> joanna wrote:
>
> It can
> be a washing machine, which saves women the labor of washing clothes;
> or it can be an assembly line which breaks a task into a million
> meaningless tasks requiring no skill and creating an army of bored,
> depressed, stressed workers whose mental and physical life is degraded
> every day by having to do such work.
There are all sorts of things very wrong with this.
An assembly line is a perfect image of the absolute neutrality of technology as such. This simplification of labor would be the basis of human freedom in a world in which hours of labor were short, and conditions of work were under the control of the workers.
And the washing machine creates the illusion that laundry is a sensible _solitary_ task, instead of a task which should be wholly socialized. The misery of laundry by hand was, like that of assembly line work, an illusion created by the social conditions under which they occurred. In a sensible social order there would be no individual washing machines but there would be assembly lines.
Carrol