I've lived in a preindustrial (rural Argentina) as well as an industrial world. You experience a different sense of time in a community that works the land. Human relationships aren't professionalized or contractualized; family and friends take primacy. Life has much more continuity than discontinuity. There's a great deal of poetry in everyday life.

Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can't meet.

Technology represents intelligence systematically applied to the problem of the body. It functions to amplify and surpass the organic limits of the body; it compensates for the body's fragility and vulnerability.

As information technology restructures the work situation, it abstracts thought from action.

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

Computer mediation seems to bathe action in a more conditional light: perhaps it happened; perhaps it didn't. Without the layeredrichness of direct sensory engagement, the symbolic medium seems thin, flat, and fragile.

In diminishing the role of the worker's body in the labor process, industrial technology has also tended to diminish the importance of the worker. In creating jobs that require less human effort, industrial technology has also been used to create jobs that require less human talent. In creating jobs that demand less of the body, industrial production has also tended to create jobs that give less to the body, in terms of opportunities to accrue knowledge on the production process.