https://vegasharmon.com/authors/matthew-b.-crawford/ Recent content in Matthew B. Crawford on Vegas Harmon Hugo en Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/escaping-heteronomy-gives-up-on-skill/ Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/escaping-heteronomy-gives-up-on-skill/ The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things, to the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-rising-sea-of-clerkdom/ Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-rising-sea-of-clerkdom/ It seems we must take a cold-eyed view of “knowledge work,” and reject the image of a rising sea of pure mentation that lifts all boats. More likely is a rising sea of clerkdom. To expect otherwise is to hope for a reversal in the basic logic of the modern economy — that is, cognitive stratification. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/consumer-debt-as-discipline/ Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/consumer-debt-as-discipline/ Adopting Ford’s methods, the industry would soon be reduced to the Big Three. So workers eventually became habituated to the abstraction of the assembly line. Evidently, it inspires revulsion only if one is acquainted with more satisfying modes of work. Here the concept of wages as compensation achieves its fullest meaning, and its central place in modern economy. Changing attitudes toward consumption seemed to play a role. A man whose needs are limited will find the least noxious livelihood and work in a subsistence mode, and indeed the experience of early (eighteenth-century) capitalism, when many producers worked at home on a piece-rate basis, was that only so much labor could be extracted from them.