Many have seized on similarities between the ‘60s student-led revolt and the return of politics in the 2010s. Though the recent experience of Millennials has been much less radical than that of the Boomers, the ultimate contribution of both might end up being a cultural shift—in our times, toward the hyperactive cultural liberalism known as the “Great Awokening,” as well as in the long hangover that follows frustrated politicization. 

Indeed, journalist Ryan Zickgraf has recently argued that “there are ominous signs… that we are drifting toward a cyberpunk-themed reboot of the 1970s”—a 2020s characterized by accelerated social decline and a turn away from politics. “Just as the revolutionary fervor of 1968 exhausted itself and begat the American withdrawal into the navel-gazing Me Decade, we may be knee-deep in the Me Too Decade, but rebranded with the veneer of the political: self-care touted as a radical act.” We are now faced with a period of withdrawal and disengagement, with a turn to the private and the individual, after a decade that strove for something more public and collective. 

Is the failure of that attempt generating new political forms of withdrawal, as paradoxical as that may sound? If so, it may be that we are not just sick of the culture wars, but also worn thin by an accelerated rhythm of life that permits us ever less control over our own, human affairs. 

Hyperpolitics is Driving Us Crazy

The 2010s was characterized by the politics of anti-politics—an angry rejection of the political establishment. Easy internet organizing spawned proliferating protests, replete with slogans but light on outcomes. Hypermedia inundated us with words, images, sounds, and links. Things that weren’t political got politicized, and politics began to happen in places where it previously didn’t. Your new favorite musical artist or cooking show was called out for being a vanguard of actual fascism or cultural Marxism. And the family, once a “haven in a heartless world,” was now the site of political antagonism, a litmus test for how seriously one takes politics. This melding of private and public, of high and low, inside and outside, domestic and foreign, could be called hyperpolitics: a sense of politics being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. 

The interests of corporations and state managers continue to rule the day because the structures that once contained political energy are gone. When politics is alive, things become fluid. Fluids need containers: politics needs institutions and organizations so as to be effective. Both participation and party have the word “part” in them, as in being one “part” of society—a distinct group with distinct interests. Today, participation has been superseded by engagement. This is something you do by commenting, posting, shouting, or showing up. What all this engagement amounts to is a “public” sphere that is nothing more than a cacophony of private voices. It’s incredibly noisy, agitated, and impotent. Contrary to optimistic hopes about the return of politics, it may be that “electoral politics based around involving people through internet solicitation… inevitably produces a de-politicisation of those whose participation is the ostensible goal,” writes essayist and art critic Jonathan Crary. This new digital-media driven “politics” is aligned with consumerism and self-administration, and therefore devoid of subversive power. The deinstitutionalized individual who is engaged through the repertoires of surveys, polls, clicks, and shares, is often disengaged from deeper political questions—and even from life itself. 

We are being driven crazy, and the end result of all this engagement may not be the power to change the world but a shocking loss of autonomy. 

Feverish Short-Termism

In his landmark work on the experience of modernity, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, the Marxist humanist Marshall Berman described the epoch as a whole as “a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.” While the late nineteenth century was full of concern about conditions such as neurasthenia or nervousness, the illness of our age might be ADHD—attention-deficit and hyperpolitical disorder.

In a historical moment in which the power of science and technology to transform the present is not matched by politics, we are left with a feverish short-termism. Moments of enthusiasm (“Hey, cool, social media! Let’s organize a protest!”) are followed by despair (“It all leads to civil war!”). 

The French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky therefore suggests that we understand our times as hypermodern. With little outer nature left to domesticate, capitalism seeks to exploit inner nature. Gender, friendship, communication, art—these all become objects of rationalization and, eventually, profit-making. Conflicts are less and less structured around class antagonism, and increasingly about “personal, temporal tensions.” Time has been torn away from tradition and made a matter for individual choice—but for nearly everyone, that choice is constrained. “Modernity was built around the critique of the exploitation of working time,” Lipovetsky explains, contrasting it with hypermodern time, which “registers a feeling that time is being increasingly rarefied. These days, we are more aware of the lack of time than we are of a widening in the number of possibilities entailed by the growth of individualization.” Hypermodernity is not confronted by a confident movement seeking to shape the world, as in the form of the old workers’ movement, but by anxious individuals oppressed by the feeling that time is not theirs. 

