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In the early 20th century, Henry Ford perfected the production industry by developing a highly specific and efficient assembly line, an open system of production where raw material entered one end of the factory and emerged at the other end tranformed into a functional product - in Ford's case, a car. Each person worked in a single spot on the assembly line, doing the same thing in repetitive fashion, hour after hour and day after day.
While many people loved the assembly line and the number of jobs it seemed to produce, there was also concern about the seeming replacibility of each person on that line. You no longer had to be a craftsman to make a functional tool, and no longer had to bring specialized skills to your job. This fear of being turned into a simple cog in the the machine can be clearly seen in Fritz Lang's 1927 dystopian movie Metropolis, where Robot is the cause of chaos on part of the Planners, who are ultimately overthrown by the Workers. |
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| While most people interpret Metropolis as an anti-Communist screed, I believe that you can also see the fears of what people can and will become in a mechanized, Fordist future where people are easily replacible by whomever functions as the boss in the vertical production market of the time. This fear of replacement and the cogs in a machine mentality continued to resonate in future dystopic works of fiction by numerous science fiction authors, including George Orwell and Phillip K. Dick. Part of the cultural belief that built up around Fordism, assembly lines, and efficiency at work is what allowed Apple to so effectively use the concept of 1984's dystopic future against Microsoft and IBM. | ||