the post going around about how you can't automate various fabric processing/sewing tasks is largely not correct and i think suffers substantially from treating technology as separate from economy/policy/research funding/capital. & have a half-thought-out response but wanted to plant a small flag first. you can cut fabric to a pattern in a variety of more or less automated ways. & furthermore the extent to which automation is or is not happening is partially to do with legitimate difficulty of robotic manipulation of flexible materials & textiles AND partially to do with the cost of automation vs cost of sweatshop labor. i think it rly devalues the role of globalization of the supply chain & exploitation of labor in the global south to just hand-wave textile & clothing automation as impossible when it is not so













