Dear Comrades,
This week, a big and serious contribution from Alenka Zupančič.
An essay about how contemporary regimes of financial and data-driven indebtedness entangle our desires, attention, and political possibilities, turning the very future into a terrain of extraction and control.
As always, if you have the means and value writing that both enriches and disturbs, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
What is debt? One way to think of debt is to conceive it as one of the fundamental forms of our social relationships, of our relationship to the Other—where “Other” does not refer only to another person or a figure of authority, but has a broader meaning that can include the community, society and its institutions, language and even the symbolic horizon to which one belongs (hence, in the sense that Lacanians speak about “the big Other”). In this sense, debt resonates strongly with the notion of belonging and pertains to its register. It engages with the question of how one belongs—with our relation to this Other—as well as with the means of sustaining this relation or bond.
In this presentation, we will briefly walk through a series of figures in which debt has existed—and continues to exist—as a social bond, also in a historical sense. The forms or figures of debt we will touch upon are by no means exhaustive; nevertheless, they may offer us a certain insight into the fundamental logic of how debt operates, and especially into some of the permutations we have been witnessing in recent times. Precisely because it is situated at the intersection—the point of overlap—between the subject and the Other, or between the individual and the social, the phenomenon of debt is also an exceptionally important vantage point from which one can observe the irreducible and intrinsic connection—the entanglement—of these two dimensions.
Psychoanalysis can serve as an important point of departure in this regard, since—particularly in its Freudian-Lacanian orientation—it was, from the very beginning, conceived as something that inherently possesses a social, objective, and critical dimension. It is never merely a matter of individuals and their (more or less intimate) problems—these are, from the outset, inscribed within the sociosymbolic field that Lacan calls the “Other.” In this way, “our” problems are never simply “our” problems; strictly speaking, they are also problems of the big Other. And Freud quickly recognized how, together with his patients or analysands on the couch, the social or familial order is always present as well.
This aspect of the intersection between the subject and the Other provides a very specific and delimited focus for what is otherwise an ambitious arc outlined by the text—one that could be (mistakenly) understood as an attempt at a “short history of debt.” Yet this is by no means the case, just as the text does not attempt to place itself alongside the detailed and excellent studies of the phenomenon of debt that already exist.
1. Debt, Guilt, and Their Ambiguity
As Freud shows, for example, in his analysis of obsessional neurosis (the case study of the “Ratman”), debt plays a key role in this structure: obsessional subjects experience themselves as always indebted to the Other—be it the father, the Law, God, or the analyst. They are trapped in a paradox: on the one hand, they want to pay their debt, to be free; on the other, they endlessly postpone payment, because if the debt were ever settled, the Other’s desire would be extinguished—and that is unbearable. The obsessional solution, therefore, is to keep the debt alive. This gives them a sense of control over the Other’s desire (“I still owe, so the Other still wants (something from me)”), albeit at a very high cost, which can almost completely paralyze life, as we vividly see in the case of the “Rat Man.” Freud extends the fundamental logic of this compulsive structure to the functioning of religion in general, understanding the latter as a kind of “universal obsessive neurosis”: religion is not simply a set of beliefs and intimate faith; it operates as a system of practices and rituals aimed at managing anxiety and guilt in relation to the Other. Since, for Freud, there is at the same time no such thing as a completely non-pathological psychological structure, obsessive neurosis can be understood as one of the possible structures of “normality.”
In a slightly different register—one in which debt also resonates with guilt (as it does directly in the German language, where Schuld means both debt and guilt, though this connection is culturally more universal)—it is interesting to observe how this plays out in classical tragedy, and later in modern tragedy. As Hegel notes in his Lectures on Aesthetics, the force of the great tragic characters of antiquity lies in the fact that they have no choice: they are what they will and accomplish from their birth onward, and they are this with all their being. For this reason, Hegel continues, they do not in any way claim to be innocent of their acts. On the contrary, the greatest offence one can commit against a great tragic hero is to regard him or her as innocent; for great tragic characters, it is an honor to be guilty.[1]
To be guilty—to carry one’s particular symbolic debt—is to be, in the emphatic sense of the term. In this configuration, guilt pertains to being in a double sense: not only are we already guilty by virtue of existing (like in the tragedy of Oedipus), but guilt/debt also serves as the proof—the manifestation—of our being. Roughly speaking, we can see this logic at work later as well, in most of the classical tragedies.
