oh, we thought about them.

"the masses instead make do with stamped out plastic or metal objects that evince no sign that any living, breathing human ever worked on them or thought much about them."
Peak Everything p.76 by richard heinberg

i've spent the last twenty-nine years working in industrial manufacturing and i'd like to assure mr. heinberg that as a group industrial workers think quite alot about what they make at their jobs....for all the high-tech wizzardry that industialists and their shill economists like to hype to the service and information sector a great deal of manufacturing is still done by hand, and if it is primarilly mechanized people are still needed to serve as adjuncts to machines to package and quality control product...most machines in the real world are not bright enough to know when they are malfunctioning...someone still has to keep an eye on them....so for eight or ten hours a day ( at least during the recent bubble...not these days) people become extentions of machines...performing mindlessly repetetive tasks in the service of capital...this leaves a good deal of time for reflection ( a facet of proletarians little understood by management...since we perform tasks like automatons they feel that's what we are...the imagiantion and ingenuity of the shop floor continually take them by suprise)..being that workers are treated as ciphers and maligned as lazy and inefficient caretakers, that reflection usually turns to resentment and an active contempt for capital...everyone on the floor is keenly alert to the fact that the more they do the more wealth they provide for someone else...this is an empirical understanding of marx's theory of alienated labor, both psychologically and economically...all the boys and girls are natural marxisits, although they're unaware of it....even the bulk of their wages are someone else's property due to obligations in the form of monthly bills...disposable income is a luxury that is not common...so as you look at your souless toaster or that godawful refrigerator or bar stool, remember that someone somewhere put a good deal of thought into what you're using...even if, in these lean time, they spent less time doing it.