Introduction: The Question of Work

“What do you do for a living?” This seemingly innocuous question, so common in social interactions, reveals the centrality of work in our lives. In the age of advanced capitalism and artificial intelligence, the nature of work, its meaning, and its value are being profoundly questioned. The promise of technology was to liberate us from drudgery, but the reality is more complex. As companies call workers back to the office after the remote work revolution, we must ask: Is this about productivity, or is it about control?

The Proliferation of Bullshit Jobs

David Graeber, in his seminal work Bullshit Jobs, argues that modern economies are awash with jobs that serve little social purpose. This echoes the reflections of French thinkers like Renaud Garcia and Matthew Crawford, who both critique the alienation and loss of meaning in contemporary work. Crawford, in Shop Class as Soulcraft, writes:

“Manipulating abstractions is not the same as thinking. White-collar workers, too, are victims of routinisation and degradation of their tasks, as management expropriates cognitive content and systematises it into abstract procedures.”

Many jobs today—telesales, PR, layers of management—exist primarily to sustain the machinery of the market, not to serve genuine human needs. Indeed capitalist economies organise work and production as a vast, impersonal system. In this system, individuals are often reduced to interchangeable parts—“cogs”—whose main function is to keep the economic machine running efficiently. This metaphor highlights how workers lose their autonomy and agency, performing tasks dictated by abstract market logics rather than personal or collective meaning. As Marx and later theorists argue, workers are alienated because their labor is organised not for their own fulfilment but to generate surplus value for capitalists. The system prioritises the smooth functioning and expansion of the market over the well-being or self-realisation of those within it, leading to a sense of dehumanisation and loss of purpose.
In contrast, roles like nursing, teaching, or firefighting have an obvious social value because they directly contribute to the well-being, safety, and development of individuals and communities. The positive impact of these professions is tangible and immediate: they create social value by addressing fundamental human needs and fostering social cohesion
Julien Brygo and Olivier Cyran argue that not all jobs contribute positively to society. In their analysis, if a job “absorbs more social value than it produces”—for example, by consuming resources, time, or attention without providing commensurate benefits to society—it can be considered harmful. This is especially relevant for jobs whose main purpose is to sustain bureaucratic processes, market mechanisms, or corporate hierarchies, rather than meeting real social needs. Such roles may proliferate in advanced economies, often justified by the need to maintain employment or organisational complexity, but they risk becoming what David Graeber famously termed “bullshit jobs”

Alienation and the “Sense of Limits”

Christophe Dejours, a leading French psychoanalyst of work, has long argued that the organisation of labor under capitalism leads to a profound alienation. Workers are separated from the meaning of their activity, reduced to cogs in a vast machine. Michel Henry, in his phenomenology of life, goes further: the abstraction of economic value detaches us from the lived experience of work, from the joy and suffering that make us human.

Norbert Trenkle, a member of the Krisis Group, posits that capitalism’s internal logic—endless growth and valorisation—must eventually hit a historical limit. The imperative to expand productive power collides with the narrow goal of accumulating abstract wealth. As Trenkle writes, these limits are not fixed; they are temporarily masked by ever-accelerating expansion, but the contradiction remains, he refers to a core contradiction in capitalist dynamics. The contradiction is that capitalism must constantly expand production and consumption to sustain itself, yet this endless growth is ultimately unsustainable—economically, socially, and ecologically. The system’s internal logic pushes it to overcome any immediate crisis or limit (such as market saturation, resource depletion, or social unrest) by finding new markets, new products, or new forms of exploitation. This creates the illusion that there are no real limits, but in reality, these are only postponed, not resolved. The contradiction is between the need for infinite growth and the finite nature of resources, human needs, and social cohesion. As crises accumulate, the system’s ability to mask these limits weakens, leading to deeper instability and potential transformation.

The Digital Age: Quantity vs. Quality in Human Relations

In the digital era, this logic extends to our social lives. Byung-Chul Han, in The Transparency Society, warns that the proliferation of connections and information leads paradoxically to a loss of meaning. Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Love describes how relationships become fleeting and disposable, mirroring the commodification of everything under capitalism.

The rise of social networks and remote work, accelerated by AI, promised greater freedom and flexibility. For some—primarily white-collar professionals—AI and digital tools have enabled remote work, more autonomy over schedules, and the ability to balance personal and professional lives. This is the “freedom” often highlighted in tech discourse.

However, this freedom is unevenly distributed. Blue-collar workers, whose jobs require physical presence (manufacturing, logistics, healthcare), rarely benefit from these advances. For them, AI often means more surveillance, stricter productivity targets, or even job displacement. White-collar workers may gain efficiency, but the benefits are often captured by employers in the form of higher expectations, intensified monitoring, or demands to return to the office once remote work’s novelty fades.

AI thus acts as a tool that can both liberate and control: it increases efficiency, but the surplus value created largely accrues to capital, not labor. The promise of technology is always conditional—subject to recall or limitation by those in power.

In this condition more means less. More quantities for less quality, quantity of time and goods is then inversely proportional to their quality.

AI, Remote Work, and the Return to the Office: Control or Liberation?

AI was supposed to free us from repetitive tasks, giving us more time for meaningful activity. For some—especially remote workers—this has been partially true. Yet, as companies now demand a return to the office, we must question the motives.

Is this about collaboration and innovation, or is it an attempt to reassert control over workers’ time and, ultimately, their minds? The office, after all, is not just a place of work; it is a site of discipline, surveillance, and socialisation into the logic of the firm.

Renaud Garcia, in his critique of the “sense of limits,” would argue that the push to bring workers back to the office is less about productivity and more about restoring managerial control over workers’ time and attention. The office is a space where surveillance, hierarchy, and discipline can be more easily enforced. The autonomy gained during remote work is thus revealed to be provisional, always at risk of being revoked when it threatens established power structures.

“The freedom promised by technology is always conditional, always subject to recall.”

This recalls George Orwell’s warning: “The natural slope of the machine is to make authentic human life impossible”. The technological system, while offering possibilities for liberation, is continually repurposed to reinforce the boundaries of control required by capitalism.

Conclusion: Toward a New Ethic of Work

The challenge, then, is to reclaim the sense of limits—not as a restriction, but as a way to rediscover meaning in work and life. As Matthew Crawford suggests, meaningful work is rooted in tangible reality, in the satisfaction of doing something well for its own sake. As AI and digital technologies reshape the landscape, we must resist the temptation to let quantity replace quality, to let abstraction replace experience. In the end to let AI work instead of us and not for us.

Perhaps the true promise of technology is not to free us from work, but to free us for work or purposes that matters.

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Suggested Readings

• David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs
• Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft
• Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society
• Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love
• Christophe Dejours, Travail vivant
• Michel Henry, La Barbarie
• Renaud Garcia, Le sens des limites
• Norbert Trenkle, La grande dévalorisation