CONCEPT
Generic Worker
Manuel Castells’s term for the labor category defined by interchangeability—workers whose contributions can be replicated by anyone with similar training, and whose position in the network is determined by expendability rather than by the unique judgment that only their particular history makes possible.
The generic worker is the figure that
Manuel Castells positioned in the network society as the labor category most vulnerable to structural displacement. In the industrial era, generic workers were routine laborers—factory workers, clerical employees, retail salespeople—whose skills were defined by the task rather than by the worker’s capacity for adaptation. The
network society already disadvantaged them; AI has made their situation structurally critical. What Castells could not have anticipated in the 1990s was that the AI transformation would extend the logic of generic labor upward through the knowledge economy: the junior developer who writes code according to specifications, the analyst who applies standard models to standard datasets, the lawyer who produces routine contracts from standard templates—each is a generic worker in Castells’s precise sense, because their contribution can now be replicated by a machine at a fraction of the cost. The generic worker is not fired; the generic worker is disconnected—excluded from