Over the Speed Limit

The sense that we have ever-less time to do the things that matter has been meticulously explored by sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa. Modernity opened up possibilities: “growth and acceleration served as the societal precondition on which the promise of autonomy, in the sense of a liberation from material and social compulsions of all forms, was based.” But this has now changed. The “core of modernization, the acceleration process, has turned against the very project of modernity that originally motivated, grounded, and helped set it in motion.” Acceleration used to set us free; now it locks us in. Indeed, the prevailing sense today is that nothing remains the way it is for long, but still nothing essentially changes. This is, as architect and critic Paul Virilio has said, “frenetic standstill.”

Rosa explains this by reference to the pace of change. Societies generally undergo radical transformation around once in a generation, but at some point in the past decades, that rate has accelerated, so that change is now intragenerational. This erodes the conditions for coherence and continuity in one’s personal identity. Rather than setting out on a life path whose route is relatively clear, we increasingly find that “the duration, sequence, rhythm, and tempo” of things is “decided in the course of their execution, that is, within time itself.” 

So while modernity may have made marriage a choice, for example, in hypermodernity, all relationships are put into question, including their expected duration and the meaning society attaches to them. This bewildering scenario has not made us more free. In fact, it seems the more choices we have, the less optional the institutional structure is. 

The modernist dream of speed has turned into a nightmare. Our lack of grip can be exemplified by reference to the world of work. The Fordist factory regime memorably depicted in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times demonstrates the way man is made to work to the beat of the machine. Labor militancy and then the post-war class compromise led to reductions in working time, birthing the notion of the “nine-to-five” job. Workers claimed back time from bosses. Even so, for a rural worker who migrated to the city from the country in mid-century, the factory would act as a sort of accelerator of the rhythm and pace of life.

How is the nine-to-five perceived now? For bosses, it is an inconvenience, a regulatory artifice that only slows things down. If you’re not responsive outside of work hours, that is a form of dissent, perceived as an insolent adherence to leisure over labor. In white collar jobs, the expectation is that e-mail sets the beat: instant, always-on. It is in struggles over the time spent working that we most clearly see how the process of modernity (things going ever faster) comes into conflict with the project of modernity (having more individual and collective autonomy). 

Tired and Disengaged 

In this light, hyperpolitics appears as both a product of and contributor to social acceleration. Media cycles become ever shorter, driving a sense of political whirlwind, which makes us lose our bearings and makes the pace of life seem faster than ever. 

We seem to be getting rather tired of this as the enthusiasm of the populist decade dies down. When politics is deinstitutionalized, aggregate engagement levels can swing wildly according to that ineffable thing—mood. But when we disengage, the places we withdraw to may not provide much solace. Religion, family, hobbies—these are also subject to the breakdown of public and private. Increasingly, it seems like the only option is to just mentally clock out. The traditional union tactic of “working to rule” has been reborn as a desperate individualistic strategy: quiet quitting. Individuals are increasingly rejecting an unregulated, deinstitutionalized world that robs them of any sense of meaningful control. 

Is there a way to politically harness such instincts, but in a way that makes good on the modern project’s promise of individual and collective autonomy in the face of self-autonomizing forces? I want to explore three trends that are indicative of such instincts, but which propose themselves as political projects: refusal to work, new forms of urbanism emphasizing proximity, and ideological orientations away from contemporary liberalism. Together, they constitute alternatives to hyperpolitics from varied political tendencies, and they stand against the speed, the vertigo, and the lack of control of hypermodernity. Unfortunately, they all also fall prey to its logic in different ways, closely binding their proponents to the present moment.

