Capitalism wants your free time too

We often talk about automation as a struggle over working time. But capitalism is interested in the hours when we are not working too.

Your free time is already an economic resource. There are companies competing for how long you look at a screen, what you watch, what you click, what you buy, what makes you angry enough to stay, what makes you insecure enough to consume, and what keeps you scrolling for another twenty minutes.

So imagine AI really does help us win the twenty-hour working week. We get twenty hours back. Those hours immediately become twenty hours somebody else would quite like to capture. This is why liberation from work cannot simply mean replacing forty hours of employment with twenty additional hours of consumption. Free time is not automatically autonomous time. There is a difference between time in which nobody is paying you to do something and time that is genuinely yours. The fight over automation is therefore not only a fight about who owns the machines. It is also a fight over what happens to the human attention those machines supposedly liberate.