In the Age of the Smart Machine Shoshana Zuboff
 
Selected Quotations
 

"More frightening still was the sense of a future moving out of reach so rapidly that there was little opportunity to plan or make choices." (p.371)

 
" 'The managers want everything to be run by computers. But if no one has a job, no one will know how to do anything anymore. Who will pay the taxes? What kind of society will it be when people have lost their knowledge and depend on computers for everything?' " (p.372)

 
"...the sentient body loses its salience as a source of knowledge, resulting in profound disorientation and loss of meaning." (p.373)
 
 
"Work becomes more abstract as it depends upon understanding and manipulating information." (p.373)


 
 
"Employees barred from the new forms of mastery relinquish their sense of responsibility for the organization's work and use obedience to authority as a means of expressing their resentment." (p.374)

 
"Authority comes to depend more upon an appropriate fit between knowledge and responsibility than upon the ranking rules of the traditional organizational pyramid." (p.374)


 
 
"The new technology becomes the source of surveillance techniques that are used to ensnare organizational members or to subtly bully them into conformity." (p.374)

 
"The new technological infrastructure becomes a battlefield of techniques, with managers inventing novel ways to enhance certainty and control while employees discover new methods of self protection and even sabotage." (p.374)

"It is also a vision of a fruitful future, a call for action that can lead us beyond the stale reproduction of the past into an era that offers a historical opportunity to more fully develop the economic and human potential of our work organizations." (p.375)

 
[Introduction to Webbed Analysis][Selected Quotations from Section 2]