1. Disengaging from Work

The terms anti-work or post-work describe a spontaneous trend, as well as a body of thought. Theoretical proposals can be found in the work of Kathi Weeks, David Graeber, and André Gorz. Another advocate, Peter Frase, sums up the ambitions of this approach: “…giving workers voice within the institution of wage labor can never fundamentally call the premises of that institution into question. For that, you need the real right of Exit, not just from particular jobs but from the labor market as a whole.” The phenomenon of exit, of people voting with their feet, is exemplified in the two-million-strong membership of r/antiwork, a community on the message-board site Reddit. Already sizable in 2019, the community exploded during the pandemic as the lockdowns refocused attention on who was and was not an “essential worker.” Many people, worn down by the demands of their work—bad conditions, poor wages, long hours, asshole bosses—sought a place to air their grievances. According to erstwhile moderators, the plurality of posts are such complaints. The community’s growth also comes in tandem with the so-called Great Resignation, whereby US jobs markets tightened after the pandemic—economistic euphemism for people no longer wanting to work for peanuts, particularly in certain service sector jobs. As such, r/antiwork also became a place to discuss strategies for quitting. 

Quitting here should be understood in broad terms: people are not just looking for tips on how to draft a resignation letter, but also on how to create a life with less paid employment. Discussions often concern how to downsize, how to make do with less or earn enough by doing little. As the community’s slogan has it, “unemployment for all, not just the rich.” Despite some fleeting political expressions, r/antiwork is not a new institution, like a party or a union; it is a swarm, an evanescent colliding of atoms. Rather than heralding an attempt to reconfigure the world of production, antiwork looks more like a pure negation of work as it exists. 

Even when we consider more elaborated conceptions, such as expressed in post-work thought, the absence of institution-building is notable. Exemplary here is the thinking behind Universal Basic Income, advanced by many across the political spectrum. You get your monthly check and are left to your own devices. At its worst, the sort of UBI favored by Silicon Valley is explicitly premised on rolling back state welfare institutions and full submission to the market.

In a thoroughgoing critique of left-wing post-work thought, political theorist Alex Gourevitch has noted that refusal and withdrawal from work does not, as its proponents imagine, land a blow against a work ethic that always demands more and faster. Rather, post-work is “just as ideologically laden as the capitalist work ethic. It is a concession to a reality that is imposed by capitalism: that work could only ever be as it is here and now; that resistance is futile.” It is this cynical stance that is now leading many to slink away from work. Reimagining the organization of work, so that it might be distributed evenly and drudgery reduced to a minimum, is a task that goes wanting. 

There is still a lot of work to be done. The daily reproduction of the world, let alone the project of civilizational advance, requires and will require a lot of human labor, even in the best scenario of production being rationalized and automated to the greatest extent possible. You can ditch your bullshit job, but there’s a lot of essential work that is currently being done which has become invisible in the West (mostly because it has been exported to China and beyond). Likewise, there is a lot of essential work that is not being done that must be: more teaching, more caring, more creating, more fixing and building and rebuilding. 

Antiwork types labor under the illusion that we can live off thin air because they occlude the essential work of others. They ignore the real, skillful, life-sustaining production that goes on behind the fetishized category of “the economy”—or else they abandon any vision of social improvement whatsoever.

Instead of counterposing leisure to work, why not reimagine how we produce? Why not fight for work to be done at a pace, length, and intensity suited to human beings, not the machines that increasingly watch over us? And why not institutionalize such an arrangement, so that we collectively decide how and what to produce, rather than withdraw to a deinstitutionalized life of you and your UBI check and nothing else? 

2. The City for Me, Not for Thee

The world of work and production is governed by what can be called a “regime of time.” Under capitalism, time really is money. The pace and rhythm of life is set for us by the demands, ultimately, of profit. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was the state, the military, and the factory that served to accelerate society. Nowadays, it is the hyper-speed of the internet and finance that act as timekeeper, accelerating the pace of life and the speed of social change. 

