Neijuan, Involution and the New Disaffected International

Neijuan, or involution, has become something of a buzzword recently. Evolving out of sociological discourse and finding resonance in contemporary Chinese culture, the concept underlines a phenomenon exerting its pressure around the world. The slow stagnation that was first felt in the early 1970s has reached its nadir. Everywhere, the promise of progress – whether it be capitalist or social, or any combination of the two – now rings completely hollow. There’s hardly an area in professional or private life where people don’t get the feeling they are being robbed of the things that used to be quite normal or at least considered somewhat attainable. The world is turning in on itself, becoming increasingly splintered and complex while also hollow and meaningless.

Let’s begin with the basics – the world of work and housing. With the faltering of Keynesian economics and the social state in the “Western world” of the 1970s and the rise of neoliberal economics in the 1980s, the social contract began to be subverted from the top down. There’s no longer any working your way up the ladder, from dishwasher to CEO, rising through the ranks of a company to secure your livelihood and a comfortable life for your family. You won’t be allowed through most doors without the proper qualifications, no matter how dedicated you have been at the company. You need a degree at minimum, quite probably a few years of unpaid internships and connections, before being able to get on that bottom rung of the ladder. I started my first office job in 2000 and remember how one of the mid-managers was celebrating 40 years at the company. At the time, as a young man shaped by various underground scenes, I found this to be endlessly depressing. Funnily, what was once considered the worst curse for some – decades in the same job, a state pension, buying a home – is now a total pipe dream. What good is dedicating yourself to a profession or a craft when there is no certainty that it can, or ever will, sustain you? This story has been told many times before, but it bears repeating. The societal effects of this development, be it on the family unit, birth rates, mental health in general, and now, very obviously, on politics, cannot be ignored. And it’s international. There is no job security, even if one lands a job. Technologies have been changing so rapidly that you are likely to become underqualified for your job within the first decade of your career. It begets the housing crises faced across the Global North.

As technologies replace an increasing amount of jobs and money turns from industry to investment, real estate becomes the preferred international medium of attaining and keeping wealth. Any major city around the world will have dozens of international investment companies with their fingers all over the housing market. As industries pick up and move around the world, they push out the former residents of neighborhoods. The global rich are given the inside intel on where to build and invest and urban landscapes are transfigured without any prior knowledge by those who live there or have lived there for generations. Young people leaving university struggle to find a job, let alone job security, and, as such, will never be able to afford their own home or even standard rent in many cases. That is, unless they inherit it or have the parents to bankroll them. The megacities of our time hold people hostage with the only viable jobs, but keep the people trapped in an endless hamster wheel of making ends meet. Though not necessarily new, the cross-class scope creates a unique desperation and resignation. Quite simply, there are no safe jobs, and there is nowhere to live.

As the title of this essay underlines, this is not just a problem based in the Atlantic-capitalist spheres. A generation of Chinese young adults has understood that, even in a supposedly socialist society, there are no guarantees for steady employment or even health safety. Across the world, it is who you know or how much money your parents can invest to ensure you are allowed to have the basic starting kit for life. You can study as hard as you want, you can become an Olympian and win medals for your country, but there is no guarantee that you or your family will have any kind of long-term security in terms of home and health. The average person represents a cog in the machine of larger players, cogs that can easily be replaced no matter how qualified they are.

What good is a basic university degree in the first place? It’s simply a door to a master's, with the master’s degree being the basis for any mid-level job. If you still can’t find a job, then you can try and get a PhD and hope, just hope, that you might get a foot in the door of academia. Even then, you can hustle and hustle, teaching, hitting your research publication quotas, and still your chances of getting anywhere near a properly paid position are slim – forget about anything resembling tenure. Academia, as with most every other sector, has a top-down problem. Having degrees and attempting to crack open the world of academia as a young student means being met with legions of other, over-accomplished applicants trying to enter the very tightly guarded upper echelons. Academia has also been raked by neoliberal, cost-cutting measures so that fewer people have to do more work for less pay – who can afford to take the time to learn, let alone teach?

What about more “honest” jobs, such as in agriculture or industry? With the dawn of digitalization and now AI, most are being hung out to dry. Whatever level you may be active at, you or the essence of what you would normally have brought to your vocation is being replaced. Farmers are held hostage to corporations, given the choice to either play along or die out. Lease your hardware from a company at their conditions, with no chance of ownership or a right to repair. To maximize the use of your hardware, other companies will lease you their software. You can use the data they have gathered from satellite imagery, weather prognostics, analysis of your land and soil, as well as new AI-powered predictions concerning when to plant and harvest. Opt in and you can maximize land usage, opt out and you will be left behind. This way, you can be held hostage to whatever the real owners see as the best use of their product. There are fewer and fewer jobs where you can bring your actual skills and potential to bear that aren’t defined by a set paradigm determined by technologies completely out of your control. Even the most intellectual of jobs now require you to be nothing more than a steward of the newest technologies and push the right buttons at the right time, a pathetic 21st-century version of slaving away at the massive, crushing machines of the industrial revolution. You are forced to compete or leave. There is no ladder. You are offered a temporary spot, and you either take it or clear out.

