Your life is not like a Detroit assembly line — it’s worse

This year’s Free Thinking festival at the Sage in Gateshead has been asking the question,  Who’s in Control?. Oddly, or perhaps presciently, as soon as I typed that last word ‘control’, the power went off in the midst of Monday’s storm. No word processor, no internet connection, no phone line, almost no radio (since the only battery-operated radio I now possess is in the bathroom). A weekend of debates and talks about who’s really in charge of our health, our imagination, our privacy soon becomes a lot of hot air in the face of hurricane-force winds. The most sophisticated technology is useless without power, and yet in spite of this we’ve allowed ourselves to become so dependent on technology we can no longer do anything purposeful without it.

In her free-thinking feature Production Line Living (Radio 3, Sunday night), A.L. Kennedy took us back 100 years to Detroit and the very first moving assembly line.