Paradoxically, the more “technical acceleration” increases (for instance, faster transactions, quicker internet connections), the more time we should have to do other things, but instead we discover that we have ever-less time. The paradox becomes particularly acute if we consider private transport: cars take you where you want to go quicker than the alternatives, but the more cars there are on the road, the more traffic, and the more stuck you are. You end up wasting time, generating an even greater sense of time scarcity. 

Enter proposals for “15-Minute Cities”—an urban planning concept that aims to create communities in which everything people need is within a 15-minute walk or cycle ride from home. The concept is already policy in what was once the emblematic capital of modernity: Paris. In fact, the Socialist Party mayor of the city, Anne Hidalgo, won her re-election campaign on the back of her commitment to the idea. 

The concept is the brainchild of Franco-Colombian urbanist Carlos Moreno and has been adopted in cities as varied as Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Melbourne, and Barcelona, while several British cities’ Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) follow a similar emphasis on proximity and access over mobility. In the US, the idea has so far had little impact on policy, even if a reform to the urban environment seems more pressing. Still, the National League of Cities singles out Portland, OR and Cedar Rapids, IA as examples where planners have tried to build what they call “complete neighborhoods.” 

The notion of having everything you need within easy access is intuitively appealing. Faced with the strains the contemporary city imposes—noise, wasted time, stress and the ensuing aggression, etc.—retreating to a more manageable size and scale sounds tempting. But dig deeper and the 15-minute model reveals itself to be a redundancy, a mere marketing label, or else something more sinister: a retreat to hyperlocalism that excludes working people. 

Consider Paris: services and amenities like bakeries and restaurants are already plentiful and proximate, even if jobs are not. But the solution—restricting movement by car across the capital—would limit access to the places where jobs already are to those already living there. Measures to enact a 15-minute city under current circumstances would require, for instance, that bosses be incentivized to only hire locally. Thus, “an initially laudable utopia could gradually turn into a petty tyranny that would gradually stifle the entire Parisian economy,” as one critic, a former World Bank urbanist, put it. 

To have the 15-minute city really deliver on its utopian vision would require municipalities to have powers to create businesses, jobs, services and amenities that they simply do not and will likely never have. “Is Carlos Moreno a lifestyle guru preaching a return to simpler times before mechanized transport, or is he a Haussmann-like planner?” The answer is neither. He’s more like a snake-oil salesman to green-tinged, bourgeois-bohemian dreamers.

Over in the UK, the LTNs have become a political flashpoint. A recent Parliamentary by-election in Outer London became a referendum on London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s (Labour) plan for Ultra-Low Emissions Zones (ULEZ). The Conservative Party won, despite suffering in polls nationally, for its opposition to the measures. In Oxford, LTNs were designed to create a 15-minute city but seem to have benefited only those people who live immediately within them. The plan requires that thousands of CCTV cameras be mounted so as to monitor trespassers. Not for nothing, 33% of respondents to a King’s College London study on conspiracy theories believe 15-minute cities to be “a tool of government surveillance.” Early in 2023, a protest in Oxford against the urban policy drew demonstrators from around the country. A belief that neo-Nazis had “hijacked” the rally led anti-fascists to set-up a counter-demonstration, resulting in clashes. 

All this over some rejigged traffic flows? If the idea of 15-minute cities has turned Carlos Moreno into “public enemy no.1,” as the New York Times claims, then it would seem to underline Gilles Lipovetsky’s claim that hypermodernity sees “the escalation of themes and conflicts linked to time.”

