Today we're reading chapter 12, "FALC: A New Beginning," and it begins by immediately addressing the profound and complicated relationship between technology and politics, asserting, "Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral".
Rather, the context from which technology is conceived, created, and utilized—specifically the political, ethical, and social contexts—determines its impact and benefit. While technology may not determine history, it certainly possesses the capacity to disrupt and shape it, making "the history of technology... the most relevant".
The chapter posits that the Third Disruption, characterized by innovations like AI, renewable energy, and gene editing, exhibits both modern and historical tendencies, having emerged alongside new concepts regarding selfhood, nature, and production models. T
o fully grasp the present moment, from the rise of synthetic meat to advancements in artificial intelligence, requires examining underlying social movements (such as green activism demanding animal welfare and climate action) just as much as observing the internal dynamics of capitalism that drive extreme supply and automation.
This chapter explores why certain revolutionary ideas remain historically inert until the necessary technology renders them commonplace, much as the widespread availability of the printed word made the concepts central to the Reformation inevitable, long after their initial conception.
The Third Disruption is defined by the fact that core innovations—including photovoltaic cells, lithium batteries, and the silicon transistor, which have seen "continuous progress since the 1950s"—are now bringing extreme supply to information, labor, and resources.
This unprecedented abundance fundamentally challenges two central premises of capitalism: the notion that scarcity will always exist, and the assumption that goods cannot be produced if their marginal cost approaches zero.
Consequently, the direction of this overwhelming technological and economic transformation—whether it results in greater liberation or widespread collapse—will be determined by politics, specifically the "binding decisions on all of us that we collectively choose to make".
Chapter 11, titled "Reforging the Capitalist State," delves into the necessary economic and political transformation required to facilitate the transition to Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC).
The chapter initiates this discussion by evaluating the viability of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), noting that it is conceptually radical because it presents a "wage without work" that could undermine capitalism's disciplinary control over labor.
However, UBI is critiqued as being politically ambiguous—supported by both progressive groups and neoliberal thinkers like Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek—and potentially leading to the complete marketization of the welfare state.
Furthermore, models show that an adequate UBI is often prohibitively expensive ("unaffordable") while an affordable UBI remains inadequate for substantially reducing poverty. Consequently, the chapter advocates instead for Universal Basic Services (UBS), arguing that providing resources like housing and healthcare as human rights is a more robust political program.
UBS aligns perfectly with the tendencies of the Third Disruption, where extreme supply causes costs (for information, energy, and labor) to move toward zero, rendering the price mechanism increasingly inefficient for allocating essential resources.
The reforging of the state centers heavily on challenging the established financial architecture and measurement standards, beginning by exposing the myth of neutral central banks.
The chapter argues that central banks already engage in deep political planning, and their purpose must be actively repurposed away from monetarism (which privileges low inflation to the advantage of asset-holders and creditors) towards explicit social goals, such as rising wages, high productivity, and affordable house prices.
This would include measures like setting a target for zero nominal house price inflation. Crucially, the chapter highlights the inadequacy of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a metric for success in an era of technological abundance. Since extreme supply and digitization create massive free, non-market value—such as with music streaming or resources like Wikipedia—and drive deflation, the actual quality of life is no longer accurately captured by GDP.
To address this, the chapter proposes moving toward an "Abundance Index". This index would measure success based on factors critical to overcoming the five civilizational crises, including CO2 emissions, energy efficiency, the falling cost of resources, the delivery of UBS, leisure time, health, and self-reported happiness.
Today we're reading Chapter 10, "Fundamental Principles: The Break with Neoliberalism," and we're getting down to the actual groundwork.
The central message here is that while the ultimate goal is Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC), we can’t wait decades to start.
The immediate, critical task is to stop the current system—neoliberalism—which is built on privatization, precarious labor, and falling wages.
This chapter uses vivid examples, like the chaos caused by the collapse of the outsourcing giant Carillion and the absolute absurdity of the East Coast Main Line railway repeatedly being nationalized and then re-privatized simply because it failed to make a profit for its private owners, to show how broken things are.
