Information now functions as society’s organizing principle, replacing labor

Evidence

The division of learning is to us, members of the second modernity, what the division of labor was to our grandparents and great-grandparents, pioneers of the first modernity. In our time the division of learning emerges from the economic sphere as a new principle of social order and reflects the primacy of learning, information, and knowledge in today’s quest for effective life. And just as Durkheim warned his society a century ago, today our societies are threatened as the division of learning drifts into pathology and injustice at the hands of the unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that surveillance capitalism has achieved. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 583

Categorization

• DEFINE: The key framing claim positioning the division of learning as the successor principle of social order to the division of labor.
• DEEPTHINKING: The analogy frames surveillance capitalism as an epochal shift in the basis of social order itself, not merely a new business model.
• XREF: connects to: The digital era shifts society’s axis from division of labor to division of learning — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 600; Knowledge production now structures social order as labor once did — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 582; Human life as organized through data is the new direct input of capitalism — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 160 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Knowledge production now structures social order as labor once did #corroborates (0.95) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 582
• Mastering matter is now less pressing than building information networks #corroborates (0.85) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 680
• Human life as organized through data is the new direct input of capitalism #expands (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 160
• Deliberation mechanisms create new social realities that information alone cannot #qualifies (0.70) — , The Rod and the Child, 7390