The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy.

Honda opened its first assembly line in Lincoln in November 2001.

Doing a TV show, you're on an assembly line and it's as cut and dry as that. There are some shows that are exceptions. There are producers that want really special things.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

I was running an assembly line designed to build memory chips. I saw the microprocessor as a bloody nuisance.

I'm a Detroit kid who grew up with that assembly line mentality: You go to work to make money.