Technological Slavery

Friedrich Georg Jünger wrote in 1946 that technology "plugs man in" — not as user but as component, hooked to circuits managed from a central office. Eighty years later, Pasquinelli arrives at the same junction from the opposite direction: against Turing's prediction, "it was the master, not the worker, that the robot came to replace first." The concept of technological slavery has always been framed as machines doing what humans used to do. But the deeper enslavement is structural — when the means of labour become identical to the means of its measurement, as Pasquinelli notes, you don't need a human overseer because the tool *is* the overseer. Srnicek and Williams want to accelerate past this by demanding full automation, but Jünger's 1946 insight haunts their project: the state that promotes technology to increase its power finds that technology has hollowed out the state itself, replacing governance with automatism. The chain runs: hand tool shaped to the body → machine that fragments the worker → platform that fragments the manager → infrastructure that fragments the state. Each link promises liberation. Each delivers a more elegant harness.