The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.
Shoshana ZuboffTechnology 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.
Shoshana ZuboffEarlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks. In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual content of work at all levels. Work comes to depend on an ability to understand, respond to, manage, and create value from information.
Shoshana ZuboffIf the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamicsthat present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.
Shoshana ZuboffLabor came to humanity with the fall from grace and was at best a penitential sacrifice enabling purity through humiliation. Laborwas toil, distress, trouble, fatigue--an exertion both painful and compulsory. Labor was our animal condition, struggling to survive in dirt and darkness.
Shoshana ZuboffThe history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker's body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers' intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.
Shoshana Zuboff