A Brief History of “Unempowerment” aka Unemployment

“From this know-how, what could be detached from human performance was gradually cut out and “perfected” with machines that use regulatable combinations of forms, materials, and forces…As its techniques are gradually taken away from it in order to transform them into machines, it seems to withdraw into a subjective knowledge (savoir) separated from the language of its procedures (which are then reverted to it in the form imposed by technologically-produced machines). Thus know-how takes on the appearance of an “intuitive” or “reflex” ability, which is almost invisible and whose status remains unrecognized.”

Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 69.

Being an intellectual child of the 90's I'm easily seduced by French theory, although the humanism that underlies thenRenaissance, the Enlightenment, and post-modernism is all of a piece in allowing full subjectivity only to the mind of the highly domesticated urban dweller, and that is a existential foundation that I have become less and less willing to grant. If you only "recognize" city people and the forms of knowledge generated in cities, then climate change and mass unempowerment and industrial mono-culture and "big data" is what you get.  

Still, French theory is a useful antidote to thinking in American terms, which some people would say is impossible anyway.  But there was Aldo Leopold.