The Internalization of Authority, Freedom, and Progress

Amazon laid off 16,000 people in early 2026. Meta released almost 10,000. Over 130,000 tech workers lost their jobs this year alone, which was a 33% jump from last year. The layoffs en masse sent many into despair. The day AI began replacing workers had finally arrived. But for others, these layoffs offered an unusual source of hope. Suddenly everyone had a Substack about leaving their job to "build." The solopreneur, the founder, the one-person startup billionaire armed with Claude and their OpenClaw minions and a Stripe account. People shared their excitement about the future upon regaining their flexibility, ownership, and freedom. So, is this progress? Has the advancement of AI actually lent us more freedom?

The Enlightenment view holds that history tends toward freedom, that history is progressive. We are, on net, more free than our ancestors. On the surface, this claim is easily substantiated. AI destabilizes incumbent authority, democratizes access, hands you the means to make things that used to require a team of experts. The worker becomes their own employer, while previous authority is dispersed and dissolved. Yet crucially, authority didn't disappear. The employee-turned-solopreneur became their own employer. Authority migrated from external entities (i.e. the old employer) to the individual. What looks like freedom, really, is self-government. The individual is now both the employee and the employer. But is self-government equivalent to freedom? Put differently, does self-government produce more freedom, or less?

My claim is that history is not progressing toward freedom but toward the perfection of self-government, which the Enlightenment mistook for freedom. Marx, Foucault, and Freud each catch this mistake at a different layer. While none of them deny that something has indeed improved, all of them deny that what improved is freedom. What improved is our capacity to internalize authority, to do unto ourselves what was once done unto us, with greater efficiency and less friction than any external entity ever managed to.

In a Marxist world, the serf becomes a worker. They sign a contract and the lord retreats, and freedom is, at last, reclaimed. But the contract is not the absence of authority; it is in fact the arrangement of an asymmetric social relation. The same way the serf was disciplined by the lord, the worker is disciplined by the need to eat. "He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic," Marx writes, "and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood." (Marx-Engels Reader, W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 160) The market disciplines the worker, and does so more thoroughly than any individual lord could, because the market is ubiquitous and constant.

In fact, the workers discipline themselves more harshly than the boss would. They work unpaid overtime, answer the email at dinner, and internalize the "whipping" if they missed a deadline. Marx puts it bluntly: "It takes centuries ere the 'free' labourer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e., is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for work, for the price of the necessaries of life." (Marx-Engels Reader, W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 376) For centuries, people have been trained to volunteer their lives to work. His proposed solution is to structurally end the asymmetric social relation and abolish private property in the means of production. But suppose they were, that factories and corporations are nationalized. Would the discipline disappear?

Foucault suggests otherwise. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault implies that the discipline isn't only economic, but is distributed across institutions that have nothing to do with the factory or the corporation. The school, the clinic, the exam, the prison each produce "docile bodies" — bodies "that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved." (Discipline & Punish, Vintage Books, pp. 136) Notably, the disciplinary power doesn't repress and forbid people so much as produce willing subjects. It hands out rewards for being disciplined: good grades, promotions, the dean's list, the LinkedIn endorsement. You don't resist what you've been taught to want because you're rewarded for wanting it.

Foucault famously uses the metaphor of the Panopticon, a guard tower in the center of a prison. The panopticon enforces self-surveillance: since the prisoner can't see whether anyone is watching, they watch themselves. The prisoner "inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection." (Discipline & Punish, Vintage Books, pp. 203) The design effectively renders the presence of the guard optional, and eventually unnecessary. The prisoner internalizes the Panopticon and resorts to self-surveillance. Disciplined subjects are, according to Foucault, simultaneously more productive and easier to control (docile). "Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)." (Discipline & Punish, Vintage Books, pp. 138) The prisoner/worker believes they are choosing to be more productive. They are choosing it, in the sense that nobody is forcing the choice, and that is precisely why the choice is so efficient. It is cheaper to manage people who think they are managing themselves. Hence, nationalizing the factories does not institutionally eliminate the Panopticon; its members learn to discipline themselves, even in the absence of a visible governor. So dismantle the institutions. If institutions create docile bodies, can docile bodies exist without institutions?

In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud affirms this belief. The institutions simply formalized a social relationship that emerged when the first humans agreed to live together at all. To live with others an individual must renounce some quantity of instinct, especially aggression. The aggression, however, does not and can not disappear, hence gets redirected inward. "Civilization, therefore, obtains the mastery over the dangerous love of aggression in individuals by enfeebling and disarming it and setting up an institution within their minds to keep watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city." (Civilization and Discontents, W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 85) The super-ego renders external surveillance redundant. One no longer obeys the law because one fears the police. One obeys it because the law has taken residence inside one, tormenting one with guilt for even wanting to break it. "At this point the dread of discovery ceases to operate and also once for all any difference between doing evil and wishing to do it, since nothing is hidden from the superego, not even thoughts." (Civilization and Discontents, W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 87) Even if the subject can outrun external authority, they cannot outrun their own conscience. The subject becomes their own prosecutor. "The super-ego torments the sinful ego with the same feelings of dread and watches for opportunities whereby the outer world can be made to punish it." (Civilization and Discontents, W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 87) Even without capitalism and the panopticon (the institutions), the surveiller remains, because it arose as a precondition for civilization to take place.

