In other words, the division of labor was summoned into society at the beginning of the twentieth century by the rapidly changing circumstances of the first modernity’s new individuals, discussed in Chapter 2. It was an essential response to their new “conditions of existence.” As people like my great-grandparents joined the migration to a modern world, the old sources of meaning that had bonded communities across space and time melted away. What would hold society together in the absence of the rules and rituals of clan and kin? Durkheim’s answer was the division of labor.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 579