CONCEPT
Proletarianization (Stiegler)
Stiegler's extension of the Marxist concept beyond economic dispossession to the loss of knowledge — the hollowing of savoir-faire when cognitive capacities are externalized into systems that perform them without requiring understanding.
For Marx, proletarianization was the dispossession of the means of production — the artisan stripped of tools and knowledge and reduced to a factory worker owning only labor power. Stiegler retained this structure while extending it far beyond industrial labor. Proletarianization, in his usage, is the loss of knowledge — of savoir-faire (knowing-how-to-do), of savoir-vivre (knowing-how-to-live), of the capacity to individuate through one's own knowing. This loss occurs not through material dispossession but through the externalization of cognitive capacities into technical systems that perform those capacities more efficiently than the practitioner. What AI accomplishes, and what You On AI documents with uncomfortable specificity, is the extension of proletarianization into the domain of cognitive labor itself.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Industrial proletarianization was the proletarianization of the hands. The artisan who knew how to shape wood or forge metal was replaced by a machine operator pressing buttons, and the knowledge that lived in the artisan's hands — embodied understanding built through