Customizing cars as a defense against alienation
Meet Liam. Liam is a hot-rodder, of sorts. He spends his time customizing cars. He buys something mass-produced by a big corporation and makes them his own. But he never drives them.
Liam is a toy car customizer. By cutting, painting, and rebuilding toy cars, Liam creates his own toys. Some of them he gives to his son, others he puts on display. He also documents their creation on Instagram.
Instagram has become the perfect space for Liam, and other toy customizers, to show off their imaginations. On Liam’s account, @tippityplop, he documents each of his builds from start to finish. As of today, 14.1 thousand people follow him to watch those builds.
So, what’s so appealing about a middle-aged Australian man cutting up toy cars in his basement? For Liam and his followers, I argue, toy car customization is a defense against capitalist alienation.
Marx’s theory of alienation, simply put, describes the process by which industrial forces alienate the worker from the self. The worker becomes a cog in a bourgeoisie capitalist machine, so distant from the products of his labor that his sense of self dwindles.
Obviously, Marx paints in broad strokes. But bear with me.
I haven’t been able to find anything about Liam’s day job. I can reasonably state, though, that Liam lives in a late capitalist society in the Global North. As such, he customizes toy cars as a statement of existence and identity against the capitalist machine. Again, broad strokes.
It starts to make sense when we consider scale. The toy car industry is gigantic — since 1968, Mattel has produced more than 4 billion Hot Wheels cars. That’s the very definition of mass production. What Liam does, in the face of mass production, is fine, localized craftsmanship.
The urge to make for oneself runs counter to the apparatus of capitalism. Liam spends weeks to make a product that could be made in a factory in minutes. His work is slow, detailed, and very personal. How could he become alienated from the product of his labor, a toy car he has been holding, cutting, painting, and re-painting for two months?
It’s not enough for him to “look at how shit works” — it’s not enough to observe existing objects. Liam fights alienation by rebuilding mass-produced toys into unique, one-of-a-kind customs. In his Australian workshop, there is a place for imagination, for the thriving of the unique self. In a factory in Malaysia, there is room only for standardization, speed, and profit.
Instagram also serves an important role for Liam in his role of ‘craftsman-as-protest.’ It has become a medium for him to show off his imagination and thus have his identity validated. As with other communities (foodstagram, fitstagram, catstagram) the group provides a mediated common identity.
The satisfaction of the work is not solely intrinsic. For further validation of his identity and the products of his labor, Liam posts updates of his projects to Instagram, where fans and other customizers praise his creativity. It seems to be a very supportive community, one that exists outside of commerce, one where you have to do all the work with your own two hands.
Interestingly enough, though, Liam has recently started selling chassis kits that make custom builds easier. Time will tell how his new monetary motive will affect his relationship to his labor.
