-- HenryRaffel - 01 Mar 2024

The theory of alienation provides a diagnosis of the ailments of capitalism, at least as to how it existed in the 19th century. However, since the 19th century, the state of affairs has greatly worsened. Today, due to the advent of tracking human behavior through technological devices, we find ourselves even more alienated from our species-essence than ever before. Alienation is the separation of an essential attribute of one’s self from themselves, generally that attribute being the “conditions of meaningful agency.” There are four forms of alienation: alienation from the product of labor, from the activity of labor, from the self, and from other people. Each theory helps to explain how we have become more alienated from our personhood due to the behavior generating quality of algorithmic technology.

Alienation from the product of labor refers to the fact that the process of creating a commodity, i.e. labor, is the same process in which the worker loses the commodity to the capitalist. The worker’s “product of labor” becomes a hostile, “alien object” belonging to the capitalist. As the worker produces more, the “alien world of objects” becomes more powerful as does the capitalist while the worker’s inner world grows less powerful. As we produce behavior, we also create a commodity—data. This data is not ours, but belongs to the company tracking the data. Human behavior becomes an alien object to be owned. As we produce more behavior, the trackers become more powerful as they have more to sell to the broker. Just as the worker’s value is dictated by the product he creates, the smartphone user’s value is dictated by the data his behavior creates. At the same time, the more behavior that is tracked, the easier it becomes for the company to elicit specific behavior by understanding the tracked’s previous behavior—our inner world becomes less our own to control.

Alienation from the activity of labor refers to the loss of control over the activities of a worker’s life due to the need to labor in the manner in which the capitalist dictates. What the worker spends a majority of his life doing, laboring, is not “free conscious activity” as it could have been prior to capitalism. Instead, his labor is directed and owned by the capitalist. Labor becomes not the “satisfaction of a need,” but a mandatory means to satisfy physical needs like food and lodging changing its nature into “forced labor.” This results in the worker only feeling truly human when he engages in “his animal functions—eating, drinking, ... procreating”—the escape from work. Our own behavior—through the tracker’s elicitations of behavior—has been alienated in this manner. We engage in “forced” behavior when the Starbucks iPhone app offers us a cheaper latte when passing by a store, when it hits 7:30 PM and DoorDash? tells us it is time to order our dinner, and when Tinder’s algorithm suggests you take this person out on a date. This behavior is directed by the company, it is not entirely the free conscious activity that ordering espresso, calling out for pizza, or finding someone attractive at a bar once were. But, these were the “animal functions” in which we felt truly ourselves. Our animal functions, our last refuge, has largely been alienated from ourselves already.

Alienation from the self, or dehumanization, proceeds from the previous two forms of alienation. “The productive life is the life of the species; as dictated by our own free consciousness, but our productiveness is controlled by another and we are forced to sell our labor, which is our ;life-activity,” thereby losing your very self. In capitalist labor, man “makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.” General behavior, both outside and inside the workplace, can be tracked, turned into data, and sold. Still we try to seek refuge in our animal functions, leaving us alienated from the productive species-essence of humanity, but our own free conscious cannot be liberated enough to engage in those functions freely. Our animal behaviors are controlled another and is sold. Our humanity and animal aspects have both been untethered from our personhood.

Finally, we turn to alienation from other people. Alienation must exist in relation to another person, so when something is alienated, it must belong to another person. Under a capitalist system, every human is either a “useful or threatening object”—an obstacle or a rival. The capitalist gains money from the worker and the worker needs the capitalist to provide a method of sustenance. So it is the same from the prospective of the tracker, whether private or the state. The corporate tracker sees each human as accumulated data, a useful object, to which they can control. The state tracker sees each human behavior as a potential threat, something which they “need” to control or risk losing the ability to listen to everyone. But, even then there is more. Users have also become more alienated from each other. We see the threat of beautiful people on social media and so viewers try to mitigate this threat through consumption of beauty products pushed on them by the corporate tracker. We see an influencer in Monaco and are threatened by the ostentatious display of wealth we would love nothing more to copy, and so Delta’s cheapest flight there makes a miraculous entrance into our social media feed. Moreover, we see fewer people face to face than ever before, relying on Zoom or FaceTime? to chat with our family. We are more alienated from society, from humanity, than ever before.