Even more darkly, events like the Grenfell Tower fire exposed the deadly consequences of the neoliberal priority of "self-regulation" and cost-cutting over public safety and housing the poor.
The good news is that the break with this old orthodoxy can start right now, from the ground up! The chapter outlines three key principles to launch this shift away from the "rigged system".
First, it pushes for re-localizing economies through progressive procurement, championed by the "Preston Model," where local public bodies ("anchor institutions") deliberately favor local, worker-owned businesses [208–210].
Second, this requires socializing finance by creating a network of regional and local banks specifically designed to lend to these new worker-owned cooperatives, which currently struggle to access long-term credit.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the movement calls for the introduction of Universal Basic Services (UBS), making essential resources like housing, transport, education, healthcare, and information free public goods, accessible to everyone, fundamentally shifting them away from being commodities for profit.
By starting this break with neoliberalism now, we lay the necessary foundation for achieving the long-term goals of FALC, ensuring technology serves the common good and supports the urgent need for decarbonization.
Chapter 9 is where we stop talking about machines and start talking about politics. The core dilemma the book throws out is that while technology "makes history," it doesn't set the rules for that history.
If we just let the exponential abundance of the Third Disruption unfold unchecked, the predictable result is just going to be "novel forms of profiteering" instead of widespread liberation.
We’re left with a huge question: How do we actually translate these incredible technological possibilities into tangible political power so that the needs of people—not just maximizing profit—are met? That tension between technological promise and political failure is exactly what Chapter 9 is designed to resolve.
This is where the chapter, boldly titled "Popular Support: Luxury Populism," really takes off. The argument here is that for any political project to succeed in directing the possibilities of the Third Disruption toward people's needs, it must be populist.
It completely rejects the old guard approach of "elite technocracy" and refuses to accept that we must constantly sacrifice ourselves on the "altar of profit and growth". Instead, it calls for a new movement, described as a "luxury" populism.
This isn't about some anti-utopian retreat from modernity to save the planet; it’s about demanding "everything"—the limitless prosperity and abundance that technology has already made possible. The goal is simple: fight for the resources necessary for everyone to lead happy, fulfilling, or as the book puts it, "expanded lives".
Today we're reading Chapter 8 of Fully Automated Luxury Communism. It starts by arguing that we are facing a civilizational cliff edge because of how we eat, specifically pointing out that the world's population is expected to hit 9.6 billion by 2050, requiring a massive 70% increase in food production.
But here’s the kicker: humanity is already consuming the resources of 1.6 Earths annually, and meeting that future demand would require over two planets under our current systems. The chapter pins the ecological disaster directly on our plates: the intense demand for meat and dairy in wealthier countries, which strains the planet, causes a mass extinction event, and degrades agricultural soils.
We’ve got a massive, immediate problem, and climate change is only making it worse, with forecasts predicting devastating yield reductions for staples like rice and wheat across the Global South. Avoiding widespread famine by mid-century will be an astonishing feat.
But this isn't just a doom-and-gloom chapter; it's about the radical solution already emerging from the Third Disruption: cellular agriculture. Imagine a world where food is an informational good that can be reprogrammed, allowing us to grow things like cow-less milk, synthetic seafood, and cultured meat. The sources highlight the exponential cost collapse that makes this so mind-blowing: Mark Post's first lab-grown hamburger cost $325,000 in 2013, but the price plummeted so fast that within just three years, a cultured meatball cost only $1,000.
This revolutionary process uses dramatically less land, water, and human labor, while producing substantially fewer greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional farming. The chapter promises that this technology is not only necessary to solve the global food crisis and climate disaster but that it’s bringing us closer to a future of post-scarcity in sustenance much sooner than anyone expects.
