Marcuse Today: Repression vis-à-vis Sublimation in the Age of AI

Welcome to the explainer. Today we’re going to use some surprisingly old ideas, like really old, to tackle a problem that’s probably sitting in your pocket right at this very moment. All right, let’s just dive right in. Have you ever been scrolling and scrolling and you finally close the app and you just feel completely exhausted, drained by the very thing that’s supposed to give you infinite choice and connection? Well, you are not alone. And what if I told you that feeling that digital burnout isn’t an accident? What if it’s actually part of the design?

So this is what we’re calling the freedom trap. And that feeling of digital burnout, it actually has a name. A brilliant philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, he called it the performance principle. It’s this sneaky creeping feeling that all our supposed freedom has somehow morphed into an obligation. An obligation to constantly perform. What Marcuse was getting at is this. We’re all under this really unique kind of pressure now. It’s not just about being productive at your job, you know, from 9 to 5. No, no. It’s that nagging feeling that even your free time, your hobbies, your vacation has to be optimized, has to be documented, posted, and performed for some kind of invisible audience. Sound familiar?

And here’s the truly wild part. Marcuse saw all of this coming more than 50 years ago, decades before anyone had even dreamed of a social media feed. He had this amazing term for it, democratic unfreedom. Think about that. It’s the paradox of our time, isn’t it? We have more choices than any other generation in history, but somehow we feel less free. So, let’s trace his thinking because it’s going to show us exactly how we walked into this trap.

Okay, but before we get to the trap, we have to understand the dream. Because this whole situation, this exhaustion was born from something incredible, something almost utopian, a dream of a world with absolutely no limits. And you can literally watch this dream build over 100 years. It all kicks off back in 1848. You’ve got Marx and Engels and they’re almost mesmerized by capitalism’s raw power to just well to melt all that is solid into air as they put it, to just dissolve every old tradition. Flash forward to 1955. Marcuse picks up that thread. He starts imagining this future where we have less work and way more free play. And then boom, 1968. It’s not an idea anymore. It explodes onto the streets. A whole generation is chanting slogans trying to make this dream a reality. And this right here, this is maybe the most famous slogan from that moment in Paris. Beneath the paving stones, the beach. It’s such a perfect image, right? It captures the feeling completely. The idea that just under the hard, gray, repressive surface of everyday life, there’s this world of freedom, of authenticity, of play just waiting for us to break through and find it.

So, at the core of this whole dream was this huge bet that Marcuse was making. He called it non-repressive sublimation, which sounds complicated, but the idea is actually pretty simple. He looked around and saw technology getting so powerful. He thought, “Hey, maybe maybe we don’t need to force ourselves to work all the time just to survive anymore. We could finally unleash all that human creative energy, what Freud would call the libido, and channel it into art and craft and play instead of just repressing it for the sake of forced labor.”

So that was the dream, an amazing dream of freedom. What happened? Where did it go wrong? Well, something went very wrong, a kind of great reversal. And what’s fascinating and kind of tragic is that both Marx and Marcuse lived long enough to see it happen. They watched as the very things that were supposed to set us free were twisted and turned into new kinds of cages. And this is it. This is the flip, the absolute core of that reversal. The dream, remember, was nonrepressive sublimation, freeing our desires from the machine of endless work. The trap is what Marcuse later called repressive desublimation. It’s where our so-called liberated desires, our passions, our hobbies, our identities are immediately captured and used as fuel for that exact same machine of working and consuming. The script got completely flipped.

Marx himself saw this happening. You know, you read his early stuff, The Communist Manifesto, and it’s all fire and revolutionary energy. But a couple of decades later, he’s a bit more sober. He realized that this incredible capitalist dynamism he talked about was also creating a powerful illusion. He called it commodity fetishism. It’s this bizarre state where we start to see the world as relationships between things, products, brands, prices, and we completely forget. We become blind to the fact that behind every single one of those things is a massive web of human relationships, of human labor. The system itself hides the people who make it run. And Marcuse decades later saw the exact same trick playing out in our culture. Society looked like it was getting freer, right? You had rock and roll, rebellious fashion, all these new ways to express yourself. But Marcuse said, “Wait a minute. This is an illusion. This is that repressive desublimation. The system is brilliant. It lets you feel like a rebel as long as you buy the right jeans or listen to the right music. It takes your genuine desire for opposition, packages it up, and sells it right back to you as a lifestyle choice. Your dissent becomes just another brand. And the result is what he called a happy consciousness where we’re so busy choosing between different brands of rebellion that we forget what real freedom even looks like.”

