You know that feeling: you pick up your phone “just to check one thing” and forty-five minutes disappear. You close the app feeling scattered, a little anxious, and weirdly empty — like you spent the time but didn’t actually do anything.
Most of us blame ourselves. “I just need more discipline.” But what if the problem isn’t you? What if the system is working exactly as designed?
That’s the core idea of the book I’m writing, Embodied Steering — Alienation 2.0 and the New Battleground. The terrain of power has shifted. The old bosses owned the factories and controlled your body during work hours. Today’s steering mechanisms own the apps, feeds, and algorithms that shape what you feel, what grabs your attention, and even what feels possible or urgent — all day, every day.
I call this the means of modulation. These systems don’t force you to do anything. They simply make certain paths smoother, faster, and more addictive while making reflection, delay, and sustained attention feel slightly harder. They work by tuning the bodily signals (what neuroscientist Antonio Damasio called “somatic markers”) that tell you what matters right now.
The result is something I call Alienation 2.0. It’s not the classic Marxist alienation from your job or the product of your labor. It’s a quieter, more intimate estrangement: from your own sense of coherence, from temporal depth, and from moral weight. You still make choices — but the field inside which you choose has already been gently tilted.
Here’s the part that keeps me up at night: this isn’t a break with capitalism. It’s the relentless continuation of capitalism’s deepest logic.
What Marx identified as capital’s tendency toward frictionless self-expansion has simply found new terrain. Where the factory once removed every obstacle between labor and surplus value, the means of modulation now remove every obstacle between stimulus and response, between attention and action, between individual feeling and population-scale behavioral patterns. The same logic that once demanded the shortest path from raw material to commodity now seeks the shortest path from somatic marker to engagement, from personal data to aggregate steering.
This is not conspiracy. It’s not even malice in the usual sense. It’s just capital doing what it has always done: extending itself into every domain it can reach, colonizing the last interior spaces — our embodied conditions of thought, expression, and collective life — because those spaces still contained friction.
The factory organized what workers did with their bodies during the hours of labor. The means of modulation organize what we feel, notice, want, and value across the whole of our waking lives. The combined system is now more comprehensive than either level alone could ever be.
So what does this new alienation actually feel like?
