Domination in advanced capitalism is masked as neutral administration and objectivity
Evidence
Domination is transfigured into administration. The capitalist bosses and owners are losing their identity as responsible agents; they are assuming the function of bureaucrats in a corporate machine. Within the vast hierarchy of executive and managerial boards extending far beyond the individual establishment into the scientific laboratory and research institute, the national government and national purpose, the tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality. Hatred and frustration are deprived of their specific target, and the technological veil conceals the reproduction of inequality and enslavement. With technical progress as its instrument, unfreedom—in the sense of man’s subjection to his productive apparatus—is perpetuated and intensified in the form of many liberties and comforts. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 186
Categorization
- XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s attention-economy goal: the ‘technological veil’ hiding exploitation is the same structure by which algorithmic content platforms recruit attention while masking their commercial extraction. — connects to: Domination is perpetuated by thought’s own ossification, not by technology; Depicted nature becomes a coded endorsement of industrial domination; Monopoly capitalism destroys the very notion of property while retaining its form (+25 more)
- SEED: Angle: how tech platforms recast labor and control as neutral ‘administration’ — the moderation queue, the recommendation feed — precisely masking whatever unfreedom they reproduce.
- ADDENDUM: Ties to the sacrifice article’s theme of hidden structure behind a rationalizing facade — here Marcuse names the rationalizing machinery itself.
Broader Connections
- Ideological forms like wages serve to maintain capitalist domination
#exemplifies(0.82) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 903 - Capitalism breaks with prior production yet continues domination over objects
#expands(0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1602 - Market-centered accounts of capitalism function as ideology masking production
#expands(0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 475 - Theorizing away the concept of totality serves capitalism by hiding it from political challenge
#expands(0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 713 - A rationality geared to domination shapes how we construe the Other
#expands(0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 464 - Capitalism co-opts opposition and must be escaped rather than confronted
#expands(0.72) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 468