Those machines, like the ones that followed them, were labor savers. They may seem old-timey in comparison to today’s ‘acre eaters,’ but when they came on the market they greatly increased the amount of work that one worker could do in a day. And so they confronted us with a critical question: How would we define labor saving? We defined it, or allowed it to be defined for us by the corporations and the specialists, as if it involved no human considerations at all, as if the labor to be ‘saved’ were not human labor. We decided, in the language of some experts, to look on technology as a
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