Our Processed World

Utopian reveries spill forth daily from the pulpits of the Oracles of Progress, promising the transformation of the drone labor of our soi-disant Information 
Age into acts of impassioned freedom by a liberated leisure class. We know 
all too well, however, the painful truth about today's work routines, which have become more ― not less ― routinized, soul-killing, and laden with drudgery 
to be beguiled. Indeed the grim contrast between the glum reality of cubicle labor and its ilk with the gilded rhetoric of a technocratic Golden Age, which once enticed us, then amused us, now only galls us as we contemplate 
our increasingly processed world. As Thorstein Veblen presciently observed
at the dawn of the last century: "Wherever the machine process extends, 
it sets the pace for workmen ― great and small."