[...] Are we living in a new stage of capitalism, though, or are today's digital technologies just a different version of our ancestors railroads and six-shooters, our Silicon Valley titans just the newest update to the ketchup and steel tycoons of an earlier, east-coast fantasy of wealth and opportunity? Identifying what makes our moment unique (or not) is no easy task, in part because we are living in it, and in part because the language we have to understand and describe our era's inequality is itself one of the instruments of perpetuating it. How can we think and act critically in the present when the very medium of the present, language, constantly betrays us?

[...] "hegemony" shows us how the interests of a ruling class become the commonsense of others. Hegemony, he argues, comes to "depend for its hold not only on its expression of the interests of a ruling class but also on its acceptance as 'normal reality' or 'commonsense' by those in practice subordinated to it." [...]

[...] Schools like Wework are ultimately invested in reproducing a kind of ideal personality suited to the alternately dystopian and Pollyana-ish mindset of today's US elite: an autonomous individual entrepreneur built from kindergarten, whose potential can only be realized in the struggle for wealth accumulation, and whose creativity can only be productively exercised for profit. [...]

"Noeliberalism" is sometimes used in a similar shorthand way - basically, to name everything bad about the contemporary world - and there is considerable disagreement about the term's meaning and scope. Some dismiss it as leftist jargon, meaningful in too many different ways to be useful. David Harvey defines it rather succinctly, though, as "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade," all of which are to be enforced by a strong state. Quinn Slobodian's recent intellectual history of neoliberalism has emphasized the project's goals - primarily the "complete protection of private capital rights" from democratic interference - and the importance of "extra-economic" means to secure these rights. These extra-economic means can include, for example, global institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), which can override national laws that restrict capital's power. [...]

[...] Relentlessly busy, visionary, and creatively enterprising, speculating upon the future appreciation of one's present (educational and material) assets, the financially leavened-self treats work as a way to pursue one's purpose. Work as labor - exhausting, exploitative, but performed with and for others - fades into the background of work as the acquisition of self. [...]