Algorithmic Labour (2026)
The relative rise in anxiety has been reported widely in news media, with one meta-analysis indicating that anxiety has risen by 90% since 1990. The task is not to dispute this notion, nor consider the various ways of disputing the statistics, cite the rise of the internet, the changing diagnostics criteria etc. Instead the fact that this notion affectively feels palpable is worth examining. If later decades of the 20th century and early 21st century have been focused on depression, these has almost certainly ceded to the examination of anxiety.
Lacan located anxiety as the desire of the Other [1]. As our contemporary materialisation of the big Other, the internet desires us unambiguously, and constantly. Almost every major social media space is freely constructed as a place wherein the subject can experience their lack. The libidinal charge of a platform like Instagram or Tiktok remains correlative to the amount of anxiety they can install in the subject. The algorithmic capitalisation on this is clearly articulated by Zupancic [2,3] who perpetuates the algorithm as a kind of ultimate realisation of the conclusions Lacan began to explore in his notion of Capitalist discourse [4] in which the subjects desire itself enters into an economic contract with the subject and utilises this desire as a type of resource ripe for extraction.
To push this further, in a direction likely both of the theorists mentioned above would abhor, what is withdrawn in the exchange between the subject and social media is a kind of pure surplus labour. A type of psychic exhaustion correlative to a virus and a host, in which we the unknowing vector perpetuate the algorithmic structure. This exchange is roughly parallel to the notion of the attention economy [5] with some major caveats;
Firstly, that the notion of the attention economy is strictly bound to conventional economic discourse such as the laws of supply and demand, and that the transposition of the concept into other economic models, namely that of marxism, is futile without the addition of psychoanalytic discourse - with extreme emphasis on excess and masochism.
Secondly, that the strict parallelism of Zupancic's algorithmic capitalism and Simon's[6] attention economy is inappropriate. Zupancic's psychoanalytic stance doesn't require a quantitive expenditure of time, nor even a first order encounter with the medium itself, it merely requires a investment (or in Freudian jargon, cathexis) in the inversion of the traditional structure of desire, in which the subject encounters their desire as a result of the failure of the totalisation of their lived experience of the world by language. Take for example, an individual falling into imaginary dislocation after viewing a reel displaying potential earnings of an alternative career. The entire social system of the subject is implicated effortlessly, all with the disquieting notion that the subjects eternal pursuit of the perfect economic status is somehow genetically spontaneous. This particular method of disregarding the effect of contemporary technologies on the psyche is explored in more detail in Zupancic's work on Freudian disavowal [7]
What isn't articulated clearly in Simon or Zupancic's work is the toil required on the part of the subject, which when integrated with Lacan's notion of desire and drive renders the extracted attention an infinite scope, with the only limits being the material limits of the body, a barrier that when violated results in a diverse range of symptomatic phenomena that is only starting to "trickle down" into mainstream psychiatry.
The resistance to calling such a behaviour labour may one one hand be a calvinistic hangover, but when pushed further may more rightly be a clean marxist formula; capitalism expands into every horizon wherein there lies the possibility of extraction of value, the worker (as yet biological) must be confined in their leisure strictly to the reproduction of their bodies as nourishment, sleep and sexual reproduction, with the possible exception of these limits being themselves recycled as novel avenues for the extraction of value themselves. The conversion of nourishment and sexual reproduction into the consumer society[8] having been already developed in its now explicitly algorithmic form renders the modern human a kind of perpetual battery akin to the egg sacs humanity is enslaved within, whilst being projected reality intrapsychically as a kind of infinite enjoyment in the Wachowski's Matrix trilogy. The 'doomscroll' is another metonymic articulation in the long line of capitalist consumption with the added proviso of directly implicating the subject. The average internet user no longer asks whether their timeline is in dialectic with their consumption habits, and the feeling of encountering "what I was just thinking about" becomes a daily encounter with the uncanny.
Another resistance may be an abhorrence of the equation of the "passive" social media user with the actual material labour generating value via exploitation. This resistance can be overcome when realising that the typical worker not only performs algorithmic labour *in addition* to their additional toil at the workplace, often simultaneously [9].
[1] Seminar IX, X, Lacan
[2] https://slavoj.substack.com/p/debt-inc-guilt-credit-and-the-algorithmic?utm_source=publication-search
[3]https://slavoj.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-riviera-of-the-real
[4] Lacan, J., (1972), “On Psychoanalytic Discourse” Note: Discourse of Jacques Lacan at the University of Milan on May 12, 1972, published in the bilingual work Lacan in Italia, 1953-1978. En Italie Lacan, Milan, La Salmandra, 197
[5]Bruineberg, J. (2025). Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy. _Philosophical Psychology_, 1-23.
[7] Zupančič, A. (2024). Disavowal. Cambridge. _Polity_.
[8] Baudrillard, J. (1970). The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Theory, Culture & Society. New York: Nottingham University.
[9]Ahmad, M. B., Hussain, A., & Ahmad, F. (2022). The use of social media at work place and its influence on the productivity of the employees in the era of COVID-19. _SN Business & Economics_, _2_(10), 156.