1. Introduction

As readers of this journal – or, readers of practically any print or more likely digital publication – are aware, many in developed capitalist economies are concerned about a looming crisis of under-employment and job loss. Automation, generally, and artificial intelligence, specifically, appear poised to displace the work of large numbers of humans. Even as the full impact of AI on the future of work and workers cannot be known, scholars have long decried the degradation and precarity of many forms of employment in the new economy: the speed-up of digital labour, the short term temporality of gig work, the lack of regulation and accountability of employers via platform work, the theft of wages from workers and the expansion of work into unpaid hours, deskilling and the loss of worker control to digital surveillance, gendered and racialised stratification and exploitation, intensified exposure to the speculation and instruments of financial capitalism, and on (see, recently Pötzsch & Schamberger 2022, Demir 2024, Minotakis & Faras 2024, Liu 2025, Santos 2025).

This article examines the power of discourses of technological unemployment and human obsolescence in the first decades of the twentieth century and its mobilisation in arguments for old age pensions and Social Security in the United States. These discourses were powerful in their prevalence, impact, and seeming acceptance across groups of workers, labour and social reformers, and even industrialists in advocating for and justifying corporate and state welfare practices. At a larger level, this article argues that as we analyse our contemporary moment, histories of technology and, more importantly, histories of capitalism, can provide perspectives and inform strategies for the present. Such historical work elucidates movements to resist technology, regulate technological imposition, direct technological development for social imperatives and sustainability, and demand the redistribution of the forms of economic and time wealth generated by industrial and technological change. Historical perspectives also remind us that current technologies have not innovated on their own and do not proceed in a deterministic direction, but rather have been developed and applied based on capitalists’ drive for efficiency and profit. AI and automation’s contemporary threat to jobs may feel existential, but history suggests that it is another stage in the long, ongoing conflict between capital and workers (Minotakis & Faras 2024, 631-632, Dyer-Witheford, Kjøsen & Steinhoff 2019, 69). This stage may in fact be different, but historical study clarifies those divergences between the past and the present, honing our visions for what might be possible in the future.

With this in mind, contemporary theorists of work and technology have begun to productively look to historical antecedents to explain and demonstrate the practicality of a politics that respond to capitalist priorities around work and technology, learning lessons from the successes and limitations of the examples of Luddite resistance to the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution (Noble 1995), feminist movements’ struggles to redefine work, productivity and free time (Weeks 2011, Hester and Srnicek 2023), decolonial and abolitionist positions against techno-racial systems (Browne 2015, Benjamin 2023), workers’ persistent demands for shorter work days and weeks (Hunnicutt 1988 & 2013, Roediger & Foner 1989, Cutler 2004), workers’ organising for worker-led innovation and “socially useful” and sustainable production (Nierling 2025), worker-recovered and -run enterprises and worker cooperative movements (Srnicek & Williams 2015), among others (Benanav & Flores 2023).

Surprisingly, scholars have neglected the history at the centre of this article – early twentieth-century discourses and demands around technological unemployment that contributed to the winning of Social Security and the large-scale establishment of retirement from work for older adults in the US. Perhaps it is overlooked because it is seen as part of a response to the larger economic crisis of the Great Depression, or because the resulting New Deal policies were reformist rather than radical: Keynesian-corporatist solutions to crises that would continue to reemerge. The critiques of technological unemployment and obsolescence that led to the Social Security solution were voiced by a broad political swathe of groups with a range of political positions from anti-capitalist, humanitarian and philanthropic, techno-utopian, and even reformist pro-capitalist, most with racist, sexist, and ableist assumptions in their definitions of productivity and social value. But the hegemony of the belief in technological unemployment and obsolescence, and the breadth of the voices that spoke it, proved to have been a strength when the moment came for their demands to be heard. That moment was a product of economic crisis – the Great Depression – but it was also a product of workers and organisers who drew attention to labour’s lifelong exploitation and the possibility of greater liberation from work. And the victory was not small: no less than the largest group of people in the US to win guaranteed income from the state.

How did thinking about technological change, specifically concerns about technological unemployment and human obsolescence in the face of mechanisation, contribute to the winning of economic support for older adults in the US? In the first of its multiple sections, this article lays the groundwork for answering this question – or asking it at all – in political economic approaches to media history and their potential for contributing critical perspectives that elucidate both the past and present. The article then applies this approach in explaining the development of the discourse around older adults’ technological unemployment, expressed in those terms in the early twentieth century, as well as, evocatively, as older adults being thrown on the “industrial scrap heap”. The section that follows reminds us that it was not the technologies themselves that hurt older workers, but instead their application toward capitalist imperatives. Workers, organisers, and even the scientific managers of the day saw work with machines as ageing workers, both physically weathering workers and culturally constructing them as incompatible with new technologies. Working within these assumptions, capitalists saw the removal of older adults from work as potentially beneficial to firms and the economy and workers and organisers saw the wealth of time and money generated by mechanisation as potentially offering older workers relief from work. Part 4 argues that workers, organisers and reformers mobilised these discourses from their various political orientations in a “mass movement for old age support” in the early twentieth century. Part 5 shows how these calls built upon – but also sometimes ran counter to – longstanding related demands of shorter work hours, unemployment protections, and other forms of universal or comprehensive forms of social security. The article concludes, then, with a call for our awareness of the ways in which critical discourses of capitalist application of technology can be tremendously powerful and successful in making claims on the forms of wealth produced by our labours – but that any potential resulting redistribution of this wealth is susceptible to perceptions of who is deemed worthy, often in terms of technology and labour, as defined by capital.

