Earlier 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.

If 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.

The 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.

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.

Authority is the spiritual dimension of power because it depends upon faith in a system of meaning that decrees the necessity of the hierarchical order and so provides for the unity of imperative control.

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.

Technology makes the world a new place.