In this respect, one of the most significant shifts that takes place with modernity is the idea that this symbolic debt, which once equaled (and justified) our being, can be taken away from us. In his reading of modern tragedy, as exemplified by Paul Claudel, Jacques Lacan points out that this is precisely what befalls his tragic heroines—particularly Sygne de Coûfontaine from the Coûfontaine trilogy.
“We are no longer guilty just in virtue of symbolic debt. … It is the debt itself in which we have our place that can be taken away from us, and it is here that we can feel completely alienated from ourselves. The ancient Ate doubtless made us guilty of this debt, but to renounce it as we can now means that we are left with an even greater misfortune: destiny no longer applies.”[2]
This possibility that arises with modernity is a possibility of a more radical alienation, which can lead to something like the sacrifice of the sacrifice itself: we can be asked or expected to sacrifice everything we have for a cause, but the next level, so to speak, is when we are then asked to sacrifice/betray this cause itself, the very thing for which we were willing to sacrifice everything. In this case, we don’t just lose everything we have; at the horizon looms the loss of everything we are.
In all these examples, debt functions as our attachment to the Other, who also bestows upon us our being. Yet we can also look at this from the other side: although the relation is not simply symmetrical, the Other too seems to depend on our debt—or guilt—for its own existence and prosperity. This, for instance, is something Nietzsche repeatedly exposed in his writings, taking Christianity as the model par excellence of this dynamic.
Christianity, and particularly its Catholic strain, devised a complex system for forgiving and atoning for our sins, while simultaneously maintaining our debt to the Father and the Son who made such forgiveness possible. A sin that is forgiven, in this logic, amplifies rather than abolishes our debt.
This is the reason what Nietzsche insisted on the importance of the distinction between forgiving and forgetting: forgiving is a way of sustaining a bond—and with it, a debt. Forgiveness has a perverse way of entangling us even further in indebtedness. To forgive always somehow implies “paying” for the other, and thus turning the very act of injury and its forgiveness into a new kind of “engagement ring.” God forgives our sins by paying for them—by paying for them with his own flesh.
This, for Nietzsche, constitutes the fundamental perversity of Christianity: while forgiving, it simultaneously waves before us the cross—the instrument of torture, the reminder of the one who suffered and died so that we might be forgiven, the memory of the one who paid for us. Christianity forgives, but it does not forget.
One could say that, with the eyes of the sinner fixed on the cross, forgiveness creates a new debt in the very act of forgiving. It forgives what was done, but it does not forgive the act of forgiving itself. On the contrary, the latter establishes a new bond and a new debt. It is now infinite mercy—understood as the capacity for forgiveness—that sustains the infinite debt, the debt as infinite. The debt is no longer brought about by our actions; it is produced by the act of forgiving those actions. We are indebted for forgiveness.[3] This is the reason why Nietzsche counters the concept of forgiving with the concept of forgetting (“a good example of this in modern times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done to him and was unable to forgive simply because he – forgot”).
Christianity thus invented a singular way of maintaining and amplifying our debt—through the Savior paying for it, and through the Church forgiving our sins in His name. At the same time, for doctrinal reasons, the Catholic religion long struggled with—and resisted—the idea that today appears as an entirely natural precondition of debt, or its internal moment: namely, interest. More precisely, it resisted the monetary expression of the increase of debt, which it nevertheless very much practiced on the symbolic level.
Credit means that when we receive or borrow something—especially when we borrow money—our debt grows with time, and we must return more than we were lent. We pay for the time during which the Other holds us “in credit,” and we pay, so to speak, for the very access to debt. The notion that money could generate (more) money—that value could emerge from nothing but time—stood in deep conflict with theological orthodoxy. For this reason, in the Middle Ages only non-Christians (Jewish, and later Lombard or Florentine bankers) were permitted to lend at interest, often acting as intermediaries. Of course, this also meant that Christians could use them to lend money at interest without themselves being held accountable—thus giving rise to the classical antisemitic topos of the usurious “Jew.”
