CONCEPT
Class Analysis of Technology
The analytical framework that treats technology not as autonomous force but as shaped by, and shaping, the class structure in which it is developed, deployed, and absorbed — the framework Ehrenreich applied to every earlier transition and that the AI discourse systematically avoids.
Class analysis of technology insists that understanding any technological transformation requires attending to the class structure in which it operates — who develops it, who deploys it, who captures its gains, who absorbs its costs, and how these distributions are produced and maintained. The framework treats technology neither as neutral tool (available to all, blamed for nothing) nor as autonomous agent (driving history independently of human choices) but as social product whose trajectory is shaped by the interests of the actors with power over its development and deployment. Ehrenreich's career was, in one reading, a sustained application of this framework to successive technological and economic transitions. The AI discourse has avoided the framework almost entirely, preferring the autonomous-technology narrative that lets the actors capturing the gains disappear from analysis.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework's core move is to refuse the standard question — is