Picture the village baker, up before dawn, working dough by hand before sliding the first loaves into a wood-fired oven. Or the blacksmith, bent over his forge, practicing a craft learned through years of apprenticeship. We admire these people today. We seek out artisan bread, handmade furniture, and traditionally crafted goods. We imagine skilled people working independently, taking pride in what they make, and enjoying a direct relationship between their work and their lives.
We’ve made something of a romance out of the artisan.
But whose lives are we imagining?
In eighteenth-century Britain, mastery of a craft did not guarantee ownership of a workshop, and apprenticeship did not guarantee advancement. Even skilled journeymen could spend their entire working lives earning wages. By 1798, roughly three-quarters of households in England and Wales belonged to categories described as workers, cottagers, and paupers. These were not all destitute households, but neither were they the independent master craftsmen who dominate our retrospective imagination.
We have allowed an appealing picture of some people’s lives to stand in for the experience of an entire society.
When the Luddites began breaking machines in 1811, they weren’t defending a universally prosperous world of independent artisans. They were workers responding to changes in production, wages, and the value of their skills, in a society where most people already had limited control over their circumstances.
We usually tell the story that follows as a history of industrialization, technological progress, and struggles for labor rights. But alongside that history is another, one in which writers and reformers began changing the way ordinary people were understood, what they might become, and what society could make possible for them.
Part I: The People We Began to Imagine
Changing the Circumstances, Changing the Person
The Luddites have become shorthand for people who resist technology. The label survives two centuries later, applied to almost anyone who objects to a new machine or an unfamiliar technological practice. Yet the original movement was concerned with considerably more than machinery. Skilled textile workers were losing established protections, bargaining power, and livelihoods as new manufacturing practices spread.
Some responded violently. Others petitioned, organized, and appealed to government. The resistance drew attention to the consequences of industrial change, but it was not the only response taking shape.
During those same years, Robert Owen was developing a different kind of argument.
Owen managed cotton mills at New Lanark in Scotland. He was a successful manufacturer, not a worker protesting industrial machinery. But in A New View of Society, published in essays beginning in 1813, he advanced a proposition with implications far beyond factory management: human character was formed by circumstances, not independently created by the individual.
People’s habits, conduct, capabilities, and expectations developed through their upbringing, education, work, and daily surroundings. If those circumstances could be changed, so could the possibilities for the people living within them.
That challenged a society accustomed to treating poverty, ignorance, and undesirable conduct as personal failings. Owen was proposing that institutions themselves helped produce the people they subsequently judged.
He also put the idea to work. At New Lanark, he improved housing, sanitation, education, and aspects of working conditions. The mills remained a commercial enterprise, and Owen used their operation to persuade other manufacturers and lawmakers that improving workers’ lives could be compatible with profitable industry. He spoke to people who possessed power in a language they could understand, while asking them to reconsider their assumptions about the people they employed.
His approach was paternalistic. Owen believed enlightened authorities could organize better circumstances for others, without necessarily giving those people much authority over the arrangements themselves. But his larger proposition opened a question that was difficult to confine to the factory: if circumstances shaped what people could become, who should have a say in creating those circumstances?
People Who Govern and People Who Are Governed
By the 1830s, Britain’s industrial economy had changed enormously, but political representation remained restricted by property and status. The Reform Act of 1832 had expanded the electorate without extending voting rights to most working men.
In 1838, William Lovett, Francis Place, and their associates produced the People’s Charter. It demanded six parliamentary reforms, including voting rights for adult men, secret ballots, equal electoral districts, and the removal of property qualifications for members of Parliament. They were challenging the assumption that the people who worked, paid taxes, and lived under the law should remain largely excluded from making it.
Their movement included peaceful reformers and advocates of physical force. Their petitions were rejected, but over subsequent generations most of their demands were incorporated into British democratic institutions.
Owenism and Chartism were not the same movement, and their relationships were sometimes contentious. Yet Owenite ideas circulated within Chartism, and both participated in a broader reconsideration of the place of ordinary people in society. Owen imagined improving people’s circumstances through the actions of those who governed and employed them. The Chartists demanded that working people themselves possess political authority.
The Worker Who Was Already a Consumer
A generation later, the American machinist Ira Steward made another conceptual move that I find particularly compelling.
In his 1865 pamphlet The Eight Hour Movement: A Reduction of Hours Is an Increase of Wages, Steward argued that reducing working hours would do more than make a worker’s life less exhausting. It could change what that worker wanted from life.
Someone working twelve or fourteen hours a day had little time or energy for anything beyond the immediate necessities of existence. But give that person leisure, and different possibilities appeared. Time to read, learn, enjoy a family, participate in community life, and develop interests that went beyond subsistence.
