Ambivalent Capitalistic-Techno Dreams

"Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise." - Han Byung Chul

How do I reconcile my humanism and sentimentalism with my drive to contribute to a hyper-competitive, relentlessly rationalizing capitalistic system that reduces human worth into exchange value? Does my belief in myself to make positive change reflect nothing more than the neoliberal imperative to fetishize individualism and perpetuate the psycho-social dimension upon which the ego-aggrandizing clutches of achievement society may find purchase, to keep us entirely attached to labor, to make of us absolute slaves?

A sizeable body of critical economic theory will point toward the supposition that the structures inherent in capitalism are aesthetically undesirable to the subjects beholden to those structures and any intensification of the system corresponds to a further alienation between individuals and what is traditionally held as the good life. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

Marx’s materialist understanding of history posited that the modes of production will become so far advanced by capitalist methods that it would usher in its own undoing. Somewhat similarly, I see a future where innovation and society will converge to a point that allows humans to become truly free, not only from material but emotional insecurities. The recent breakthroughs in AI have already implanted into the public consciousness dreams of a future where the need for human labor and consequently the need to contort, transform, and modulate oneself to meet the demands of labor, to strive to be more, becomes extraneous. Maybe capitalism’s ultimate purpose isn’t to change the world, but to stop the world from changing us?