“What’s your business?”: the new approaches to the precarization of mental labor against the backdrop of the neofeudal social order triumphant

Abstract

In the modern world complacent against the backdrop of the triumphant progress made by digital revolution, more and more highly qualified specialists employed in a wide variety of sectors of the economy are beginning to feel the complete meaninglessness of what they are doing. The exponential growth of clearly imitative activity is especially acute in the scientific and technological sphere. Are we in this case dealing with a purely psychological phenomenon? Or are we talking about a visible manifestation of profound changes in the social order and its economic basis? In this article the devaluation of knowledge work is viewed through the prism of a number of relatively recent special socio-political and economic studies. Fiercely competing in their theoretical approaches all of them together provide nevertheless a holistic and consistent picture of the formation of a new social order – “technocratic” or “digital feudalism”.Being based on the extraction of a kind of “quasi-rent” from financial flows created by the process of imitation and profanation of socio-economic and primary S&T development this new order of things creates incentives for the systemic precarization of mental labor and the devaluation of “human capital” while in itself being largely dependent on the continuity of this deplorable process.