If we want to resist the system we live in, we first have to understand how it works.
As Yanis Varoufakis points out, Facebook is worth billions because people work for it for free. Every post you upload to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and the rest adds to their cloud‑based capital. You create the value; they pocket the profit.
This enormous accumulation of capital is possible because, in an age when everything and everyone is financialized, one domain remains unprotected and unpaid: citizens’ free time. It has become an open hunting ground for extracting unpaid labor. Sometimes this labor is voluntary; other times it’s mandatory, enforced by rules, procedures, and laws.
Many companies — and even government offices and institutions — have already built this free reservoir into their business models or are rushing to update them in that direction. Wherever possible, they replace paid working hours with citizens’ free time. But no one exploits it as efficiently and shamelessly as the big tech oligarchs. Their business model outperforms all others for one simple reason: they have replaced paid labor time with unpaid leisure time.
But this temporal resource is not a bottomless well. Citizens have less and less free time.What remains barely covers their most basic needs, leaving them in a growing state of time scarcity. People wonder where their free time has gone — yet the answer is clear: it has been siphoned off and converted into someone else’s capital.
I am convinced that there is a direct causal link between democracy and citizens’ free time. The consequences of unrestrained exploitation of that time are devastating for the functioning of the state and for democracy itself. As citizens lose time, they lose the ability to participate in decisions about how society and the state are governed. This makes them increasingly vulnerable to exploitation.
That is why I believe that within the current system, citizens’ time must be financially valued. Only then can we protect people from time scarcity and restore the temporal space necessary for democratic processes. Because this exploitation — and the erosion of democracy that comes with it — will continue as long as citizens’ free time remains free for others to take.
Alenka Sottler
