CONCEPT
The Factory Without Walls
The dissolution — from telephone through email through smartphone to AI — of the material and temporal boundaries that once contained production to a specific location, leaving the enterprise of the self without architectural limits.
The industrial factory had walls, and this architectural fact had consequences for the history of labor more significant than it initially appears. The walls defined two spaces: one for labor, one outside it. Inside, the worker was a worker; outside, she was a person. The employer's jurisdiction ended at the wall. Immaterial labor dissolved this boundary through a sequence of technical and organizational changes — telephone, email, smartphone, and finally AI — each removing one layer of the wall. AI represents the final layer's removal: the collapse of the implementation barrier that once separated portable ideas from non-portable production. The factory has no walls because the self is the factory, and the self is always available, everywhere, for productive engagement.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The walls were not built to protect the worker. They contained machinery. But they had the inadvertent effect of protecting the worker's non-work life from encroachment. The employer's claim