Today we're discussing chapter 7 of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, titled "Editing Destiny: Age and Post-Scarcity in Health". This chapter addresses the enormous societal challenge posed by the fact that for the first time in human history, there will soon be more people over the age of sixty-five than under the age of five, a shift which is referred to as the "crowning achievement of our species". This longevity, however, raises critical questions about the viability of collective insurance programs, such as public pensions and socialized elderly care, as these traditionally rely on a larger "working age" population compared to dependents.
The chapter explores how advancements in technology offer a solution to the exponential medical challenges presented by an aging population. It frames healthcare as increasingly resembling an information good, noting that organic life itself is a composite of material and information (DNA). Chapter 7 details how rapid, exponential progress in genetic engineering, particularly techniques like gene sequencing and CRISPR-Cas9, has drastically lowered costs and increased efficiency. This shift toward extreme supply in healthcare suggests that medicine can move from a reactive approach to a predictive one, allowing for the potential elimination of genetically inherited conditions and making healthcare cheaper to administer each year. This development is presented as a way to not only meet the challenge of societal aging but also surpass it.
Chapter 6, titled "Mining the Sky: Post-Scarcity in Resources," is the third chapter under Part II, "New Travellers," a section dedicated to examining how advances in automation, energy, resources, health, and food are creating the foundation for a society that moves "beyond both scarcity and work". This chapter introduces the crucial argument that alongside climate change, resource depletion represents one of the central challenges of the age, particularly noting that the minerals required for sustaining a post-carbon world are ultimately finite. Although Chapter 5 addressed the potential for limitless power from solar energy, the transition would still be constrained by materials like lithium and cobalt, which are necessary for energy storage. If a complete global transition to renewables were to occur, such resources would quickly become strained, requiring constant recycling, a situation that would ultimately ensure that post-capitalism would remain confined to conditions of "abiding scarcity".
The solution presented in this chapter is the radical proposal to overcome the limitations of a finite world by choosing to "mine the sky instead". The sources detail the immense and almost incomprehensible wealth available in space, particularly among near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) [130–1]. For instance, the asteroid 16 Psyche, located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, is composed of iron, nickel, and rarer elements, with its total estimated "value" reaching around $10,000 quadrillion—just for the iron content. The chapter notes the emergence of the private space industry, with companies like SpaceX pushing down costs of launch, and new techniques such as 3-D printing making rockets cheaper and quicker to manufacture. Should humanity succeed in accessing this resource abundance, it would not only address issues of mineral depletion on Earth but potentially collapse the price of these valuable commodities altogether, creating extreme supply in raw materials.
Chapter 5, "Limitless Power: Post-Scarcity in Energy," falls under Part II, titled "New Travellers," which explores emerging technologies in areas such as automation, energy, resources, health, and food to show how the foundations are cohering for a society that moves "beyond both scarcity and work". The chapter introduces the profound role that energy and its sources have played in shaping the previous historical shifts, known as disruptions. The First Disruption, marked by agriculture around 12,000 years ago, saw humans rely on domesticated animals, their own bodies, and elements for power. This was succeeded by the Second Disruption starting in the late eighteenth century, which was defined by the arrival of James Watt’s steam engine, providing an abundant and reliable supply of power derived from fossil fuels.
The chapter begins by framing the shift to limitless power within the context of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis, noting that the Second Disruption's dependence on fossil fuels inadvertently changed Earth's ecosystems by causing global temperatures to rise. The transition to limitless power is presented as both an ecological imperative and a technological inevitability, driven by the fact that the sun provides virtually free, limitless energy—many thousands of times more than humanity currently consumes. This aligns with the overall theme of the Third Disruption bringing about "extreme supply" in multiple areas. The chapter explores how technologies like photovoltaic (PV) cells are subject to the experience curve (where costs decline as capacity doubles), suggesting that a complete global transition to renewables will eventually lead to perpetually cheaper energy, thus achieving post-scarcity in energy.
