from here:
When I wrote about Amazon—which is as emblematic of the American corporation in 2014 as U.S. Steel was in 1914 and Walmart in 1994—for a story in The New Yorker, earlier this month, I began to wonder what a company worker looked like. I found it hard to come up with an image. Amazon’s workforce is made up mainly of computer engineers and warehouse workers, but when you think of Amazon you don’t picture either one (and there aren’t many photographs to help your imagination). What you see, instead, is a Web site with a button that says “ADD TO CART” and a cardboard box with a smile printed on the side. Between clicking “BUY” and answering the door when U.P.S. arrives lies a mystery—a chain of events that only comes to mind if you make a conscious effort. The work is done by people you don’t see and don’t have to think about, which is partly what makes Amazon’s unmatched efficiency seem nearly miraculous.
The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy. Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought. The guy stocking shelves and the girl scanning purchases at Target never occupied much of a place in the public mind, and certainly never a romantic one (no one composed a “Ballad of the Floor Associate”), but at least you had to look at them whenever you ventured out to stimulate the economy. They reminded you that low-priced Chinese-made goods were a mixed blessing—that many of the jobs being created in post-industrial America were crappy ones.
With work increasingly invisible, it’s much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy. For example, a century ago there was a great debate over the trusts—enormous concentrations of economic power in oil, railroads, banking, steel. The trusts produced a historic backlash called Progressivism. Reformers were divided into two camps: the New Nationalists, led by Theodore Roosevelt and guided by the New Republic editor Herbert Croly, believed that monopoly was an inevitable and highly efficient feature of the industrial economy. The New Nationalists wanted not to break up monopolies but to regulate them in the public interest, necessitating a central government that was the equal of the big corporations. “Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it,” Roosevelt said in Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1910, in a speech that inspired President Obama to talk about inequality a century later in the same place.
Comments