Under contemporary techno-capitalism the individual workers in the post-imperial core of so-called “developed” countries must no longer simply sell their labor-power in order to survive. Advancement past the barest level of subsistence requires them to increasingly devote their time away from work, their free time, to a perpetual labor of alienation: the acquisition of new skills, the creation of “personal” brands, the production of “content” for the cybernetic spectacle, the consumption of media and consumer products, the adoption of prefabricated roles and styles; in short, the commodification of the last remnants of free individuality.

Our very existence has become the newest, most profitable market under capital’s current phase of global hegemony, as social life is privatized and colonized by the ruling order to an extent never before possible. What was once free time becomes dead time: career advancement, maintenance of good credit, posts, likes, networking, hustle. Having begun the process of dismantling the meager gains of social democracy, the ruling classes have cornered the working masses at the precipice of precarity with a view to the misery beyond: homelessness, illness, starvation, addiction, suicide. Thus consumed with fear at the consequences of disobedience, an unending stream of propaganda pressures us to adopt the praxis of alienation.

Our every thought and movement is meticulously tracked by the ubiquitous gadgets of the new order. Omnipresent screens, cameras, smartphones, facial recognition, apps, social networks, credit cards: every second of the day the system documents where we shop, what we eat, our interests, hobbies, likes, dislikes, secrets, friends, acquaintances, conversations. Consumer profiles, like the files of the secret police, fill the archives of the corporations, who work to simultaneously manufacture and divine our needs and desires.

To the extent that they still produce objects of value under the traditional aegis of capitalist wage-labor, the workers remain alienated from the products of said labor. But so too are they alienated from the products of the new labor of existence: the contents of their lives. Relationships, conversations, photos, thoughts, all the debris of the everyday is commodified directly through its transformation into content, while the dwindling hours are spent almost entirely in various forms of consumption. At the root of this totalizing cycle of emptiness is the fact that people who lead free and fulfilling lives are incapable of adopting the role of the consumer-laborer with an enthusiasm that satisfies the ruling order’s incessant drive for profit accumulation. In order to be coerced into buying back the products of our own alienation, we must first have our self-meaning ripped away from us.

To sabotage roles and brands, to recuperate dead time, to resuscitate individuality outside the tyranny of commodified identities: these are the first personal steps that each of us must take on the path toward a revolution in social consciousness whose end goal is nothing less than total destruction of the regime of alienation and the free construction of everyday life.