2. Capitalism and Metamorphoses of Debt
But times—and Christianity with them—have changed rapidly, and attitudes have shifted. As with so many other things, capital has also revolutionized debt and debt relations. Marx and Engels famously captured this “capitalist revolution” in The Communist Manifesto:
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”[4]
By the seventeenth century, interest rates had become institutionalized, especially with the rise of public debt (e.g., the Dutch Republic and later in Britain). By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, interest rates were not only legitimate but had become central to capitalism—determining the cost of credit, investment, and economic growth.
Since then, it has become difficult, if not impossible, to think of debt outside this specific economic logic and relation pertaining to capital. Debt has become inseparable from, and intrinsically bound to, the (capitalist) economy and all its developments and shifts. And to return to our previous example: when Freud wrote about obsessional neurosis and its entanglement with debt, one could already discern in his case study of obsessional “fixations” this curious underside opened to flexibility and metonymical movement/substitution to which debt can, and will, lend itself.
Let us thus pursue this question of debt further along the capitalist path. The story acquires an additional twist—or rather, a push forward—with the form of capital known as financial capital. The latter no longer needs to invest in anything (that is, in any kind of production), but instead thrives on speculative gambling in financial markets.
For example, when Volkswagen—or any large corporation—uses its profits not to reinvest in production (in new factories, technology, or labor) but to buy its own shares, it effectively withdraws from the sphere of production—the so-called “real economy”—into the sphere of circulation, the financial market. How does this relate to debt?
The relation is very interesting, and by no means merely metaphorical. Stock buybacks mimic the structure of debt repayment without any reduction of debt: the company uses existing profits (already extracted surplus) to inflate its own market value, rather than to reduce liabilities or invest productively. This creates the appearance of growth while in fact indebting the future, since fewer productive investments mean less real foundation for future profit. In other words, the company pays itself in the present by borrowing against its own future capacity to produce. Present “profits,” in this sense, are nothing but debts—debts that, in most cases, someone else will eventually have to repay (or lose their job), even as this profits-debts are presented as the fruits of the company’s past and present “success.”
The futurability [5] of interest thus acquires a new twist. One no longer profits simply from the interest rate on a given sum of debt; rather, the debt itself—one’s own debt—becomes an object (a commodity) and a potential source of profit. In this new configuration, debt also becomes a driver of “growth” through the difference between cheap and expensive credit. “Cheap debt” means that one can actually profit from acquiring debt: access to low-interest credit is more desirable, and economically more advantageous, than having no debt at all.
This is one of the reasons why the richest countries also hold the largest national debts—with the United States leading, at a staggering $37 trillion (the last time I checked). Without delving into the economic complexities of this fact, we can simply note that debt itself has become a form of value and an object of both international and domestic trade. One can be in a position where others want to hold your debt—“desire your debt”—because it functions as an investment vehicle.
But the modifications and shifts in the functioning of the global capitalist economy do not stop with the form of financial capital, which thrives on interest and speculation—where profit comes from anticipating price changes, from betting on future movements, and where prices do not depend on any value tied to commodities or the “market,” but rather on what investors think others will think.
Something else has joined this logic and the vicissitudes of debt: a new kind of object to be traded within the anticipatory and speculative logic of profit—something that involves our bodies and minds more directly, from within. The time when selling our labor power on the market was the principal source of capitalist profit is long gone. Alongside speculative capital, we now have algorithmic capital as a new or additional form of credit system—one that involves a digital form of debt concerning our desires, emotions, and habits.
Not that these dimensions had been absent from earlier marketing strategies, but the algorithmic data generated by our intense, daily engagement with social media has brought this to an entirely new level. The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (2020) illustrated this quite well—and things have since advanced far beyond that depiction.
Platforms like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and TikTok speculate on future behavior — your clicks, your attention, your potential purchases. Data becomes a kind of collateral: it doesn’t have value in itself, but because it predicts what you’ll do next. The algorithm’s goal is to optimize returns on that future — by keeping you scrolling, clicking, reacting.
