Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Erickson

Production as a single-minded destination turns the factory into a philosophy, and Erickson is calling out how thoroughly North America bought into it. The assembly line here isn’t just a technique; it’s a worldview that treats efficiency as a moral good and variation as a bug. His phrasing - “dominated,” “alone,” “mass consumption” - reads like a quiet indictment: once output becomes the only metric, everything else gets demoted. Craft becomes nostalgia. Local needs become “market segments.” People become end-users.

Coming from an architect, the subtext is especially pointed. Erickson spent his career arguing, implicitly and explicitly, that the built environment can’t be reduced to throughput. When he describes industry “dominated” by standardization, he’s also describing the pressures that reshaped cities, housing, and public space in the postwar boom: modular suburbs, corporate glass boxes, the copy-paste logic of developments optimized for speed and financing rather than belonging. This is mid-century modernity’s bargain: cheaper goods, faster construction, more convenience - purchased with sameness.

The line works because it frames mass production as a narrowing of imagination. “With production alone as the goal” suggests a whole cascade of exclusions: beauty, durability, repair, labor dignity, ecological cost. Erickson isn’t romanticizing pre-industrial life; he’s exposing how an economy built to feed consumption trains us to accept the standardized as inevitable, even natural. The real critique lands offstage: if we organize industry this way, we end up organizing everyday life the same way.