And indeed, Moreno’s plans do look like a way of taking charge of how we manage our finite time on Earth by making cities that work for us. But the wild conspiracism of some opposition notwithstanding, critics have rightly cottoned onto the idea’s restrictive qualities. The reliance on punitive measures is almost unavoidable, mostly to the benefit of those residing in immediate locales. As one critic and Oxford resident appositely asks, “could LTNs have been introduced in a way that would have benefitted Oxford as a whole, rather than just the advocates who live within them? Or is chopping a city up into neat but almost impenetrable quads, in a bid to please academically minded activists, always a bad idea?” Hence the leap to seeing the LTNs as a means of locking people into their homes, or as a precursor to “climate lockdowns”—mass restriction of mobility along the lines of Covid measures. What is understood is that the 15-minute city does not amplify popular autonomy by increasing our control over our own time, but rather hampers it.

Behind the understandable desire to make city life manageable is a means for compounding inequality. The limitations on mobility, that great liberatory engine of modernity, are rather aristocratic. The 15-minute city is a playground for residents of the (increasingly high-rent) urban core. Peasants must stay out. Or as one satirical meme had it, “If you can get to the coffee shop within fifteen minutes, but the barista who makes your drink can't afford to live closer than a half-hour away, then you live in a theme park.”

Professor Moreno’s vision is good vibes in place of social transformation, a therapeutic politics, as the postliberal philosopher John Gray has argued. The application of “15-minute cities” creates little petit-bourgeois idylls of parcellated neighborhoods, closed off to the working masses who most suffer from lack of control over their own time—while doing nothing to improve, say, services and transport in poor, underserved exurbs. This is not an engagement with what metropolises are and could still be; they are a means of disengaging from the promise of modernity tout court.

3. Liberalism Doesn’t Sell

On the moderate Right, the most dynamic body of thought today goes under the name of “postliberalism.” It can be understood as a critique of the materialist assumptions of progressive perfection, as well as a disenchantment with the promise of economic and cultural liberalism, and a turn to community, belonging, welfare, and an orderly life. 

Emblematic of this shift is some of the commentary produced in magazines and journals like UnHerd in Britain or American Affairs and Compact in the US (full disclosure: I have written for all three). A controversial and widely circulated article in the latter outlet captured well the dissidence of the postliberal right, in its willingness to break from right-wing shibboleths of market supremacy. Helen Andrews, an editor at The American Conservative (another magazine that swims in the same political stream), wrote a positive take on the history of the German Democratic Republic—that is, Stalinist East Germany. 

What appeal could it hold for a conservative? Life in the GDR was wholesome and provided a sense of life satisfaction, away from the hyperactive circulation of commodities. Yes, it lacked goods like bananas, Andrews notes, but “should we really consign a regime to infamy on such grounds?” Indeed, the “lack of consumer goods might have been a price worth paying to build a more humane society.” Of course, Andrews acknowledges that this was precisely what was not delivered, but the tone is nevertheless sympathetic. 

This is not just historical revisionism on the part of a conservative. Andrews concludes by arguing that “[t]he bargain that East Germany offered is basically the one China offers now: Stay out of politics, and we will leave you alone, and in return, we will deliver rising living standards. Most people are happy to take this deal.”

We’ve already seen how, on the Left, the vision of a world without work constitutes a sort of “utopia of resignation”; and in the center, how a strangely analogous utopia obtains, of a city without that which makes a city a city. Now, with the postliberal turn, the Right exhibits its own visions of a quiet life.

The pandemic lockdowns offered, at least to the professional classes, an experience of a slowed-down existence and a dependence on proximity. But here too contradictions abound. The pandemic ended up proving the biggest accelerant of Crary’s “Internet Complex.” The post-pandemic world is more online and accelerated than ever, and power is even more concentrated and centralized in the hands of a few surveillance capitalists. 

The penny has dropped for some. In a review of a book on postliberalism by Adrian Pabst, a British political scientist inspired by Catholic social teaching, the British Conservative MP Danny Kruger confessed in 2021 that, “[w]e briefly hoped… that the pandemic would usher in an age of local cooperation, mutualism and responsible business. Instead, as Pabst says, the ‘new normal’ represents an intensification of the old normal: centralization, hyper-capitalism and culture war, all sustained by new technologies.”