Chapter 4, "Full Automation: Post-Scarcity in Labour," is the first chapter under Part II, titled "New Travellers". This section of the book examines what the world "is, or rather as it is becoming," by looking at seemingly disparate technologies in automation, energy, resources, health, and food, before concluding that these foundations are cohering for a society that moves "beyond both scarcity and work". This chapter delves directly into the implications of full automation by posing a key question from The Economist: "What happens when ... machines are smart enough to become workers? In other words, when capital becomes labour?". This technological shift challenges the traditional belief in classical political economy that human labor would always remain distinct from "capital stock" (such as machinery and tools).
The central conflict explored in this chapter is the potential collapse of labor value that arises if human-made tools can subsequently perform any task humans complete. This concern is encapsulated in a famous anecdote involving Henry Ford II and union leader Walter Reuther. When touring a new factory floor, Ford reportedly asked how his industrial robots would pay their union dues, to which Reuther countered, "Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?". This exchange highlights the paradox central to the future of capitalism: capitalists want to eliminate workers to save money, yet they also need affluent consumers to maintain demand for their mass-produced products. While Henry Ford I had intuited this need by supporting higher wages and shorter work weeks to ensure employees could afford the products they created, Chapter 4 addresses whether this historic compromise can survive as accelerating automation begins to define the future.
In the third episode of season 5 of Antifa Book Club, we're reading chapter 3 titled "What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism?"
It serves to introduce and define the central political project of the book, designated as FALC. The chapter immediately addresses why the term "communism" is used, acknowledging that many view it as a failed 20th-century experiment. The author clarifies that "communism" is employed precisely for its precision, denoting a society where work is eliminated, scarcity is replaced by abundance, and labor and leisure merge. This vision is presented as being technologically possible now due to the possibilities arising from the Third Disruption and the emergence of "extreme supply" in information, labor, energy, and resources, defining FALC as the conclusion of these trends.
The chapter explores the intellectual foundations of this concept by looking at three thinkers who believed capitalism was a contingent, finite system that would eventually lead to a society beyond itself: Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Peter Drucker. Marx, particularly in the "Fragment on Machines" from the Grundrisse, recognized capitalism’s contradiction: its compulsion to automate progressively replaces labor with machines, unintentionally reducing human labor to a minimum, which would be the "condition of its emancipation" under a new system. Keynes, writing in 1930, predicted that the "economic problem" (scarcity) would be solved within a hundred years, leading to a world where humanity could address how to use its freedom and leisure "wisely and agreeably and well". Drucker, a theorist of management, identified that information had become the primary factor of production, creating a post-capitalist society where the application of knowledge to knowledge drove the "Productivity Revolution". The chapter then details Paul Romer's economic analysis, which identified technological change as an immaterial "improvement in the instructions for mixing together raw materials," leading to the contradiction that the most valuable part of a commodity—its instructions—is capable of infinite replication at near zero cost, fundamentally challenging capitalism’s necessity for profit and scarcity.
In the second episode of season five of the Antifa Book Club, we're reading chapter 2, of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, titled "The Three Disruptions."
It provides a historical framework for understanding the profound societal changes currently underway, arguing that they are comparable to the two most momentous shifts in human history. The chapter establishes that change is not uniform, distinguishing between simple progress and disruptive ruptures that alter the very meaning of what it means to be human. The First Disruption, occurring approximately twelve thousand years ago, was the transition to settled agriculture through the domestication of plants and animals, generating the necessary social surplus for cities and culture. The Second Disruption began roughly 250 years ago with the Industrial Revolution and the first machine age, fueled by fossil fuels and steam power, leading to extended life expectancy and increased production. The present era is now defined by the Third Disruption, which promises a liberation from scarcity in vital areas like energy, cognitive labor, and information, moving beyond the mechanical power defined by the Industrial Revolution.
