The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy.
From George Packer
With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.
Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected.
To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world - and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales.
I actually think that self-interest is overrated as an all-purpose guide to political motive. It leaves out something at least as powerful and immovable - individual psychology.
Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party.
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