The question of whether machines master people must be re-decided by every generation

Evidence

The question was posed to me in 1981 by a young paper mill manager sometime between the fried catfish and the pecan pie on my first night in the small southern town that was home to his mammoth plant and would become my home periodically for the next six years. On that rainy night his words flooded my brain, drowning out the quickening tap tap tap of raindrops on the awning above our table. I recognized the oldest political questions: Home or exile? Lord or subject? Master or slave? These are eternal themes of knowledge, authority, and power that can never be settled for all time. There is no end of history; each generation must assert its will and imagination as new threats require us to retry the case in every age. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 19

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the book’s core question — whether the digital future can be ‘home’ — in terms of timeless master/slave politics.
• XREF: connects to: Machine mastery perpetuates rather than ends enslavement — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 635

Broader Connections

• Machine mastery perpetuates rather than ends enslavement #expands (0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 635