Is This the Future We Dreamed Of?

Israel Centeno

Karl Marx anticipated that capitalism carried within its contradictions the seeds of its own end. The antagonism between capital and labor, the growing exploitation, and the concentration of wealth would, in his analysis, culminate in a terminal crisis that would open the way to another form of social organization. History, however, has shown something different: capitalism has not perished from its contradictions. It has mutated through them, absorbing and redirecting them, even incorporating Marxism itself into its dynamic of renewal.

Late capitalism had already demonstrated this plasticity through welfare policies, mass consumption, and financialization. But the most radical leap takes place today, with the transition to what Yann Moulier-Boutang (2007) called cognitive capitalism: a system in which the object of accumulation is no longer currency or the factory, but data, knowledge, attention, and life itself. Maurizio Lazzarato (2004) and Carlo Vercellone (2006) described this as a capitalism that exploits directly the cognitive, creative, and communicative faculties of human beings. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2000) spoke of a global Empire managing immaterial labor, while Shoshana Zuboff (2019) diagnosed the consolidation of a surveillance capitalism that turns personal experience into raw material.

In this new scenario, the industrial proletariat has given way to the digital proletariat: millions of users who work for free on platforms, producing data that feed algorithms. Surplus value is no longer drawn solely from the laborer’s physical effort but from the capture of human time and everyday experience. This labor force is enslaved through hooks to the screen: no whips or chains, but notifications, instant rewards, and carefully designed mechanisms of addiction. Attention becomes the factory, intimacy the field of extraction.

Universities, once guardians of knowledge, have mutated as well. Today they function as data-extraction machines, capturing not only academic outputs but also consumption habits, digital interactions, and the everyday traces of student life on educational platforms. Even those who produce “little” or “partial data” are absorbed by persistent processes of extraction. Added to this is their function of indoctrination: they no longer form critical subjects but compliant users, trained to accept algorithmic dependence as natural. Under the rhetoric of innovation and employability, universities have become engines of legitimation for post-capitalism rather than spaces of emancipation.

Meanwhile, the demographic surplus grows. Entire populations are excluded from both the traditional labor market and the new knowledge economy. Yet their very precariousness is turned into resource: their lives become passive sources of data, raw material for systems of control and statistics.

The great paradox is that artificial intelligence, nourished by the accumulated cultural heritage of humanity, should be recognized as a collective patrimony. Instead, it has been appropriated by a handful of corporations that hold monopolistic power over it. Just as the commons were enclosed in the Middle Ages to enable agrarian capitalism, today language, creativity, culture, and memory are enclosed. What should belong to all is privatized under the sign of the commodity.

But alongside this digitalized world exists what we might call the material periphery: those who still produce tangible goods—food, manufacturing, construction, mining. This world sustains basic life yet has been relegated to the margins of value. It is no longer the central proletariat of industrial capitalism, but a class of support, subjected to new forms of exclusion. Even sectors that once defined accumulation, such as real estate, are losing relevance. Very soon, those who spent their lives saving for a house will realize that capital is no longer measured in bricks but in data.

And as I write these reflections, I cannot help but recognize that I, too, am part of this dynamic. By transforming my thought into words and sharing it online with a minimal audience, I am voluntarily and freely giving away the value of my interaction. Although outside the system that captures it this seems to have no exchangeable value, it is nonetheless absorbed by the digital economy. Even after paying in tangible currency for the service that connects me, my words remain registered, indexed, and converted into input. To paraphrase Marx, we no longer even have our chains left: criticism itself becomes fuel for the system.

Far from collapsing under its contradictions, capitalism has learned to turn its limits into levers for expansion. Marxist concepts such as alienation, exploitation, or fetishism have been reconfigured into digital consumption practices and technological dependency. What Marx once described as the germ of capitalism’s destruction has instead become the engine of its reinvention. Capitalism has not died; it has become a mutant system, able to metabolize even the critique directed against it.

The result is unsettling: there are no longer smoke-filled factories or workers on assembly lines, but there are screens that enslave us; no longer communal fields, but universities that indoctrinate; no longer an enlightened bourgeoisie, but technological corporations enclosing the commons. The material periphery sustains life, while accumulation is concentrated in the intangible.

The question that remains is not only economic but ethical and political: will we be able to reclaim the democratization of data and artificial intelligence, or will we be reduced to mere consumers of knowledge that belongs to us but is returned to us only as commodity?

And more profoundly still:

Is this the future we dreamed of