> Why did working people understand this truth in 1915 but not today?My cynical view (as another 'born into a union family' etc etc) is that, back then, enraged human souls could take out their anger on the material interests and personal safety of capital owners. A factory would burn, stock would get ruined, people would get physically threatened. That empowered workers and did a lot in making owners understand that humans are not tools that you can just put down when not needed.
Nowadays what you gonna do, burn a few laptops? Smash a few desks? Big deal. The owner or CEO responsible for directives is probably in another continent, essential business interests are in datacentres across the world. Unless you are an uber-skilled security professional, you simply have no significant recourse. You could lynch the redundancy managers sent to deal with you (as they are starting to do in France), but the owners will just hire a few more.
What this means is that, behind all our philosophy about Sharing Economies, Clouds and so on, the new model of work is really the Mechanical Turk: machine-mediated work distribution across an atomized workforce. Until we stop loving the machine, we will not stop this trend.
This is generationally very hard, because we have grown with these machines and we've seen them shape our world and our professions - how can we not like them? There is still so much to do, so many opportunities... We are going through an industrial revolution the likes of which had not been seen since the early 1800s, and we know those were not easy years for the common folk. It will take a few more generations to stabilize and get to grip with new social realities; it will take people who were born after machines stopped being novel, people who can consciously refuse and refute the model pushed upon them by networks, computers and centralized capital. It will probably not be millennials, but maybe their kids will be desperate enough to start considering real changes.