2. Foundations

This study brings together approaches from labour studies, history, and media and communication studies, a triangulation essential for understanding the historical moment at the centre of this article – the early twentieth century – as well as our current one. It takes inspiration from Vincent Mosco’s classic conceptualisation of the interrelated guiding commitments of work in the political economy of communication: “history, the social totality, moral philosophy, and praxis” (Mosco 2009, 81). Unlike conventional media history focused on a disconnected historical moment’s text, technology, industry or practice, what distinguishes a political economy orientation is a commitment to analysing media history in the context of “the social whole or the totality of social relations” of the historical moment (Mosco 2009, 16). Those interested in political economy look to history, not only to historicise and trace the origins of the structures of power of the present, but also to help us to see more clearly the dynamic, conflictive forces within capitalism that drive history. Historical inquiry reveals moments of historical change and reminds us of its possibility. Those of us concerned with the political economy of the present may also draw conclusions from historical class struggles as lessons for contemporary developments and challenges as we seek a more just future (Mosco 2009, Fuchs 2024a).

Methodologically, this article hopes to combine labour studies and related materialist traditions of political economy with analysis of the logics, aesthetics and ideas from cultural studies, or “ideology critique,” to examine the ways in which discourses about work, technology, and the economy shaped both systems of power and challenges to them (Marx 1867/1990, Mosco 2004, Fuchs 2024b, 133). In all historical moments, ideas about capitalism are shaped by, but also shape, its material realities. In the early twentieth century, beliefs about technological and industrial change, and perceived human obsolescence in relation to it, would shape the material realities of the modern life course.

Aaron Benanav (2019) has persuasively written against putting automation at the centre of the economic and labour history of the 20^th century, arguing that unemployment in the last two decades is due not to technological change but rather industrial overcapacity and global competition leading to economic stagnation. Increased labour productivity due to technological development generated income for corporations and stockholders, which they put into financial capitalism’s instruments for short-term profits and speculative investment, rather than productive investments that would stimulate economic growth and employment. But while arguing that automation explanations are misguided, Benanav does assert that they have served important imaginative purposes in the history of labour and capitalism. Citing Fredric Jameson, he sees automation discourses and related postwork politics (which see a technological solution to both unemployment and potential liberation from work) as important forms of capitalist critique and attempts to imagine emancipatory, utopian possibilities. But per Benanav they have not generated real change, partly because the economic crises predicted by automation critics have not appeared:

“Visions of automated factories then appeared again in the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s, before their re-emergence in the 2010s. Each time, they were accompanied or shortly followed by predictions of a coming age of ‘catastrophic unemployment and social breakdown’, which could be prevented only if society were reorganized. To point out the periodicity of this discourse is not to say that its accompanying social visions should be dismissed. For one thing, the technological breakthroughs presaged by automation discourse could still be achieved at any time: just because they were wrong in the past does not necessarily mean that they will always be wrong in the future. More than that, these visions of automation have clearly been generative in social terms: they point to certain utopian possibilities latent within modern capitalist societies. The error in their approach is merely to suppose that, via ongoing technological shifts, these utopian possibilities will imminently be revealed via a catastrophe of mass unemployment” (Benanav 2019 citing Bix 2000, 305-307).

But it is the historical moment right before Benanav’s periodisation – the first decades of the twentieth century – that is the exception that proves the rule. The critiques of technological change that emerged in the late 19^th century continued through the early 20^th century in multiple forms, especially in concern about older workers, found evidence in the catastrophic breakdown of the economy during the Great Depression and their arguments gained purchase in some of the proposed solutions to the crisis. In Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs, Amy Sue Bix writes, “In the 1920s mechanizing production seemed to guarantee prosperity; in the 1930s, people feared that changing workplace technology might become America’s social and economic downfall” (2000, 5). But the prosperity of the 1920s was not equally distributed, like our own period of income inequality, nor were the guarantees of mechanised production. Many of those labouring with machines saw them as threatening unemployment and obsolescence, at least for older workers. They also saw the potentially emancipatory possibility of technologically enabled reduction of human labour through reduced working hours, and even technological unemployment, through the large-scale retirement from work of older workers. These logics and demands predated the 1930s, when the economic crisis allowed for them to get traction in the proposals for old age pensions and Social Security. Well before the Depression, in the early 20^th century, workers, social reformers, and even some businessmen were increasingly seeing the need for forms of old age insurance and security. They argued that the historical developments of capitalism in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, including the growth of monopoly capital, capital investment in technology and the mechanisation of labour, labour speed up, and associated age discrimination against perceived inefficient older workers led to both the need and possibility of systematising old age income and socialising the costs of the social reproduction of the elderly (Oran 2017, 150).

This history also reminds us that the temporalities of labour and life that we accept in our current moment are in large part constructions of capitalist imperatives and state policy. With the resulting federal old age insurance that came to be Social Security, both work and age became defined in relation to each other, and both by industrial and technological requirements. The terms of who was productive and who was not, what kind of life was deserving of social protection, what kind of work merited relief, how entitlements from the state could be justified in service to the economy, and how the life course should be paced, became renegotiated for the twentieth century and were built on discourses of technological unemployment and human obsolescence. After decades of demands and debate, Social Security encouraged the removal of a large group of workers from the workforce through retirement to increase the employment of other younger workers. It defined certain forms of waged, industrial labour as productive and deserving and left other people’s work and lives unprotected. In this historical moment of the early twentieth century when the temporality of the waged work day and working life were not yet clearly fixed, we see can the foundation of our current debates around technological unemployment, whose time is deemed productive, how time away from waged work is defined, and the possibilities and pitfalls in the ways demands for protection from labour exploitation and displacement are made.