Everyone finds justification for his or her views in logic and analysis, but a personal philosophy often emerges from some archaic part of the mind, an early idea of how the world should be.
George PackerRead
With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the challenges in understanding the social impacts of the Internet economy due to the often unseen nature of digital work.
George Packer's quote underscores the difficulty of comprehending the broader human and social implications of the Internet economy, especially as much of the labor involved goes unnoticed. As work becomes more digital and less tangible, it becomes challenging to evaluate how these changes shape societal relationships and individual experiences.
Themes
InternetEconomyWorkSocial ImpactInvisible Labor
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech on modern work, one might quote Packer to illustrate the challenges of understanding labor in a digital age.
More from George Packer
All quotes βIdeology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.
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At the heart of the matter is a battle between wish and fear. Fear generally proves stronger than a wish, but it leaves a taste of disappointment on the tongue.
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As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.
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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.
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Abstract sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments - who might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know.
George PackerRead
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People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.
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Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.
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People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.
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Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to redistribute it to others, and helpless because the users can't change it since they don't have the source code. They can't study what it really does. So the proprietary program is a system of unjust power.
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Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
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