One should complicate even further the picture here: it is not just that the privatized commons is the space within which exchange and communication takes place—the ideal counterpart of neo-feudal privatized commons are precarious workers who can experience themselves as free entrepreneurs since they as a rule own their own means of production (the PC of a programmer, the car of an Uber driver …). Precarious workers, although still a minority, are gradually becoming the specific case of work which confers its colour on the entire field of work—they are today workers kat’ exochen. Precarious work has a double advantage for the predominant ideology: it allows you to experience yourself as an independent small capitalist selling your work freely, not a wage slave, plus since you compete with other precarious workers it makes organizing solidarity between precarious workers very difficult. So the ideal we are approaching today is a multitude of precarious workers interacting in a commons controlled by a neofeudal lord. The mystification is thus complete: workers are free entrepreneurs, and their feudal lord is just providing the social space for their “free” activity.

The pessimistic conclusion that imposes itself is that even stronger shocks and crises will be needed to awaken us. Neoliberal capitalism is already dying, so the forthcoming battle will not be the one between neoliberalism and its beyond but the one between two forms of this beyond: corporate neo-feudalism which promises protective bubbles against the threats (like Zuckerberg’s “metaverse”), bubbles in which we can continue to dream, and the rude awakening which will compel us to invent new forms of solidarity. How should the existing state be transformed in order to serve these new forms?

Slavoj ŽiŽek, Freedom : A Disease Without Cure