Steward argued that people would develop new wants and expectations. They would demand better wages because they now had lives in which those wages could be used. Those demands, in turn, could stimulate consumption, production, and broader prosperity.
The worker was not simply a producer. The worker was also a consumer.
That seems obvious to us now. But what makes Steward’s argument interesting is not the observation that workers purchased things. It’s that he recognized possibilities already present in ordinary people, but constrained by the circumstances of their lives.
The argument reached beyond those workers. Better lives could produce benefits that manufacturers and the broader economy had reasons to recognize. Steward’s ideas entered the American labor movement, influencing the Knights of Labor and Samuel Gompers. Gompers explicitly credited Steward in connecting shorter hours to higher wages and expanding human wants.
When the New Understanding Becomes Ordinary
Americans have a familiar story about Henry Ford.
Ford’s decision in 1914 to introduce a five-dollar working day is often remembered through the idea that factory workers should earn enough to buy the cars they manufactured. The historical circumstances were more complicated. Ford was also responding to extraordinarily high labor turnover, the demands of assembly-line production, and the costs of retaining workers. The popular story gives too much credit to one manufacturer and too little to the labor movements and thinkers who preceded him.
But there is a reason the story has survived. It captures an idea that now seems entirely reasonable: a prosperous economy depends, in part, upon ordinary people having enough income and leisure to participate in the prosperity their work helps create.
What had once been an argument advanced by labor reformers became part of the language through which businesses and governments understood the economy.
The nineteenth century did not produce a continuous, inevitable march toward better lives. Many reforms were fiercely contested. Rights were extended unevenly. Some of the benefits of industrial prosperity came slowly, and some people were excluded for generations. Nor can we draw a single, uninterrupted intellectual line from Owen to the Chartists to Steward to Ford. These thinkers worked in different circumstances and did not all derive their ideas from one another.
But there is a history of ideas here, alongside the history of industrialization and political conflict.
Owen challenged the assumption that people’s character and capacities were fixed independently of their circumstances. The Chartists challenged the exclusion of ordinary working people from political authority. Steward challenged the conception of workers as merely producers, recognizing the possibilities that leisure, rising expectations, and consumption could open.
These were not only arguments about what people deserved. They were arguments about what people were, what they could become, and what might be possible for society if those understandings changed. They could be heard by workers, lawmakers, reformers, and eventually businesses whose interests were not always aligned with the people seeking change.
And over time, some of these ideas became ordinary assumptions.
By the middle of the twentieth century, significant numbers of people were living with opportunities that earlier generations had struggled to imagine. The circumstances of ordinary life had changed, and so had expectations about what people might do with their time, knowledge, and abilities.
Another set of technological transformations was beginning to change those circumstances again.
Part II: The Possibilities We Created
The Knowledge Worker
The decades following the Second World War brought an enormous expansion of education, white-collar employment, professional occupations, and the modern corporation. Manufacturing remained essential, but growing portions of Western economies were devoted to services, administration, research, finance, communication, and the management of information. Increasingly, what people knew, rather than simply what they could physically produce, became central to their economic value.
In 1959, Peter Drucker gave this transformation a name: the knowledge worker. His argument went beyond identifying a new occupational category. Where industrial production could be organized around machinery, standardized processes, and measurable output, knowledge work depended more heavily upon expertise, judgment, learning, and decisions that could not be prescribed in quite the same way. The worker possessed something valuable that the organization needed but could not simply manufacture.
Large corporations became both organizers and beneficiaries of this transformation. Universities educated growing professional classes, businesses developed departments around specialized expertise, and information systems supported increasingly complex organizations. Education and the ability to apply knowledge to new problems became important determinants of professional opportunity. The producer and consumer had not disappeared, but the knowledge worker now occupied a growing place in how society understood economic contribution.
Marshall McLuhan was considering related changes from another direction. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, he examined how print had shaped habits of thought, individualism, and specialization. In Understanding Media, he explored electronic communication and automation, arguing that they would change not merely employment but the relationship between work, learning, and everyday experience. In 1964, he was already imagining continuous learning as central to production and consumption alike.
McLuhan and Drucker were examining different questions, but both recognized that technology was changing the activities through which people developed and applied their capacities. And for a generation growing up amid expanding education, greater leisure, and rapid technological change, the distinction between learning for work and learning for pleasure was becoming less rigid.
From Knowledge Worker to Participant and Creator
The personal computer changed who could put those capacities to work. Tasks that had required corporate systems, specialized equipment, or institutional resources became possible at home. People could write, analyze, design, compose music, develop software, and organize projects using tools they controlled themselves. The Internet extended those capabilities into communication, collaboration, and distribution.
