They don't seek an equilibrium

Two things workers are hearing a lot lately are that AI is going to allow us to accomplish way more in way less time, and that AI is creating such competition that we need to work a lot more to stay relevant. These statements only seem contradictory if you think that a market economy naturally seeks an equilibrium. It does not.

It’s old hat at this point to remark upon past predictions of industrialization and automation and the massive amounts of leisure time they would create for the average Joe. Not only has technological progress not freed us from the shackles of work, it’s created more, dumber work. It’s created rise-and-grind and 9-9-6. It’s created a desperate need for performative productivity in which workers are judged not by what they accomplish but by how stressed it seems to have made them.

You don’t need to be a theorist of Marx to see this in action. I’m dubious that AI agents are doing, really, anything that their adherents claim they are, but even if they are, it’s also true that those who claiming to be doing the most agentic work are also doing so around the clock and with levels of anxiety more appropriate to driving a truckload of TNT down a mountain. You may also have heard of “tokenmaxxing,” the obnoxiously named practice of tech workers competing to see who can burn the most tokens each work day. For what? Not important.

From our perspective, greater productivity seems like it should be win-win. The employer gets the same level of output and we get more time to do what we want with our lives. You could even imagine a virtuous cycle here, where the extra time off leaves us feeling more creatively charged when we are on the clock. But that’s totally illogical from the standpoint of capital. Less is not more; only more is more.

We think doing in 20 hours what used to take us 40 hours should be progress, so why does capital still want 40? Trick question: capital doesn’t want 40 hours. It wants 80. It wants 168. And it will take them all if we let it.