"The Manipulation of Things Rather Than Ideas"

"The truth about most white-collar office work, Crawford argues, is captured better by 'Dilbert' and 'The Office': dull routine more alienating than the machine production denounced by Marx. Unlike the electrician who knows his work is good when you flip a switch and the lights go on, the average knowledge worker is caught in a morass of evaluations, budget projections, and planning meetings. None of this bears the worker's personal stamp; none of it can be definitively evaluated; and the kind of mastery or excellence available to the forklift driver or mechanic are elusive. Rather than achieving self-mastery by confronting a 'hard discipline' like gardening or structual engineering or learning Russian, people are offered the fake autonomy of consumer choice, expressing their inner selves by sitting in front of a Harley-Davidson catalog and deciding how to trick out their bikes."

Francis Fukuyama reviews Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work in The New York Times.