Contrary to the expectations of the Italian autonomist theorists—who foresaw the coming of emancipatory futuristic feudalism, with its cognitive workers reclaiming the means of production while watching capitalists lose their collective grip on value extraction—the capitalists did not disappear. They just took a brief sabbatical to invent subtler forms of Taylorism. Steve Jobs promised us computers as “bicycles for the mind”; what we got instead are assembly lines for the spirit.

Evgeny Morozov