In the contemporary economy, the logic of debt and interest finds a new, algorithmic expression. Just as financial capital speculates on the future value of money, algorithmic capital speculates on the future value of human attention and behavior. Both systems operate through anticipation: they extract profit not from production but from prediction, from the capacity to pre-empt and shape what is yet to come. In this sense, the algorithm functions as a digital equivalent of the credit system—it binds the subject through invisible obligations, a continuous repayment in data, attention, and affect. What financial capital achieves by converting time into interest, algorithmic capital achieves by converting desire into a specific form of engagement—“attention” has become one of the key market categories. The “interest rate” of our connected lives is measured not in percentages but in notifications, clicks, and emotional volatility: each moment of distraction is a micro-installment in the debt of our attention. The result is a form of soft servitude, in which the future—once the site of possibility—becomes the primary terrain of capitalization.
Put differently, in the algorithmic economy, the logic of debt and interest assumes a form that is even more explicitly libidinal. If, in Marx’s schema, capital is value that valorizes itself through the exploitation of labor, then financial capital radicalizes this by extracting value from the anticipation of value—from the future itself. Algorithmic capital extends this one step further: it speculates not only on the future of production or exchange, but on the future of desire (thus, we could add, robbing desire of its future). Like financial derivatives, algorithms convert uncertainty into a field of calculation; they extract surplus not from things, but from “subjectivity”—from the circulation of affect and attention.
We could perhaps say that what interest is to capital, engagement is to the algorithm: both are measures of libidinal investment, ways of taxing the subject’s relation to lack. Thus, in the digital sphere, the credit system becomes psychologized — or rather, psychical life becomes collateral. We live in a regime where desire itself accrues compound interest, and where the future, as both Marx and Lacan might agree, is mortgaged to the endlessly deferred satisfaction that sustains the system. (In the sense that, on the one hand, it promises “full, ultimate satisfaction,” while on the other hand it profits from its structural impossibility.)
It looks almost as if the economic system has fully adopted and institutionalized the complex and “irrational” mechanism invented on the individual level by Freud’s “Ratman.” Or else, that the case history of “Ratman” anticipates much of the debt-driven shifts and reversals of contemporary capitalism. Obsessed with the idea that, if he had not paid his debt correctly, something terrible would happen to the people he loved, he became consumed with the need to avert this disaster—but every attempt to make things right only made the situation more complicated and confusing.
He rushed to pay off the debt, then hesitated, unsure whether he should pay or not, to whom, or how much. At one moment, he decided that paying would save his loved ones; at the next, that paying would bring about their ruin. He borrowed money to cover the supposed debt, then wanted to return it immediately. Each action brought temporary relief, followed by a new doubt and a new compulsion. His days became filled with calculations, errands, and small rituals meant to avert the imagined catastrophe. He felt he must watch over every coin, every step, every word, lest they bring harm to those he loved. The debt became an all-consuming labyrinth of obligations, rules, and prohibitions and compulsions—an invisible chain binding him to endless, self-canceling acts of repayment and reversal.
Sounds crazy? Or is it rather that, stripped of a few piquant details and individual obsessions, this sounds uncannily like our everyday involvement with the debt-driven adventures of capitalist economy—an economy that has become inseparable from ourselves?
Yes and no. The contemporary algorithmic configuration of debt, our entanglement within it, and at the same time the libidinal gain it can bring (us), could also be seen as a step beyond obsessive neurosis, which—with its fixations and often paralyzing anxiety—nonetheless hinders circulation from within and prevents its “free flow.” Rather, it can be understood as a step toward the clinical structure of perversion, in which debt and its circulation become the very substance of enjoyment, of satisfaction.
In the case of “Rat Man” debt functions as the signifier of an impossible repayment — the subject is caught between wanting to pay (to clear the debt) and not wanting to pay (to preserve the bond with the Other). The subject’s position here is divided — between servitude to the system’s injunctions and the fantasy of autonomy. However, the algorithmic economy — especially in its libidinal dimension — also has a different, perverse aspect.
In Lacanian terminology, perversion is not simply a deviation but a structural position in which the subject strives to sustain the enjoyment of the Other. The subject perceives itself as an instrument of the Other’s enjoyment—deriving enjoyment both from being instrumentalized and from the feeling that in this way, and through this very path, it controls the Other. Unlike the structure of the obsessive neurotic, who attempts to control the Other through lack (by always owing something to it), the perverse structure controls the Other through excess, or through satisfaction (“you need me for your enjoyment and functioning”). Unlike the neurotic, who is split, the perverse subject finds itself “within” the mechanism it sustains, where, through participation and collaboration in it, it asserts a sense of control. By this I do not mean that people are suddenly turning en masse toward perversion; rather, that this is the form of subjectivation posited and imposed by the aforementioned permutations of algorithmic capital and its “system.”