Though the term “postliberal” often refers to a collection of Catholics, populists, isolationists, paleocons, disappointed conservatives, and even pagans, Kruger laments that “[i]t is a shame that so much of the energy of postliberalism is coming from the left.” Indeed, in an astute review of postliberal thought, the editor of VogelinView notes that “the new left and new right both criticize the assumed dogmas of liberal modernity.”

This rejection of liberal modernity goes across the board. Few now believe in the promise of expanding commerce and trade, individualism, growth and development. Even contemporary liberalism’s most fervent adherents are recoiling from the overwhelming expanse of private over public power, centralization over localism, and speed over autonomy. The historian Timothy Garton Ash, an emblem of triumphal, End-of-History liberalism, confessed in a 2020 essay in Prospect Magazine that, “we… underestimated the traumatic impact of the sheer speed and depth of the changes wrought in people’s everyday lives by post-1989 globalization and liberalization.” 

In the face of so many solids melting into air, the historian tries to characterize popular reactions: “As so much that is familiar is swept away, people cry: ‘Enough! Too much change! Too fast!’” But postliberal critics misread these exclamations, and substitute in their conservative prejudices. They have concluded, wrongly, that the sin of the neoliberal era is one of too much freedom. Instead of individualism, we should have community; instead of choice, we should be bound by duty, or honor, or virtue; instead of seizing power, we should wish to be merely left alone. In line with generations of conservative critics, postliberals founder on these stale dichotomies. The truth is that we are not too free, but rather live in the kind of society where freedom for one person can only be bought at the expense of the other. 

The consummate liberal Garton Ash is not a postliberal, but does evoke something about the way the wind is blowing. He comes to a surprising conclusion for someone who was only recently singing the praises of globalization. “We need to slow down the rate of change to one that most human natures can bear, while preserving the overall liberal direction of travel. Joachim Gauck, a former German president, sums up this injunction in two words: zielwahrende Entschleunigung (goal-preserving deceleration).”

Goal-Preserving Deceleration?

There is a lot of recoiling going on, but we must be conscious about what it is that we are recoiling against, so that our political action might be conscious and not just reflexive. Antiwork wants to declaim that work is exploitative, but betrays a sense of political exhaustion. Fifteen-minute cities don’t reimagine the urban landscape, they are an ideological disguise for the narrow interests of the middle-class hipsters. And postliberalism is ultimately a flinch against the consequences of market society by its erstwhile adherents, a turn away from liberalism arriving post festum. 

The political world is slowly creeping toward policies that are no longer “neoliberal” as traditionally understood. But an even more “protective” state seems unlikely to guarantee the bases for the development of individuality as classic liberalism promised. 

To institute a freer society requires that we grasp what is at the root of our contemporary unfreedom. This means not throwing ourselves headlong into what counts as political engagement, but to identify the rational kernel in the politics of disengagement. 

We’ve seen at length how central the politics of time have become. What is paradoxical about our age is that this concern has emerged at a time in which there is little contestation over the fundamental way that time is structured in capitalist society: wage labor. 

It is for this reason that antiwork is the most interesting tendency expressing withdrawal—and also the most one-sided. Antiwork, as a spontaneous movement, and post-work, as a theorization, turn our attention to what we do with our time: who controls it and to what end. But the answer provided simply involves the absence of work: living off UBI checks, themselves the condensation of the labor of others. It is an atomistic vision that takes refusal, not commitment to one another’s freedom, as its end point. The labor movement understood this problem better, campaigning for and then winning an eight-hour day. But the forward march of labor was halted, and with it further reductions to the working day.