The fundamental basis of this current historical rupture is the modern transistor and integrated circuit, which serves as the general-purpose technology—the contemporary analogue to Watt's steam engine. The rapid, epoch-defining nature of the Third Disruption is explained by the accelerating rate of historical change, driven primarily by non-linear, exponential trends. This concept is illustrated by examples like Moore's Law in computing, where the performance of computer chips has doubled every two years for decades, and the predictable decrease in the cost of photovoltaic cells governed by the experience curve. This accelerating improvement is ushering in an era of "extreme supply," not only in information but also potentially in labor (through automation), energy (through solar power), and resources (through space mining). The chapter concludes that this combination of advanced technology and abundant resources completes a chain that allows humanity to exceed its present planetary limits.
For the fifth season of Antifa Book Club, we are going to read Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, written by Aaron Bastani, presents a political project intended to leverage the potential abundance created by technological advancement to build a society beyond scarcity and work.
The book’s Introduction, titled "Six Characters in Search of a Future," sets the stage by using six fictional accounts (featuring characters like Yang, Chris, Leia, Peter, Federica, and Doug) to explore current trends that feel like science fiction but are rooted in contemporary facts. These vignettes touch upon subjects such as automation in factories and retail, private space exploration (including asteroid mining), the dominance of solar energy, the implications of artificial intelligence (AI), and low-cost genetic engineering. These dramatic transformations are defined as the "Third Disruption," a rupture in history comparable in significance to the prior shifts brought about by the emergence of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution. The Introduction argues that the foundations for a society beyond scarcity are cohering through disruptive technologies in labor, energy, resources, health, and food, requiring a new political map—Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC)—to ensure these possibilities benefit the collective rather than just a wealthy few.
Chapter 1, "The Great Disorder," begins by examining the legacy of Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay "The End of History?," which proposed that the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the permanent triumph of Western liberal democracy and market capitalism. This thinking infused a political "common sense" known as "capitalist realism," which holds that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. However, the 2008 financial crisis decisively demonstrated that history was "back" and that the status quo was giving way to a historic moment defined by profound crises. The chapter outlines five overlapping civilizational threats that challenge capitalism’s capacity to reproduce itself based on infinite growth and wage-labor. These crises include climate change, resource scarcity, societal ageing, a growing surplus of global poor who form an "unnecessariat," and a new machine age leading to technological unemployment. The book asserts that confronting these existential crises is the basis of FALC, arguing that capitalism is nearing its end, and the key question is in whose interests the dramatically different world resulting from these converging challenges will be created.
Welcome to the season 4 finale of the Antifa Book Club: The Full Book review of Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics. The central argument he presents is that contemporary neoliberal society is governed by a psychopolitics that operates through positive motivation and voluntary self-exploitation, fundamentally differing from the disciplinary power and biopolitics described by Foucault, which relied on negativity and coercion. Han contends that this new regime exploits freedom, emotions, and personal data (Big Data) to maximize productivity, leading to a profound crisis of freedom where individuals willingly participate in their own subjugation, transforming into "projects" rather than subjects. Key themes analyzed include the shift from the disciplinary panopticon to the digital panopticon, the gamification of work and life, and the triumph of Capital as a new form of transcendence that rules over all aspects of existence. Ultimately, the text advocates for practices of resistance like idiotism and profanation to escape this cycle of unlimited self-optimization and control.
Chapter 13 of Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power is titled "Idiotism," and it introduces the concept of the "idiot" as a profound figure of resistance and a pathway to liberation from the ubiquitous control of neoliberal psychopolitics.
The chapter posits that the very function of philosophy, from its inception, has been to "play the fool," suggesting that any philosopher who has forged a new way of thinking has, by necessity, been an "idiot" with unique access to the "wholly Other" and a field of immanence that defies subjectivation and psychologization.
In stark contrast to the historical role of the idiosyncratic idiot, the chapter observes that contemporary society, with its "thoroughgoing digital networking and communication," has massively amplified the "compulsion to conform," effectively suppressing such idiotisms through a pervasive "violence of consensus."
Idiotism is thus presented as a vital "practice of freedom" for the modern age, embodied by an unallied, un-networked, and uninformed individual who inhabits an "immemorial outside" beyond the reach of total communication and surveillance.
