By Joanna Lambrou
Perfection takes zeal. Practice. A passion so consuming it reshapes your life. But passion can be bent, redirected, even weaponised.
Pray tell, what is our billionaire class’s biggest passion project?
I, and many others, would call what we’re living through neo-feudalism: a 21st-century hierarchy where a small elite accumulates outsized power, legal protections divide in two, social mobility stalls, and the rest of us orbit as tenants of someone else’s platform, data centre, or skyscraper. Neofeudalism holds weight, has been for years; from Habermas’s “refeudalisation” of the public sphere to contemporary analysts and writers chronicling the return of lord-and-serf dynamics. But, its daily texture is simple enough: power concentration at the top while participation devolves into consumption at the bottom.
We have been conditioned to believe that deep engagement is wasteful and that joy is indistinguishable from consumption. Buy it, stream it, scroll through it. Creativity, or creation in general, is reshaped as optional; your attention is the commodity, and it’s almost non-existent at this point. We are reduced to consumers -of products, of content- whichever yields the higher return. The working class no longer has rights, only a nine-to-five, a stagnant wage, and the newest iPhone on installments. We are not valued for what we produce, but for what we purchase. Our role in the chain is no longer to make, only to buy.
AI slides in smoothly here by writing your op-ed, composing your song, painting your picture. It industrialises the act of making while steering us, humans, toward passivity. I do not call this liberation from menial tasks, I call this a subtler servitude. Consumerism becomes a concealed slavery, disguised as choice.
However, while we argue over “attention slavery” in wealthy markets, modern slavery persists as brutally literal elsewhere. In 2021, an estimated 50 million people lived in modern slavery each day, including 27.6 million in forced labour. These are not abstractions; they are the hidden costs of supply chains feeding our appetite for cheap garments, rare-earths and battery metals, fast tech, fast fashion, fast everything.
AI did not invent hierarchy. But it accelerates it -industrialising content, compressing creative labour, and enabling surveillance-grade optimisation that routinises our choices. The through-line is clear: from cobalt mines to cloud servers to glass seafront towers, extraction only scales upward. Passion hollowed into productivity. Choice reduced to checkout.
If there’s a way out, it starts with reclaiming the right to make -work, art, policy, community- on our own terms. Not as tenants of someone else’s platform, but as citizens of a place, literal and figurative, we refuse to surrender.