Machine Unlearning

The assembly line is perhaps the most iconic image of the Industrial Revolution. Situated in a cavernous factory, filled with smoke or the din of whirring metal, sweaty workers attend to their machines, drilling or joining the product as it rolls by, each according to his role.

In Becoming Attached, Robert Karen looks through the lens of attachment theory at the psychosocial effects of the Industrial Revolution on individuals and their relationships. Beginning with a description of the centrality of the family unit in preindustrial society, Karen explores the roots of many of the pressures we experience in society today: the pressure to compete and win (along with an emphasis on ambition and the fear of failure), to make your place in the world, to produce more and faster, and to keep moving until you achieve those goals.

Without falling prey to a naive, romantic nostalgia for the past, Karen makes a compelling case that in some ways we have quite naturally become harder and colder—more out of touch with our emotional needs—as we began to go out of the home to work in environments that lacked the familiar connections of preindustrial society. The modern emphasis on emotional intelligence in the workplace is just one response to the loss of the familiar closeness of the cottage industry. 

These are not new ideas, and they bring us back to the tension between love and power, community and technology, depicted so aptly in the symbolism of Tolkien’s ring of power or in the Star Wars story. It seems that the exponential rise of the machine and the power it puts in our hands has made it more and more difficult to cultivate community. John Bowlby, the pioneer of attachment theory, added mobility to the list of enemies of community: “In days gone by, people stuck around, they saw a lot of each other. But this business of moving every five years from one place to another is exceedingly destructive.”

As Thomas Wolfe wrote, you can’t go home again. We can’t turn back the clock to the pre-industrial days, so what can we do? Maybe the way forward is a focus not on the home as the unifying principle, nor on the workplace, but on the neighborhood. Perhaps we can create neighborhoods that are more integrated with businesses, where at least some of the people who live physically close to each other can go to work together. If better neighborhoods are a solution to the disintegration, fragmentation, and pressure that so many people experience, let’s ask: what makes a neighborhood good?