Automated exploitation becomes less conspicuous because workers internalize technological community
Evidence
Now the ever-more-complete mechanization of labor in advanced capitalism, while sustaining exploitation, modifies the attitude and the status of the exploited. Within the technological ensemble, mechanized work in which automatic and semi-automatic reactions fill the larger part (if not the whole) of labor time remains, as a life-long occupation, exhausting, stupefying, inhuman slavery—even more exhausting because of increased speed-up, control of the machine operators (rather than of the product), and isolation of the workers from each other. To be sure, this form of drudgery is expressive of arrested, partial automation, of the coexistence of automated, semi-automated, and non-automated sections within the same plant, but even under these conditions, “for muscular fatigue technology has substituted tension and/or mental effort.” … The proletarian of the previous stages of capitalism was indeed the beast of burden, by the labor of his body procuring the necessities and luxuries of life while living in filth and poverty. Thus he was the living denial of his society. In contrast, the organized worker in the advanced areas of the technological society lives this denial less conspicuously and, like the other human objects of the social division of labor, he is being incorporated into the technological community of the administered population. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 169
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s attention-economy thread: mechanized cognitive labor here prefigures digital attention harvesting. — connects to: AI adoption is reducing the need for entry-level workers. — Joanna Stern, I Am Not a Robot- My Year Using AI to…, 858; Effective community norms constrain behavior and suppress beneficial innovation — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 110
- DEFINE: Lays groundwork for the one-dimensional administered society thesis by showing how exploitation turns psychological.
Broader Connections
- Effective community norms constrain behavior and suppress beneficial innovation
#expands(0.75) — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 110 - AI adoption is reducing the need for entry-level workers.
#complicates(0.72) — Joanna Stern, I Am Not a Robot- My Year Using AI to…, 858