Thinking in public. on Luise Freese / A(I)mbivalence

Technology does not contain its politics

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

People keep asking whether AI will create utopia or dystopia. I think the question gives technology far too much responsibility: AI does not contain a political system.

The same underlying technological capability could help create a society in which people work considerably less, knowledge becomes broadly accessible, dangerous and tedious work is automated, public services improve, and productivity gains translate into more human freedom. Or it could help create a society in which a tiny number of companies own an extraordinary amount of productive infrastructure, workers become increasingly replaceable, public institutions depend on private platforms, surveillance becomes cheap and ubiquitous, and everyone else rents access to systems they cannot meaningfully control.

Who taught you what to want?

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a version of the post-work future that goes something like this: machines do most of the unpleasant work, we work far fewer hours, everyone has enough to live, and finally we are free to do what we want. I love this vision, I am just not sure the final five words are as simple as they sound.

What do we want? And where did those wants come from? None of us develops our desires in isolation. We grow up inside cultures, markets, class structures, gender roles, advertising systems, recommendation algorithms and ideas about what a successful life is supposed to look like. We learn what to aspire to long before anybody asks us whether those aspirations are actually ours.

Capitalism wants your free time too

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Post-work is not post-power

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Suppose we win. AI and automation dramatically reduce the amount of labor society needs, productivity gains are actually shared, and the working week shrinks to twenty hours without people losing half their income. Great. Now what?

It is tempting to imagine that getting our time back would automatically make us free, and it would certainly make us freer. Wage labor occupies an enormous part of our lives, not only in hours spent working but in commuting, recovering, preparing, worrying, scheduling our lives around work, and organizing almost everything else around the fact that tomorrow morning we have to do it again. But work is not the only way power enters our lives. Capitalism does not merely organize what we produce, it has become extraordinarily sophisticated at organizing what we desire: what we buy, what we consider beautiful, what success looks like, which experiences are worth having, what kind of body we should want, and what kind of home, career, holiday, and person we should become. Even our leisure has industries dedicated to capturing, measuring, monetizing and optimizing it.

We invented machines to save labor

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is something deeply absurd about being afraid of a machine because it can do less work for us. Reducing necessary human labor is, in principle, fantastic. If a machine can perform in ten minutes what previously required ten hours of tedious human work, that should be good news: we have gained nine hours and fifty minutes of human life.

Except that this is not how we experience automation. Instead, the worker starts wondering whether they will still have a job. Think about how strange that is: we invented machines to save labor, and then built an economy in which saving labor threatens the person whose labor was saved.

AI did not take your job

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“AI will take your job.”

There is something interesting about the grammar of that sentence. AI takes your job. Prices rise. Markets demand. The economy requires. Jobs disappear. Apparently, capitalism is full of things that just happen by themselves.

Prices do not usually “rise” like the tide. Someone decides to charge more. Jobs do not simply “disappear”. Someone decides that the work should no longer be paid for, should be distributed among fewer people, outsourced, automated, or eliminated entirely.

The time AI saves is not yours

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of the promises of AI is that it will save us time, and it probably will. The interesting question is what happens to the time it saves.

Imagine a task that used to take you ten hours now takes five. Those five hours did not magically become yours. You do not get to leave work at lunchtime because productivity improved. In most workplaces, you are still employed for the same number of hours. So the five hours you saved become capacity for more work.

Uniformity

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The more we rely on AI tools, the more generic our output becomes. The less we are forced to shape our own thoughts, the more uniform we grow. But the problem is not just that everything starts to look and sound and feel the same (although that is an issue on yet another level). It is cognitive deskilling. Thinking is not simply having thoughts, but is a practice. We learn to think by struggling to articulate what we mean, by sitting with uncertainty, finding words that do not quite fit yet, changing our minds halfway through a sentence, developing an argument, discovering contradictions, and eventually arriving at something that is actually ours.