Television had already shown how electronic media could transform social and cultural life. Families and communities gathered around shared programming, even as advertising became central to the economics of commercial broadcasting and increasingly influenced what audiences received. The Internet initially offered a different relationship to the medium: ordinary people could create and distribute material without obtaining permission from established publishers, broadcasters, or distributors.
Someone no longer had to work for a newspaper to publish an account of an event, belong to a recording company to distribute music, or secure a television program to demonstrate an experiment. Capabilities associated with professional institutions became available to individuals pursuing their own interests and ideas.
Writers such as Henry Jenkins and Yochai Benkler explored the possibilities of this participatory culture. People could contribute to shared knowledge, collaborate across distances, organize communities, and participate in cultural production on a scale that had previously been difficult to imagine.
And they did. The Internet produced remarkable creative work and gave audiences to people whose talents might never have found a place within traditional institutions. It also produced enormous quantities of unremarkable material. Both were consequences of opening creation and distribution to people who had previously faced substantial barriers.
Some early bloggers, musicians, educators, YouTubers, and self-published authors built successful careers during a particular window, when creation and distribution were widely accessible but platforms had not yet fully monetized discovery. As those businesses developed advertising systems, paid promotion, and algorithmic control over visibility, later entrants faced costs and barriers their predecessors had not. Yet the original successes continued to define the possibilities people imagined for themselves.
We had found another independent artisan to romanticize, often overlooking how much the circumstances had changed for those trying to follow.
What Participation Became Worth
Not everyone creating something online wanted to build a business. People shared knowledge, answered questions, made music, and contributed to communities because they enjoyed doing so. Much like musicians gathering in an Irish pub, some participants were professionals while others simply wanted to join in. Services such as Patreon later gave audiences ways to support creators directly, something like passing the hat.
In 2000, Tiziana Terranova recognized another dimension of this activity in Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy. People could participate voluntarily, for genuine enjoyment and personal satisfaction, while their contributions generated substantial commercial value for the institutions facilitating them.
As online platforms grew, that relationship became central to their economics. Users supplied writing, photographs, videos, conversations, reviews, and relationships. Platforms controlled the infrastructure, accumulated information about their users, and increasingly determined which contributions would be visible and how audiences could be reached.
Advertising and commercial discovery systems helped transform the economics of participation. Search rankings, recommendation algorithms, paid placements, and advertising auctions could change the prospects of a creator or business without changing the quality of its work. Platform operators could revise those systems, leaving participants dependent on rules they did not control. Established organizations with substantial resources were generally better equipped to absorb the consequences.
The gig economy offered a parallel version of the promise of independence. People were invited to construct flexible working lives, choosing when they worked and connecting directly with customers through technology. For some, the flexibility was real. But platforms could also determine customer access, prices, visibility, and the terms of work. The worker’s apparent independence existed within arrangements controlled by someone else.
The promise of participation had not been false. What changed were the institutions surrounding it, and the extent to which they controlled the opportunities the technology had created.
From Human Contribution to Artificial Intelligence
The products of this participation accumulated on an extraordinary scale. People wrote, recorded, photographed, translated, explained, argued, and shared. They created cultural works, personal archives, professional knowledge, and records of their daily lives. Much of that activity was never intended to be commercial, yet its products became valuable assets held by platforms, employers, and other institutions.
With the development of artificial intelligence, those accumulated contributions acquired another purpose. Publicly available creative work, licensed material, collected web content, and commercially acquired datasets became inputs to AI development. Corporate information, including records of how people communicate and work, also became commercially valuable as potential training material.
This raises questions well beyond disputes over published books, photographs, or music. A person contributing to a discussion, sharing an experience, or participating in a workplace conversation does not necessarily imagine that their contribution may later become an asset in a market for AI development.
Copyright and patent law provide some ways of addressing these disputes, but I have long questioned whether their underlying assumptions adequately represent how knowledge and creativity develop. When Britain’s Statute of Anne established copyright protection in 1710, the initial term for new works was fourteen years, with another fourteen possible. The first American copyright law followed a similar model in 1790. Early American patents were also limited to fourteen years. Today, American copyright generally lasts for the author’s lifetime plus seventy years, while qualifying corporate works can receive ninety-five years of protection from publication. The legal structures governing intellectual property have changed enormously over the period this essay examines.
Every writer, musician, scientist, and inventor draws upon an accumulation of previous human contributions. Culture influences culture, and ideas develop through contact with other ideas. Yet the systems governing ownership have grown more extensive and commercially consequential. Steamboat Willie, first released in 1928, did not enter the American public domain until January 2024, after ninety-five years of copyright protection. Today, artificial intelligence is being developed within a complex system of copyrights, patents, trade secrets, and licensing arrangements. How those systems shape who controls the technology, and who benefits from it, deserves an examination of its own.
