“Psychopolitics” by Byung-Chul Han

I grabbed this book from a partnership a philosophy YouTube channel was doing with Verso books. The host had talked about it before, and from what I heard this book talks a lot about what people are feeling right now. Oh boy was I right! This is such a prescient summary of how people are feeling in our hellscape of a world right now.

Han starts by talking a lot about this idea of the “entrepreneur” and how that is different from the proletariat of old. As entrepreneurs, we are both our own boss and worker, and what that allows us to do is subjugate ourselves. We feel like we owe ourselves to do work constantly. This becomes a far more effective way of monitoring everyone, similar to the idea of the panopticon. Now everyone is their own security guard. This intersects with the rise of social media where we all use likes, friends, upvotes, etc to measure out our worth. And all that data goes straight to giant algorithms that know things about us that we do not even know. And yet we still have a drive to collect more and more data! He discusses the limitations of this a bit, how data can’t tell a human story, and that reminds me a lot of STS books I’ve written about previously.

He also uses this to bring in a critique of Foucault, and what he didn’t get. Foucault talked a lot about biopolitics and how the body becomes political. Han takes this farther into our psychology and mental state. He talks about how we are now anxious and depressed by default because entrepreneurs we are constantly forcing ourselves to work and be productive. This keeps us in our shackles as we seek to be ever more productive and positive. I really liked a passage early on that talks about how life can’t be only positive, you have to have negativity as well or it gets bland.

I think I really needed to read this this morning, I am sure that the above summary is flawed and oversimplifying, but the main ideas were so big and bold that it really gripped me instantly. This really does capture so much of the moment with the focus on productivity and grind mindset. Particularly in my grad school burnout right now, I just needed to hear that this is not a normal way to feel or live, but also that I’m not alone. Even if you aren’t into philosophy, this is only like 80 pages so it’s a quick read and you will find something in these pages.