We can see, for instance, how this is mirrored in the way we, as users, interact with algorithmic systems: we derive enjoyment from serving the algorithm—from curating our own exposure, from knowing the system’s “tricks,” from being seen by the system. In this configuration, debt is no longer merely the medium of the subject’s relation to the Other, but becomes something direct and substantial. My being is a debt that can sustain the Other.
3. Capitalism or Neofeudalism?
If, in conclusion, we take a step back and broaden our focus to the outlined tableau—a focus that has thus far been directed exclusively at the question of debt—additional connections and dimensions begin to emerge. For example, we cannot ignore how this latest shift in the logic of debt (its algorithmic form) coincides with what we usually describe as the rise of authoritarian regimes across the world—and, what is new, also within so-called developed capitalist states. This is in fact new, though not unprecedented—after all, fascism itself grew precisely on the ground of capitalism and out of it, as a solution to its “crisis.” And something similar is happening now.
This new authoritarianism and its appeal, of course, do not rely solely on social media; they operate through a broader orchestration of the social circulation of enjoyment (affective stimulation, resentment, the instrumentalization of transgression, etc.), which is becoming a new form of social bond on the ruins of what was once a more “social” economic policy. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the case that what we once called “the social”—in the form of socially solidaristic safety nets—is increasingly being replaced, on a mass scale, by “the social” in a completely different sense and logic, carried precisely by “social” networks and the algorithmic circulation of otherwise entirely individual and segregated forms of satisfaction.
In this respect, we are dealing both with an amplification and with a shift in tone and style. For example, compared to Trump, Biden’s volume of tweeting or posting was significantly lower—one analysis recorded roughly 2,500 tweets from Biden’s official account over several years, which is only a fraction of Trump’s approximately 57,000 during his first term—and this has, of course, multiplied in the new term. The tone and style have also shifted markedly: from a more message-oriented and formal register to something much more personal, emotional, and explicitly informal—mockery, personal attacks, calculated provocations designed to incite people, and so on. Yet this shift was, of course, not invented by Trump personally, just as it is impossible to regard Biden and other recent Democratic presidents as innocent in this process. On the contrary, it was they who successfully drove capital and its logic to the point where someone like Trump could seize and twist it.
And perhaps all this is part of an even broader and more fundamental shift in socio-economic relations. The functioning of algorithmic debt (and economy), which we have briefly outlined above, also raises the question of whether, in this new configuration, we are still dealing with a capitalist economy in the strict sense of the term. In recent years, serious theoretical proposals have emerged suggesting that this may no longer be the case. Many speak of the “end of capitalism” as we have known it (McKenzie Wark), and of its transition into something resembling “techno-feudalism” (Yanis Varoufakis) or neo-feudalism (Jodi Dean)[6].
Jodi Dean argues that contemporary capitalism has ceased to function as capitalism in any meaningful sense and has instead morphed into a neo-feudal order. Rather than organizing social life primarily through markets, wage labor, and competitive production, today’s dominant system is increasingly structured around enclosure, rent extraction, and relations of dependency. In her account, what is decisive is not simply that capitalism has become more unequal or more monopolistic, but that its basic mechanism has shifted: instead of capital investing in production in order to generate profit, we see the consolidation of power through the control of infrastructures, access, and networks, enabling owners to demand payment simply for entry and participation. The central figure is no longer the capitalist entrepreneur competing in a market, but the lord who owns the gate, the channel, the platform, the territory, and who can therefore extract tribute from all who pass through.
Digital platforms and financial infrastructures thus operate as private estates: they enclose what once appeared as public or common spaces (communication, sociability, information, even attention), and they regulate access to them in increasingly arbitrary ways. Users and workers do not simply “participate” in these spaces; they are rendered dependent upon them, compelled to remain within them because their economic, social, and symbolic existence is increasingly mediated by them. Dean emphasizes that extraction here is continuous and ubiquitous: it is not limited to the workplace or the labor contract but extends across the whole of life, in the form of subscriptions, fees, data extraction, algorithmic visibility, and the constant conversion of activity into value for others. What looks like openness and connectivity is, from this perspective, an enclosure of the commons: a privatization of the conditions of social existence.
