The inner self is colonized by capitalist productivity norms

Evidence

Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos. In After the Future, the Marxist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi ties the defeat of labor movements in the eighties to rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs. In the past, he notes, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor. Today, though, “‘we are all capitalists’…and therefore, we all have to take risks…The essential idea is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 82

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the book’s key central metaphor: internal attention as a public commons threatened like a park; central to defending against the withdrawal misreading since the target is internal colonization, not external retreat.
• XREF: The ‘we are all capitalists / life as economic venture’ claim connects to the reader’s interest in how attention and labor were historically separated (eight-hour boundaries in para 85). — connects to: Mass production has invaded private mental space through immediate mimesis — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 128; Internalized capitalist values make American workers blame themselves for precarity. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 63; Under knowledge capitalism, idleness gets absorbed into producing the person as Capital. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 115 (+1 more)