I find myself of two minds about AI training. I understand the objections of creators whose work has been used without permission or compensation. But I also question whether conventional notions of ownership can adequately account for the collective cultural and intellectual inheritance upon which new creation depends.
Where I have much less uncertainty is about the obligation that follows from building a technology upon that inheritance.
AI systems are being developed from an immense accumulation of human knowledge, culture, expression, and experience. They should return meaningful benefits to society, not merely financial returns to the institutions that own them.
I don’t yet know what those arrangements should be. But the question is larger than how individual rights holders are compensated. It concerns what society should receive from a technology made possible by generations of human contribution.
What Are We Imagining Now?
Artificial intelligence now unsettles two of the more recent conceptions through which we have understood people’s contributions to society. Knowledge work and creative production, activities increasingly associated with human expertise and capability, can now be undertaken in part by machines.
Yet much of our conversation concerns what people will lose, rather than what they might become.
There are profoundly different ways of using AI. In my own creative and professional work, I might spend hours developing ideas through conversation, asking questions, challenging assumptions, and connecting concepts from fields that don’t ordinarily meet. I use AI to help turn those ideas into writing, music, software, business models, and functioning systems.
I have said for decades that a financial spreadsheet tells a story. It describes what might be possible within a business, just as a narrative explores what might be possible within a human life. AI helps me construct and examine those stories more quickly.
For me, it expands what I can accomplish with ideas I can already imagine. It doesn’t replace the curiosity, experiences, judgment, or accumulated knowledge from which those ideas emerge.
But I don’t assume this is how most people use the technology. People approach AI with radically different experiences, purposes, and expectations. Some use it to explore and develop their own thinking. Others seek practical guidance, finished products, or decisions. The same person may use it differently from one task to the next.
We have growing research about what people ask AI systems to do. We know much less about how those interactions affect people’s judgment, capabilities, aspirations, or understanding of themselves. And some of the most detailed information about those interactions remains within the AI companies, which have commercial reasons to control access to it.
Software development provides one visible example of a profession developing practices around the technology. Developers have long worked through specifications, implementation, testing, review, and revision. AI coding tools increasingly support those established habits, allowing developers to delegate more implementation while continuing to define what they want built. Comparable approaches may develop in other fields. Some already exist. But we shouldn’t assume that access to the same technology produces the same opportunities, capacities, or experiences.
Meanwhile, the language of the public debate has become increasingly defensive. We worry about jobs disappearing, creative work losing value, professional knowledge becoming obsolete, and people surrendering judgment to machines. We discuss misinformation, manipulation, privacy, surveillance, and the need to protect people from harms they may not even recognize.
These are serious concerns. I share many of them. But the dominant image is increasingly of people who are less empowered, less necessary, or more at the mercy of technological systems. Even our arguments for protection can reinforce a conception of people as being done unto, rather than people whose possibilities might be enlarged.
Consider the contrast with Steward. He wasn’t simply demanding that workers be protected from exhaustion. He was describing what people might become if they had time and resources to live differently, and he made that possibility relevant to the wider society, including those who already possessed economic power.
Owen did something similar from another direction. He looked at the circumstances of industrial life and argued that people could develop differently if those circumstances changed. The Chartists challenged assumptions about who could participate in governing society. Later thinkers recognized people as knowledge workers, independent users of powerful tools, participants, and creators.
Those visions did not remove the inequalities that constrained people’s lives. The romantic image of the independent creator, whose opportunities narrowed as platforms commercialized discovery, is a recent reminder that expanded capabilities do not guarantee lasting independence.
But these ideas offered something more than opposition. They articulated possibilities for ordinary people that could become part of shared cultural expectations, business practices, and political institutions. They changed not simply what society thought people deserved, but what society understood people to be capable of becoming.
Today, we have no shortage of criticism of the institutions controlling technology. We have proposals for regulations, protections, ownership rights, and changes to the systems through which people participate. Some of those reforms are necessary.
But I wonder whether we are missing something that earlier thinkers understood.
If we cannot imagine a better life made possible by the technologies already around us, how do we build institutions that support that life? How do we create a common set of assumptions powerful enough to influence not only the people experiencing technological disruption, but also those with the authority and resources to shape what comes next?
And how do we articulate that possibility without allowing it to become another attractive promise that existing concentrations of power can absorb and sell back to us?
Two centuries ago, Owen looked at the circumstances of people living through a profound technological transformation and proposed a different understanding of what they could become.
Who is our Owen today?
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