In place of the universalizing antagonism between capital and labor—an antagonism that, at least potentially, produced a collective subject and a shared terrain of struggle—neo-feudalism fragments subjects into hierarchies of status, identity, and access. Dean repeatedly insists that neo-feudal relations are not primarily competitive but stratified: not a field of formally equal participants in a market, but a differentiated order of ranks and privileges. The social field is organized around differential visibility, differential mobility, and differential security. Those at the top occupy positions of insulated sovereignty, while those below are locked into various degrees of precarity and dependency. This hierarchical organization undermines collective political struggle not only materially but symbolically: subjects are individualized, sorted, and divided, encouraged to compete for recognition, attention, and platform access, rather than to recognize themselves as part of a common antagonistic position.
Dean also discusses debt as a crucial mechanism of this transformation. Where wages once (however insufficiently) indexed the exchange between labor and capital, debt increasingly binds individuals and institutions to opaque powers that govern without democratic accountability. Debt is not merely an economic burden but a political relation: it produces obligation, guilt, discipline, and dependence, while rendering the debtor legible and governable through financial metrics. In this sense debt replaces wages as the primary mechanism of subordination: it does not integrate subjects into a social contract, but ties them to private authorities and impersonal institutions that can demand repayment, impose conditions, and extract wealth regardless of the debtor’s capacity to comply. The subject of neo-feudalism is thus less a worker bargaining over the price of labor than a debtor bound by an indefinite obligation—an obligation that extends beyond individuals to cities, states, and entire populations.
For Dean, this transformation demands a shift in critique and strategy. If the problem were simply exploitation within capitalism, one could imagine reforms that restore competition, regulate monopolies, or redistribute wealth while leaving the basic system intact. But if the core issue is domination by rent-seeking lords over enclosed commons, then the task becomes different: not to repair markets, but to contest enclosure; not to humanize extraction, but to reassert collective control over infrastructures and resources; not to defend an already exhausted ideal of capitalism, but to build renewed forms of collective, anti-feudal politics. The political horizon is thus not a nostalgic return to “functioning markets,” but a struggle against privatized sovereignty—against those who rule by owning access—and for the re-commoning of the conditions of social life.
If we return to the starting point of this essay: insofar as debt is indeed a key nodal point and expression of social relations, it is hardly surprising that with every fundamental shift in these relations, a new and different form of debt comes to the fore. These new forms are not the causes of change, but rather their manifestations and symptoms. They must be read and interpreted carefully and pragmatically, for like any symptom they also testify to the cracks and internal contradictions of systemic structures, however strong and invincible these may appear.
The fragmentation of society and of the economic system itself is a symptom in this sense: it is a response to a problem that nevertheless persists. How, within fragmentation—which prevents any universalization of struggles and strategies—to invent a new medium of the universal; that is, to devise a configuration in which the universal is not a “hat” placed over some “all,” but is itself the very medium of connecting and solidarity—this remains the key task. In fact, “task” is not quite the right word. Rather a “compass”, something that can help us at least to some extent orient ourselves within a fragmented chaos, where very few past and tested recipes remain operative.
Alenka Zupančič
[1] G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in: Werke in zwanzig Bänden, hrsg. von Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970, Bd. 13, S. 573.
[2] Jacques Lacan, Le transfer, Paris: Seuil, 1991, p. 354.
[3] I comment on this extensively in The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, MIT Press, London & Cambridge 2003.
[4] Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, in: Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), Bd. 4, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972, S. 465.
[5] The term was popularized by Franco “Bifo” Berardi in his book Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, New York & London: Verso, 2019.
[6] Cf. McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Somethinh Worse? (Verso, London & New York 2019) Janis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism? (Mellvile House, London &New York 2023); Jodi Dean, Capital’s Grave. Neo-feudalism and the new Class Struggle. (Verso, London & New York 2025).
Should anyone read this, out here is another person who sees you! All we have is each other! Peace
"What looks like openness and connectivity is, from this perspective, an enclosure of the commons: a privatization of the conditions of social existence."
This quote right here must be the best definition of social media out there.