In a freer, more humane society, the opposition between work and leisure would be overcome. In contrast, a world in which we don’t collectively determine what we do with our time is one in which we swing between being enterprising, hyperactive individuals and the feeling that we have nothing better to do, crushed by empty periods. This contradiction is what we also find at a social level, in the coexistence of the overworked and the underemployed, or between different phases of life. To overcome these contradictions, new organizations are needed to collectively organize in the service of that freer society.

The Time of Our Lives

In Martin Hagglund’s This Life—a work that ties together mortality, secularism, and existential questions about time, on the one hand, and a deep critique of the way society is organized, on the other—the author makes an essential argument about how our time is what is ultimately valuable. 

Time is the only ultimate scarcity because we all die. There is something productive in recognizing this: “Only for someone who is anxious about her life can there be a right or a wrong time for action, and only for someone who is anxious about her life can there be too much or too little time.” This opens up the possibility of asking what you ought to do with your time. What is valuable is measured in terms of your finite lifetime. 

You work because you need to survive. In this realm of necessity, spending time on something is perceived as a cost, a drain on finite time. Capitalism ultimately measures the value of things with the average time it takes to produce them. But when you’re at leisure, and deciding for yourself what to do, you value things in and of themselves. If you have committed to being a sculptor or a cook in your spare time, then time spent molding clay or baking cake is not time wasted or even spent. Hagglund frames the issue in terms that antiwork types would agree with: “The more free time we have to pursue the activities that matter to us, the wealthier we are.”

The problem arises, as Theodor Adorno notes in “Free Time,” that in capitalism, free time is reduced to leisure time. It is commodified for the sake of profit: while we live in a world of wage labor, leisure time ultimately only exists to recharge us between periods of work. Worse still, that leisure time is reduced to the take-up of hobbies that themselves are things sold on the market: the sculpting/baking classes you pay for, that new oven for your clay or your cakes, and the Instagram posts to show off your achievements. There is no escape.

Is this the empty and commodified “freedom” that antiwork thought appeals to? As hyperpolitical engagement, or simply the accelerated rhythm of life, eats into our sense of free time, the refusal of work in favor of leisure may not result in being much freer than we were before.

According to Hagglund, free time, to be truly free, cannot be understood as freedom from commitment. Instead, it must be the freedom to engage the demands of having a practical identity—something we commit to being and living, like a sculptor or a cook. But it might just as well be the practice of being a father or a carer or anything else to which we might meaningfully dedicate ourselves. 

This practical identity is what anchors free time, institutionalizes it. It “cannot be invented out of nothing by an individual, but is formed by social institutions,” tied together by mutual recognition: someone eats your food and recognizes its quality, or appreciates you as a caring family member, or acknowledges you as an excellent sculptor. A free society is one in which the measure of value is no longer labor time, but what Hagglund calls “socially available free time.”

We are far from having the sort of society in which people are free to determine for themselves what they do with the finite time of their lives, sustained by institutions of mutual recognition—institutions in which “we participate because we recognize ourselves and our freedom in their form.” 

But the sense—and reality—of a world out of control makes the question ever more pressing. It is very unlikely that institutions simply adapt to acceleration while also retaining the promise of autonomy. Giving up on the project of modernity, on the other hand, is unconscionable. So what if we rediscovered the aspiration to actively shape human affairs, and reached for what Walter Benjamin referred to as the emergency brake on the runaway locomotive of capitalism? The alternative—doing nothing—would represent an “unbridled onward rush into the abyss.”

Needless to say, I won’t even pretend to present a resolution here. But what we can do is start thinking more about how we spend the finite time of our lives, who controls this time, and how it is valued. If Hagglund is right that “socially available free time” is both the means and end of emancipation, then how might we start generating more of it? The labor question is inescapable: the refusal of work cannot be the end point, but must be a means. The contestation over the time we spend working and the magnitude of its value is the first step within a wider project of gaining control over our lives. 

Alex Hochuli is a political analyst and writer in São Paulo, Brazil. He’s the host of global politics podcast Bungacast and co-author of The End of the End of History (Zer0, 2021).