Unless you've been living in a cave, we are all to a large extent in the era of mass production. When I was a kid I sometimes hung around in the workshop of a local carpenter, and so I'm very familiar with the attitude that mass produced stuff is crap and that things which are carefully crafted by people with effort and skill is what's really valuable. Mass produced things are sometimes functional but usually not durable. Apparently in the early 20th century there was a movement against mass produced furniture towards the more traditional kinds of carpentry. I've got a chest of drawers inherrited from one of my grandmothers which was perhaps part of that movement, because when repairing them recently they're obviously hand made with the carpenter's pencil marks inside - something that you would never see in modern furniture.

That craft movement obviously didn't get very far, but I think something similar is happening with information now. We are moving into a time of mass produced information, made with little or no thought at electronic speed. This is the mountains of slop and the increasingly dead internet. There is the beginnings of a craft movement away from that, and history repeats in a different industry.