The unenhanced life is worth living
Previously published on LinkedIn
April 29, 2026
Based on my readings of Berardi, Gertz, Marx and Heidegger.
I’ve spent years watching this platform fill with posts about AI “augmenting human potential,” about freeing us from drudgery so we can do more meaningful work. I believed it. I was wrong, and I think many know it too. The machine does not liberate the worker. It displaces him, then hires him back at a lower rate. The productivity gains have not flowed to workers in nearly half a century. This is not a bug in neoliberalism. It is the engine. Dead labor in software and silicon is the latest form of what has always been used against living labor.
We are told AI will free us to be more human: more creative, more connected, more fulfilled. But ask: free us for what, and on whose schedule? The vision is not leisure. It is more optimized productivity. We are being liberated from the inconvenient parts of ourselves that make us slow, inconsistent, expensive. Precision-manufactured into better instruments. Heidegger called this standing-reserve: the reduction of everything, persons included, into stockpiled energy available on demand. You feel it when you cannot explain what you would do with genuine free time, because you have been a resource for so long you have forgotten you were ever anything else. The cheerful LinkedIn consensus, technology is neutral and depends how we use it, is precisely the ideology keeping us blind. Neutrality is the alibi. The tool encodes the values of whoever built it, and for two centuries that hand has belonged to capital.
There is a word for finding meaning only through productivity, for structuring one’s inner life entirely around output, for genuinely believing the unenhanced life is not worth living.
It is nihilism. We have dressed it in a hoodie and called it a growth mindset. Franco Berardi says: act as if. As if the cognitive workers watching their skills be ingested and reproduced at scale might yet recognize their common condition and refuse the fractalization of their lives. As if the future is not foreclosed.
No need to smash anything. Just notice. Notice when efficiency means your colleague was let go. Notice when AI augmentation means your judgment is quietly circumvented. Notice when your expertise is extracted and sold back to your employer at a discount. Notice what is never questioned: why are people not happy in these environments? The future that was promised, expansive and emancipatory, was always a story capitalism told about itself. The real question, the one this platform is designed to prevent you from asking: who owns the augmentation? Not you. Not yet.
I am not optimistic. But I am not finished either.
The catastrophe, Berardi writes, is exactly the point where a new landscape will be revealed. We cannot see it from here, but that is not a reason for despair. That is a reason to preserve, fiercely, stubbornly, gratuitously, a capacity for solidarity, for empathy, for asking whether better means better, and for whom.
Just in case.