The Chapo Guide to Revolution

Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason.

Instead of a means to liberate you, technology is a tool for your boss to track you, message you, and harass you at any time of day, whether you’re on the clock or not.

It doesn’t enhance your free time, it destroys it.

Thanks to an unrelenting class war waged since about 1973, wages have stayed the same for four decades, while money has been funneled to the top.

It’s a complete, perverse inversion of the socialist or communist idea, the alternative vision.

When freed from the soul-crushing system of wage labor, what we used to call “work” actually becomes the passionate, creative fulfillment the lizards in marketing tell us it is.

The expectation that the office should also be the center of your social life, that one need never leave to enjoy activities usually associated with “free time,” is perhaps the most insidious idea about work yet devised.

If we think of today’s horrifying, depersonalizing, and culture-obliterating jobs as a kind of military hierarchy, marketing would be the Green Berets.

These days, most jobs are positions that used to be done by five different people, squeezing out every last drop of labor with more hours, more intensity, and more productivity.

years after Jobs’s demise every single one of his fellow tech lords fancies themselves a “visionary” or “explorer,” words previously reserved for Leonardo da Vinci or Magellan