Traditionally, the history of contemporary labour is delineated by a timeline that begins with the first industrial revolution (with the coal powered steam engine and culminating in the Fordist production system), continues with the second industrial revolution driven by oil after the Second World War – and which would feed so-called post-Fordism; this gave then way to the third revolution determined by digitalisation and the accelerated processes of globalisation that emerged in the 80s of the last century and would eventually culminate in what we currently call the fourth industrial revolution that bases on the development of Artificial Intelligence and the robotisation of production processes.

But this continuous timeline, which fits very much the modern Western taste and its idea of indefinite progress is nevertheless much more complex and fragmented and involves brutal processes of subjection: neither the industrialisation and its subsequent consequences were the same on all continents, nor is the supposed progressive “immaterialisation” of capitalism true. Behind today’s informational capitalism there is a huge amount of “material” labour hidden that is mainly performed by racialised people and highly feminised; not only invisible “reproductive” labour – poorly paid or unpaid (as well as socially devalued) – , but also huge amounts of labour in polluting or heavy industries, which has been delocalised outside the Western-centric space (China, India, Indonesia… the big factories of today’s world).

The last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century coincide with the alignment of neoliberalism with capitalism and the technological revolution brought about by the digitalisation, robotisation and financialising of the economy (the new niche of capital, whose accumulation was slowed down by the very frontiers of productive capacity and the limits of the planet). (…) The most visible work becomes immaterial, the generation and dissemination of information that does not belong to its workers, dispossessed of the knowledge produced and co-opted by neoliberal semiocapitalism (Francesco “Bifo” Birardi): platform capitalism hides exploitation and hyper-flexibility under the lightness of the mobile telephone-office; the “false self-employed” become widespread; the university becomes a race against time for the quantification of a non-emancipatory knowledge at the service of power; the data provided by everyone for free on social networks feed the vectorial power of large companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook…) possessing a huge amount of completely asymmetrical power relation.  

Outside the factory, the contemporary metropolis becomes a place of production, and our lives are spent without a distinction between time for living and work time because all the fissures in our lives have been captured and occupied by capital and are controlled by profitability. Work is not only a way of “earning a living” by losing it, but it becomes the fundamental strategy of disciplining our bodies and subjectivities.

The exhaustion of human labour or the depletion of soils plagued the 19th century imagination as signs of entropy. Since then, capitalism has not ceased to escape forward via an expansive process of commodification of nature. Today, the processes of capital accumulation hang in the air like an increasingly weightless whirlwind that is constantly grabbing primary energy sources. The trend towards the ending of the economy, with which neoliberalism is often associated, overlaps with the expanding appropriation of energy and mineral deposits, a process that may be reaching its historical limit.

On the other hand, past and present manifestations of entropy in workers’ bodies emerge as symptoms of resistance to capitalist valorisation, but also as psychic expressions of malaise. Physical fatigue and libidinal neurasthenia, associated with early industrial capitalism, have given way to a whole range of psychosocial disorders such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, attention deficit, the anxiety epidemic or that mixture of pleasure principle and death drive that Mark Fisher calls “depressive hedonia”: the way in which our dealings with technological devices promote a compulsive form of desire satisfaction that in turn generates constant frustration – for example, with respect to checking emails or social media over and over again. Sometimes depression is no longer so much about the absence of desire as it is about putting it to work through the narcissistic online display and the free generation of data, which are accumulated by the corporations of informational capitalism.

In the face of these historical inertias, imagining culture outside the industrial energy paradigm must assume the entropic dimension of the cosmos and human existence – not in order to surrender to its catastrophic torpor, as intuited by the scientists of the 19th century who associated it with the thermal death of the universe, but to mitigate its effects to the best possible extent.