This figure is likened to a "modern-day heretic," possessing the "courage to deviate from orthodoxy" and preserving the "magic of the outsider" against the ceaseless demands for disclosure and expression.
Ultimately, "Idiotism" champions the creation of "spaces for guarding silence, quiet, and solitude," allowing for meaningful thought and speech that transcends the "horizontal plane" of system-immanent intelligence and instead connects to a "vertical dimension" of "pure immanence," thereby pointing toward a mode of existence characterized by singularity, freedom, and a "time-space free of labour."
Chapter 12 of Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power is titled "Beyond the Subject," and it explores pathways to liberation from the pervasive control mechanisms of neoliberal psychopolitics by challenging the very notion of the subject.
The chapter introduces the concept of the "event," drawing on Nietzsche's idea of "naturification," which includes a "readiness for what is absolutely sudden and thwarting," representing something incalculable and abrupt that defies all prediction and annuls the standing order to open new spaces for action.
Following Nietzsche, Foucault also conceived of the "event" as a "reversal of a relationship of forces" and an "overthrow of domination," signifying breaks and discontinuities that call forth entirely new constellations of Being.
This idea is contrasted with "experiencing" (Erlebnis), as true experience (Erfahrung) is founded on discontinuity and transformation, serving to "wrench the subject from itself," leading to its "annihilation or its dissolution" from a state of subjection and subjugation.
Han argues that the contemporary "psychopolitics of experiencing or emotion" only ensnares the subject further, whereas the "art of living" as a practice of freedom must therefore proceed by way of de-psychologization, which disarms the psychological programming and steering of neoliberal domination.
This process of de-psychologization allows the subject, once de-voided, to open onto a mode of existence that remains unnamed and an unwritten future, ultimately aiming to move entirely beyond the confines of the subjected self.
Chapter 11, titled "Big Data," delves into how this ubiquitous digital phenomenon acts as a paramount instrument of control, surveillance, and economic exploitation, prompting the crucial question of whether it represents the "Columbus's egg" for the digital control society, a system even more effective than Bentham's panopticon in its capacity for psychopolitical steering. The chapter introduces "Dataism" as a new faith that everything measurable should be measured, heralded as a "second Enlightenment" that promises to "foretell the future" by filtering out emotion and ideology, yet which Han argues is ironically leading to a "digital totalitarianism" and the "barbarism of data" through its dismissal of intuition and theory. This new form of control creates an "aperspectival" surveillance that eliminates all blind spots, claiming to "peer into the human soul itself" by making "life logged in full" a reality, and enabling "digital psychopolitics" to intervene in the psyche at a pre-reflexive level, thereby transforming "freely made decisions into the positivity of factual states" and potentially "heralding the end of freedom." Ultimately, the chapter critically examines how Big Data not only operates as "Big Business" by commercializing personal information and creating a "new digital class society," but also fundamentally alters our understanding of memory and knowledge, as it offers mere correlations without "comprehension" or "Spirit," leading to what Hegel would term "absolute ignorance" and marking an "epoch without reason."
Chapter 10 of Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power is titled "Gamification," and it critically explores how emotional capitalism extends its reach by enlisting the very concepts of playing and games, paradoxically turning them into tools for heightened productivity.
The chapter opens by highlighting this fundamental contradiction, asserting that playing should, in fact, represent the "Other of Work," its inherent opposite.
Han argues that emotional capitalism is actively gamifying the life and working world, infusing work with an emotional, indeed a dramatic, charge to generate increased motivation. This strategy is effective because games are designed to rapidly deliver a sense of success and reward, thereby leading to higher performance and greater yield.
Individuals who are emotionally invested as players become significantly more engaged than workers who merely act rationally or are simply functioning.
However, this gamified temporality, marked by immediate experiences of success, proves incompatible with anything that "matures over time" or "lasts a long time," such as the slow processes of farming, contrasting it with activities like hunting that fit the game mode.
