I read Harry Braverman's seminal Labor and Monopoly Capital shortly after it came out in 1974. I eagerly absorbed his account of how capitalists used technology to strip skill from workers, in order to cheapen labor and heighten managerial control over the work process. I read with interest how proprietors took the deskilling model developed in a blue-collar setting and extended it to clerical and service jobs, increasingly wiping out distinctions in the workforce.