft was seen as a weak hobby – but mass produced.

In mass-production, the ideal was to make things look as little hand-crafted as possible. The future was machine-made.

Any trace of the hand – a smudge, a scratch, a dent, was seen as inherently faulty and discarded.

And as much as the hand was denied in the modern world, it was also a scapegoat for the perceived ills that modernism would produce. One day, Alfred Stieglitz looked upon a gloomy industrial landscape and called it “the hand of man”.











By the 20th century, the hand had been reduced to a caretaker for the machine. Unlike humans, machines could run 24/7, but they carried with them an essential flaw – an inability to self-maintain.

And so, a large proportion of the human workplace became perpetual maintainers, in service of the machine, ensuring their continued operation through a raft of physical scrubbing, scientific monitoring, bureaucratic management of replacement parts and supplies.

The hand was also charged with the small-scale and the finicky. Robots and machines are capable more than ever, of mighty feats of strength and balletic coordination. But you still need a human hand to contort two fingers to screw a nut onto a bolt; to run their hand over a surface to make sure it’s smooth; to perform countless inane things with their hands that robots are still incapable of.

Part 2: The Decline of the Hand

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From Hand to Mouth

Taming of the Hand

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Hands as Negative Traces

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The Hand and the Machine

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