The chapter explains that the gamification of work exploits homo ludens, the playing human, in such a way that the player, in the very act of playing, willingly subjugates themselves to the order of domination.
This logic extends beyond formal work to social communication, where the mechanisms of "Likes," "Friends," and "Followers" plug communication into a game mode, leading to its commercialization and, ultimately, the destruction of genuine human interaction.
Furthermore, Chapter 10 delves into a broader critique of labor, referencing the "Manifesto against Labour" by the Krisis-Group, which contends that despite the microelectronic revolution detaching wealth production from human labor, society in the post-Fordist age remains thoroughly committed to work, even as it becomes increasingly superfluous.
The critique extends to the political Left for exalting labor and only opposing its exploitation, rather than labor itself, suggesting that labor and Capital are two sides of the same coin.
Han also examines Marx's perspective, arguing that even Marx adhered to the primacy of labor, where "free time" is ultimately colonized and capitalized as "human capital" to enhance productive power, thus expanding the "realm of necessity" into the "realm of freedom."
In seeking an alternative, the chapter proposes that true freedom would only be possible if life were entirely liberated from Capital, which is presented as a new form of transcendence. This freedom would emanate from the "Other of Work," a wholly unproductive force, emphasizing the importance of "making use of the useless."
This leads to a discussion of authentic luxury, defined not as consumption, but as a mode of living free of necessity, based on "deviation" from need.
Such true luxury, like genuinely free play, can only be conceived beyond the realms of work and consumption, and its emancipatory potential is precisely what gamification destroys by yoking play to the process of labor and production.
Finally, the chapter offers an evocative anecdote of Greek children playing with and tearing apart banknotes, interpreting this as an act of "profanation."
This concept, returning things removed from sacred or "divine" use (like fetishized money) to human beings to do with as they will, is presented as a practice of freedom that liberates individuals from transcendence and subjectivation.
By enabling a "playful margin of immanence," profanation allows for "thinking at play" rather than "thinking at work," pointing towards a "time-space free of labour" where psychology as a mode of subjectivation is entirely surpassed.
Chapter 9 of Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power is titled "Emotional Capitalism" and initiates a crucial inquiry into the contemporary proliferation of discourse and research surrounding feelings and emotions.
The chapter directly confronts the question of where this sudden interest in emotions originates, contending that many academic disciplines researching emotion erroneously overlook its fundamental driver: a profound economic process. This oversight, Han argues, leads to considerable conceptual confusion, where terms such as "emotion," "feeling," and "affect" are frequently used interchangeably by researchers.
To address this conceptual ambiguity, the chapter meticulously differentiates these terms.
Feelings are presented as constative and possessing a narrative length and duration, often carrying an objective quality, such as a "feeling for language" or the experience of mourning, and they can even be non-intentional, like anxiety without a specific object.
In contrast, emotions are characterized as performative, intrinsically linked to actions and deeds, intentional, and goal-oriented, while also being significantly more fleeting, dynamic, and situative than feelings.
Han particularly emphasizes that emotional capitalism specifically exploits these performative qualities of emotions. Affects, distinct from both, are described as eruptive and lacking performative directionality, typically confined to a single moment.
The digital medium is identified as an "affect-medium" that facilitates their immediate release, with phenomena like "shitstorms" serving as prime examples of digital communication driven by affect.
Furthermore, atmosphere or mood (Stimmung) is introduced as being even more objective than feeling, representing a static "way-it-is" rather than a dynamic or intentional expression.
Han argues that this pervasive "boom" of emotion in the present era is ultimately a direct product of neoliberalism. He posits that the neoliberal regime strategically deploys emotions as valuable resources to achieve heightened productivity and performance, especially as traditional rationality, the medium of disciplinary society, encounters its limits as a constraint in production and becomes rigid and inflexible.
In this context, emotionality is deceptively presented as an expression of liberty and "unbridled subjectivity," which neoliberal technologies then mercilessly exploit.