The three thinkers diverge on the root cause. Marx points to a structural deficit, while Foucault points to institutions and Freud points to the human psyche. Unlike the other two thinkers, Freud suggests there is no real solution without an option outside of civilization, because civilization is the price of conscience and conscience is the cost of living together. Under the disagreement, though, there is a shared consensus. All three thinkers implicitly agree that authority migrated inward from the external entity to the individual, and that this is not freedom. Those three views are descriptive of the same phenomenon albeit at different layers. Marx describes the economic layer. Foucault, the institutional layer and Freud, the psychic layer. Each layer can show progress while the layer beneath it intensifies. The Enlightenment view erroneously assumed that the gains at the surface could propagate downward, when they often inverted.

The average factory worker in 1810 put in 14-hour days for subsistence wages with minimal days off and safety laws. The average white-collar worker in 2026 works only 40 hours a week, benefiting from workplace protections, paid leave policies, the right to quit, anti-discrimination law, even health benefits. By the liberal standard the economic layer has noticeably, materially improved. But while the 1850 worker was disciplined crudely and externally inside the factory walls, the 2026 worker is disciplined more thoroughly and invisibly, beyond the office. The additional hours that the 2026 worker gained are spent studying for the GRE, grinding Leetcode problems (a mandatory assessment used in tech interviews), enrolling in part-time MBA courses, sitting for the CFA, completing recertification exams, etc. The physical factory walls dissolved as it is no longer the singular institution that disciplines the worker, but the institutional layer has intensified. The workers now discipline and effectively institutionalize themselves, without any external authority compelling them to do so. Foucault would also add that the visible reforms (e.g. workplace democracy, HR, wellness programs) are not efforts to dismantle the Panopticon, but are efforts to further reinforce it. After all, HR is just a friendlier panopticon. What appears to be progress at the economic layer may not be progress at the layer beneath.

At the psychic layer, the suffering has intensified. The 1850 worker suffered but the suffering had a nameable source, the boss. The 2026 worker also suffers (from anxiety, depression, chronic burnout, and the diffuse dread about the future) but the suffering now has no apparent external source. The authority that now disciplines the worker is the super-ego, the internalized Panopticon that monitors and punishes the psyche. Had the source been easy to name, the industries of psychiatry and therapy would not have grown as they have. The relentless pursuit of economic growth and progress has produced a "burnout economy" where individuals feel an immense pressure to maximize productivity and income, having internalized this imperative and now prosecuting themselves for any failure to do so. The super-ego has enlarged in place of the external boss. Notably, material wealth did not translate into better well-being, but into lower levels of reported happiness, as national surveys indicate.

(This very essay, in fact, is performing exactly what Foucault points out. The dutiful, disciplined student producing the critique of self-discipline for grades.)

AI in 2026 is emblematic of a phenomenon in which economic progress can occur in the absence of progress at the lower layers, if not regression entirely. The creators of AI (namely, Elon Musk) have often promised that AI will liberate workers from monotonous work, to the point of saying that work itself will eventually become optional as everyone gains access to Universal High Income. Even if such a claim materializes, the gains may appear seductive on the surface, while obscuring important tradeoffs beneath. At the Marx layer, the surplus extracted from displaced and now more productive labor accrues largely to the owners of the models, the compute, the product, not to the workers themselves. At the Foucault layer, the AI doesn't only replace but also monitors the worker. Workplaces increasingly adopt AI-powered productivity dashboards and keystroke analytics, constructing a perpetual panopticon for the workers to monitor their own productivity. The workers now use AI to surveil themselves. Finally at the Freud layer, the cultural super-ego adapts in turn, pushing the self to remain irreplaceable, to upskill constantly, to become AI-fluent. The failure to keep pace produces guilt, while the effort to keep pace produces more anxiety.

It is true the self-governing subject is genuinely more productive and more capable of complex executions. Science, democracy, the market and the modern university all require subjects who internalize discipline rather than receive it externally. What improved was governability that no longer requires a governor. The cost is a form of suffering that pre-progress systems did not produce. The modern worker is nominally free but suffers in a way that rarely existed before. When given more freedom, the responsibilization of failure forces the individual to attribute the failure to nobody other than themselves.

The Enlightenment correctly identifies a tendency toward progress in history. The mistake was assuming progress at one layer would propagate to the others. AI will produce economic growth and free a lot of people from a lot of work. The freedom it has bestowed upon the market is undeniably real. Workers can build things they couldn't before, escape institutions they couldn't escape before, run companies they couldn't dream of before. At the surface, productivity and output have risen. But below the surface, self-discipline and self-surveillance have intensified. History is progressing toward the perfection of self-government, not freedom. And it's getting harder, not easier, to tell the difference between the two.