An efficient life isn’t necessarily a happy, or an easy life. On the contrary: a fast, efficient, high-functioning world comes with more rules, more process, and ironically, much less peace of mind. So-called “advanced” civilisations are former societies that have been reduced to efficient machines. Undoubtedly, this is an environment that is unfit for a human being, and a fertile ground for terrifying new forms of autocracy yet to be experienced, as the technosystem we once called “society” morphs into a tyranny of automation.
Humans originally set out to create high-functioning worlds, not realising that they were creating future technologies of oppression. We found ourselves working not in this world, but for this world. We found ourselves suddenly loaded with pointless obligations. The real human inside of us became a ghost, pushed into a corner and excommunicated as if it had been a hallucination of the mind all along. It was never real, we were told. What mattered now was not the human being, but its “occupation”. Yes, just like that, we picked the most dry, transactional, brutally boring word to become the main descriptor of a modern human being.
In this new world obsessed with efficiency, most of us are working for a slave master. If people in their 20s are already confessing that they have no desire to enter the workforce, this should be the most stark indication of how unsatisfying, abusive, and morally bankrupt the world of work has become. A large section of the working world consists of “bullshit jobs” whose only purpose is to serve the necrosystem. We have long ago moved from making stuff to handling stuff, from doing to re-doing, and from creating to executing. We built machines to automate our lives but ended up becoming machines in the process. Work is now grossly overrated both in terms of what it provides the employee as well as what it provides society. Many jobs involve simply pushing paper and CO2 around the globe. The necroeconomy may offer thousands of job options, but they all amount to the same objective: a planetary demolition project called necrocapitalism. When the project is all done there won’t be a need for jobs, occupations, or life for that matter. We are all working in the same supermarket of extinction: stacking shelves, marketing products, operating the cash registers. It won’t be long before this business of demolishing the planet and selling it for parts goes bust.
Our biological rhythms have been preyed upon. The sleeplessness epidemic has extended work hours, increased energy bills, decreased life span and destroyed the planet’s climate. And despite spending more time than ever being physically awake, we are more mentally and morally unconscious than at any point in our history.
Work has lost its meaning for many humans. Unlike machines, humans need work not for efficiency, but to express their creativity and emotions. Work is increasingly unable to provide humans with the basic elements of job satisfaction: community, comradery, respect. We have become nameless machine parts: replaceable, refillable, removable. Employers today give more thought to customizing pizza toppings than to reviewing a fresh stack of CVs.
To cater to this work dystopia, our educational system focuses on developing workers rather than developing humans. It prioritizes skills and qualifications over and above critical thinking, a moral compass, and a conscience, because the latter inclinations have little value in the modern psychonomy and, in fact, present existential threats to the necrosystem. Academic institutions are now shopfronts for greed, run as profit-making businesses. Students are tuition consumatrons, turned into debt slaves before they even get through to the next stage: graduating and becoming debt slaves yet again as they enter the psychonomy’s workforce.
We have created a world where those who dare to focus on the planet, personal growth and wellbeing are seen as detonation devices within the necrocapitalist economy. Industrial action is labelled as terrorism, workers’ rights are a form of blackmail, and ethics is a strange cult of dissent that landed here from another planet. The global autocracy of capital is successfully normalising the belief that being human, having human needs and human rights, should be a luxury. This is the wet dream of the most sick, savage and callous form of tyranny.
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