Key Ideas
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Self-Exploitation as Absolute Slavery
In neoliberalism, individuals willingly exploit themselves without an external master.-
There is no master forcing the achievement-subject to work, yet it remains absolutely enslaved to labor itself.
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Labour becomes totalized — life and work are no longer separable.
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Capital exploits freedom itself, as Marx wrote:
“It is not the individuals who are set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free.”
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The Loss of Relational Freedom
The neoliberal subject lacks the capacity for relationships free of purpose or utility.
Freedom, once relational and communal, is now individualized and economized.“We are being expelled from the sphere of lived immanence—where life relates to life instead of subjugating itself to external ends.”
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Transformation of Citizenship and Politics
Neoliberalism converts citizens into consumers.-
Political life becomes passive — a spectator democracy.
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Even political institutions now serve as “the handmaiden of Capital.”
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As consumers, voters no longer engage in shaping the community.
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Philosophical and Historical Context
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Hegel
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The master’s sovereignty comes from transcending bare life — risking death and living beyond necessity.
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Freedom once implied an excess of life, not survival.
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Etymology of Freedom
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Originally, freedom meant being among friends.
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The words freedom and friendship share the same Indo-European root.
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Hence, freedom is a relationship, not isolation.
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Marx
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True freedom arises in community:
“Only in community [with others does each] individual [have] the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions.”
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Freedom = self-realization with others → a working community.
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Walter Benjamin
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Capitalism functions as a religion: an endless cycle of debt and guilt.
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There is no relief or redemption, only the perpetuation of unfreedom.
“A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal.”
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Neoliberalism and the Digital Condition
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From Industrial to Immaterial Capitalism
Industrial capitalism has mutated into neoliberal and financial capitalism, creating a post-industrial, immaterial mode of production.-
The worker becomes both master and slave — the entrepreneur of the self.
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Under such conditions, resistance cannot emerge, since exploitation appears as freedom.
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The Digital Panopticon
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Social media acts as a new form of panopticon.
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Unlike Foucault’s model, today’s digital inmates willingly participate:
Digital Big Brother outsources operations to inmates themselves.
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Users expose, monitor, and discipline each other through communication and self-display.
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Transparency as Control
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“Transparency” is a neoliberal dispositif: it turns everything inside out, transforming all life into information.
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Secrecy, otherness, and interiority are treated as obstacles to efficiency and eliminated.
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Diversity itself becomes a consumable difference rather than a political one.
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The obsession with transparency leads to the loss of interior depth and the flattening of personhood.
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Digital Psychopolitics
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Big Data predicts human behavior, turning the future into a calculable and controllable domain.
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Freedom requires openness and uncertainty, yet datafication replaces decision with prediction.
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Han writes:
“Big Data has announced the end of the person who possesses free will.”
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Smartphones embody digital devotion—tools of voluntary servitude and ritual self-surveillance.
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Privacy (Datenschutz) becomes obsolete in a culture of voluntary exposure.
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Interpretive Reflections
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Capital should be seen as a living, fluid, adaptive organism—a force that mutates rather than merely dominates.
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Even the “rich” are not free; they too are subject to the dictatorship of capital.
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The term immanence captures what is lost: life lived directly, relationally, for its own sake—joy, care, creativity, and community.
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Nietzsche’s declaration “God is dead” echoes here: transcendence is gone, replaced by productivity and performance.
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Neoliberal “freedom” is a hijacked version of true freedom—defined not by connection but by competition.
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The ideology emerged in an age that underestimated ecological and social limits.
- “You are free as long as you do not impede others’ freedom” assumed unlimited resources and boundless optimism—now untenable.
Further Readings
![[Psychopolitics Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power pp. 1-12 AC.pdf]]