A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

An Aside: Weren’t Assembly Lines Awful for Workers?

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When I was in the early stages of my thinking about this book, I
attended a family wedding. During the rehearsal dinner, I began
chatting with a relative. He wanted to know what I was working on,
so I told him about this book and tested out my ideas about the
assembly line’s relevance to rethinking knowledge work. I still
remember his reaction word for word: “That sounds awful.”
The issue in using the assembly line as a positive example is that
the experience of actually working on one of these lines was anything
but positive. As the historian Joshua Freeman argues in his 2019
book, Behemoth, when we think about the productivity gains of the
assembly line, we focus too much on efficient material handling.
Many of these gains came instead from the “sheer intensification of
work.”
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 If you slacked off your attention for even a moment, you
could stall the entire line—forcing workers into an unnatural
combination of boredom and constant attentiveness. Frederick
Winslow Taylor had earlier tried to boost efficiency by measuring
workers’ performance with a stopwatch and offering incentives to
those who were fast. Henry Ford bypassed Taylor’s approach by
simply making it impossible to be anything but fast. “For assembly-
line workers, work was relentless and repetitious,” writes Freeman.
“Assembly-line work proved physiologically and psychologically
draining in ways other types of labor were not. More than ever
before, workers were extensions of machinery, at the mercy of its
demands and pace.”
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In 1936, Charlie Chaplin satirized this grim reality with his
landmark film Modern Times, which features his Little Tramp
character trying to keep up with an assembly line that runs faster and
faster. Wielding two large wrenches, Chaplin turns bolts on each
item that passes. As the foreman increases the line’s speed, Chaplin’s
actions become more frantic, leading him to eventually leap onto the
conveyor belt in a vain last attempt to keep up with the items
whizzing past. He’s whisked away through a chute and ends up
ground among the plant’s oversized gears. Chaplin made the film
soon after visiting one of Henry Ford’s factories.
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This general understanding that assembly line work is
dehumanizing was what prompted my relative’s negative reaction.
He was imagining a future of knowledge work in which we end up in
a digital-era reboot of Modern Times, with the frantic wrenching
now replaced with frantic typing, and the sequence still ending with

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us mashed by the proverbial machinery of productivity. This is a
natural concern to raise about the attention capital principle, but
when we consider specific case studies of this principle in action, the
feared drudgery doesn’t materialize. Consider Devesh’s marketing
company. Nothing about the idea of switching work from a jumbled
inbox to structured project boards indicates a shift toward more
monotonous or soulless work. If anything, this change initiated the
opposite effect. In a reversal of what happened when Ford
introduced the assembly line, Devesh’s employees found their
professional lives less grueling and more sustainable after Devesh
innovated their workflow.
As you’ll encounter in the case studies that follow throughout