This new capitalist model, branded "emotional capitalism," operates by leveraging "Emotional Design" to generate an ever-increasing array of desires and needs, effectively shifting consumption from finite material goods to potentially boundless emotions. It further integrates the "integral person" into the production process, demanding not only cognitive but also emotional competence from individuals.
Consequently, rational management techniques are progressively yielding to emotional management, with managers increasingly adopting the role of motivation coaches who cultivate positive emotions to boost performance.
Operating on a pre-reflexive, half-conscious level, emotions thus become an incredibly efficient medium for the psychopolitical steering of individuals, a stark departure from the disciplinary society which sought to eliminate emotions for rational, efficient functioning.
The chapter therefore lays the groundwork for understanding how the digital age harnesses and capitalizes on our inner lives for systemic economic benefit, turning subjectivity itself into a resource for exploitation.
Chapter 8 of Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power is titled "Friendly Big Brother" and serves to draw a sharp contrast between George Orwell's vision of a surveillance state in 1984 and the contemporary digital control society. This chapter introduces the core argument that while Orwell's state operated through explicit negativity, repression, and the destruction of language, today's power functions through a more insidious positivity and the exploitation of freedom itself.
Orwell's surveillance state, as depicted in 1984, was characterized by its reliance on negativity, enmity, and overt repression. It aimed to restrict free thought through "Newspeak," a language designed to diminish the number of words annually and thereby reduce the space for conscious deliberation. This state was maintained through a permanent atmosphere of fear, terror, and scarcity, often in a state of continuous war, and employed harsh psychotechnical methods such as brainwashing, electroshock, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, drugs, and physical torture. Big Brother, though invisible, was a threatening figure interiorized by inmates, and confessions were obtained by force. The "Ministry of Truth" actively controlled and revised the past to fit ideological narratives.
In stark contrast, "Friendly Big Brother" introduces a neoliberal technology of power that operates through positivity, permissiveness, and surplus, rather than prohibition or repression. This digital control society thrives on an illusion of limitless freedom and communication, a stark departure from Orwell's oppressive environment. Instead of destroying words, it multiplies them endlessly. The control mechanism is not about prohibition but about prospecting, permitting, and projecting, encouraging maximal consumption and generating a "superabundance of positivity". A crucial aspect is the voluntary self-exposure of individuals, where active communication and willing self-disclosure replace forced confessions. Smartphones, in this context, effectively become the modern "torture chambers," as individuals readily expose personal information without external duress. Unlike Orwell's Big Brother, who was a constant, felt presence, the inhabitants of the digital panopticon never truly feel watched or threatened, leading to an insidious form of self-surveillance where "everyone is his or her own panopticon". The focus shifts from controlling the past to psychopolitically steering the future. This new form of surveillance is made highly efficient precisely because of its apparent friendliness.
The chapter further highlights this transformation by referencing Apple's iconic 1984 Super Bowl advertisement, which positioned the company as a liberator from the Orwellian surveillance state. However, the sources argue that this advertisement signaled not the end of surveillance, but "the inception of a new kind of control society," one that seamlessly integrates communication and control, surpassing the Orwellian model in its operational scope and efficiency.
Chapter 7, "Shock," contrasts two figures of "Doctor Shock" to dissect Naomi Klein's theory and differentiate between disciplinary power and neoliberal psychopolitics.
The chapter introduces Dr. Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist who used violent electroshocks to "de-brand" and "re-brand" the psyche during the Cold War, representing an immunological, negative, and forceful intervention against an "Other" or "Enemy".
It then presents Milton Friedman, who advocated using the "shock" of catastrophes to return societies to "pure capitalism" through "painful shocks".
However, the chapter argues that Klein's theory of shock fails to grasp the true nature of neoliberal psychopolitics, which, unlike Cameron's disciplinary and negative shock therapy, operates through positivity, seduction, and the fulfillment of desires rather than coercion or repression.
This "SmartPolitics" flatters and anticipates the psyche, working with positive stimuli to please and fulfill.