Which brings us right here to the present day staring into our phones. Because you could argue that the social media timeline is the absolute perfection of this trap. In his big book, One-dimensional Man, Marcuse warned about this, a society without opposition. Now, he wasn’t talking about some brutal dictatorship where dissent gets you thrown in jail. No, he was talking about something way more subtle. A world where opposition isn’t crushed. It’s just absorbed. It’s flattened out and made invisible in the smooth, pleasant, neverending flow of information. It’s not that you’re forbidden to shout your outrage. It’s just that your shout becomes one more tile in the infinite grid, just another piece of content.

And the endless scroll, man, it’s the perfect engine to make that happen. It gives you the feeling of total choice, but it’s a choice without an exit. There’s always something new, right? Constant novelty. But there’s no room for real, meaningful opposition. The whole architecture is designed to do one thing, to wear down your ability to do the most human thing of all, to just say no and stop. It’s actually kind of chilling when you take Marcuse’s old philosophical terms and map them onto today’s tech. That compulsive doom scrolling we all do. He had a term for that, surplus repression. The constant demand for engagement. That’s a textbook case of repressive desublimation. It’s our desire for connection perfectly captured and put to work for the system. Everything from the deceptive design tricks that keep you clicking to the notification rhythms that are literally borrowed from casino slot machines. It all serves one purpose to close down our universe of thought, not open it up.

Okay, so that’s the trap. It’s pretty bleak. Is there any way out? Well, the philosophy here suggests a really provocative, totally counterintuitive solution. What if the answer isn’t to fight the machine? What if it’s to let the machine play the stupid game for us?

Yeah, I know this quote from the philosopher Slavoj Zizek is a lot. It sounds like a crazy joke, but hidden inside this wild image is a genuinely profound idea. Forget the uh specific devices here. His point is about outsourcing the pressure. The pressure to perform, the pressure to enjoy, the pressure to feel. Instead of that constant crushing obligation to be creative, to be engaged, to be living your best life all the damn time, what if you could just hand that job over to a machine and go have a cup of tea?

So, what does that actually look like in practice? Okay, step one, we outsource the endless churn. Let generative AI create the infinite content, the infinite styles. Let it handle the noise. Step two, and this is absolutely critical, we build the word no directly into the machine. We give it limits, an ethical backbone, the ability to refuse. And when we do that, we get to step three. We get to be human again. We’re freed up to do the things machines can’t. To use our judgment, to care for each other, and to exercise that ultimate power, the power to just stop.

And listen, this is not science fiction. This isn’t some dream for the future. It’s happening right now. There’s a real approach called constitutional AI, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s about training an AI on a set of core principles, a constitution, so it can learn to refuse harmful or manipulative requests. We are literally right now figuring out how to code the word no into our technology. And if you think about it, this brings us full circle all the way back to Marx’s original dream. He talked about a realm of freedom that could only begin when the labor determined by necessity finally ends. And maybe, just maybe, by automating not just the factory work he was thinking of, but the exhausting mental and performative labor of our digital lives, we could finally step into that realm. A place where our time is truly our own because the machine is handling all the draining endless noise.

So that’s what it all comes down to. The big takeaway here is that escaping the freedom trap, it’s not about you having more willpower. It’s not about another digital detox. Frankly, those are just band-aids. Real lasting freedom is a design choice. It’s a decision we have to make about what kind of world we want to build. The question isn’t if we can design technology that actually serves human freedom anymore. We can. The real question is will we or will we just keep scrolling?