In the world of music and the arts, things are no different – we have entered a phase that can be described as the big rip-off. Culture is essentially a playground of the rich or, at the very least, upper-middle class. While they have traditionally been the patrons of the arts, they now constitute the entire ecosystem, from artist to management, and from industry and infrastructure to audience. No one else can afford to take the time in their younger years to hone their craft and hit the milestones needed. Money is essential from the get-go. Everywhere one looks, there are more costs, with simultaneously fewer opportunities to even have a culture of one’s own that doesn’t simply serve as a commodity to some overarching framework existing solely to exploit creative output as “content” through which to sell ad space. Artists are made to do a never-ending song and dance to simply keep people’s attention in the hopes that they will somehow get them to their shows or by their pieces or albums. Meanwhile, the dinosaurs linger, feverishly touring and putting on shows until they collapse dead – all to keep up a meager existence. Streaming, social media, clicks, content, brands and yet there is nothing tangible to show for it. The digital flattening of hierarchies has flowed into the mainstream’s swallowing up of everything, resulting in a mass of artifice being continuously swapped out for the next thing. Culture has become a facsimile of the analog world it once was, a xerox of the human interactions that made it seem so vital in the last century. It sells the same promises, but the extraction of value has gone so far that only the biggest artists in the world are actually able to live from their art. People pour their creative souls into an endless void that sells that art for ad space. It is an imitation that not only doesn’t offer the same community, depth, and validation but extracts value from you and your needs. Now, with the introduction of AI, tech companies seek to even cut out the human element itself so as not to have to pay out the pennies they do now. Film, music, art, and human means for self-expression that have existed for tens of thousands of years are seen as fast-food content with which to phase out the human element of storytelling and simply churn out more vehicles to grease the wheels of this vapid, dystopian culture.

The feeling of being ripped permeates every last corner, with all the world’s favorite pastimes also being degraded to investment opportunities. Sports clubs and teams with long histories stretching back into the 19th century, many with ties to the working class neighborhoods they are based in, are paraded around the world for TV rights and international investors to come on-board and build new stadiums, buy big players, drain every last bit of culture from these institutions until they start making losses or lose interest. After that, you get sold to the next bidder or left to rot. Traditions are gutted, and their hollow carcasses are dressed up to cash in. Every stadium and arena’s new, weird, branded name, whatever Saudi Arabia’s latest push to sportswash their image is, international sporting associations’ complete disregard for fans – they all signal the fact that no one even bothers to pretend this isn’t just a big cash-in. They simply do not care what you think. Sure, host a World Cup in Qatar or Saudia Arabia, build massive stadiums on the premise of little more than investment opportunity and count the cost, not only in money but in the literal hundreds of dead who died building these temporary, multi-million-dollar backdrops and did so at slave wages. Squeeze every penny out of the fans and anyone else who’s halfway interested in a sport. If necessary, pretend to care about human rights, but always bend the knee to money and throw out whatever isn’t useful anymore. All pretense is out the window; shut up and enjoy – i.e., pay – or get out.

All this content, all these games, all this information is served up to us on devices that are designed to die out so that we immediately must go buy more. The same companies that (at least used to) espouse their meaningful and green intentions use what is essentially slave labor to produce their products. Those devices then get thrown in the trash and shipped around the world, populating landfills, and serving as our millennia-long inheritance to the generations following us. All our machinery is software-based, and it is all on lease to us. We can no longer fix or repair the goods we own. There is no fixing a car, a TV, your phone, or whatever device you may have thought you were happy with. No, it will be made redundant whether you love it the way it is or not. You are not allowed to fix these things; you have to take them to the authorized dealer (who themselves are completely dependent on the corporation). People go out and buy the newest phone, order from cheaper and cheaper delivery sites, all the while knowing that these things come at a cost – not just financial, but ecological and ethical. We are caught in an endless cycle of being duped, ripped off, and comforted with tales of doing good while everything we do exploits more people and damages more environments around the world. It is a permanent lose-lose situation.

What do we all have to show for this embarrassment of riches? The stuttering of progress, or global capitalism, has created a new International of the disaffected. Around the globe and across the political spectrum, people feel the same sentiment of frustration. We have been duped. The question of if it had to end like this is moot; it has. The mask is off, the rug has been pulled, and no one cares to keep up the charade.Whether it’s the ruling party or parties, this world is (again, truly) only for those with money and the power to exert influence. The rest of us live a life on lease. We can watch from the outside and cheer on the exploits of the anointed few, but never once think you are meant to be a part of the main attraction (or anywhere near it, for that matter). Of course, none of this is really that new, except that it is! This level of not caring that we can all see behind the curtain, that everyone knows the emperor is not wearing any clothes, only comes along every couple of hundred years or so. It is because all these varying sectors of work and society are simultaneously experiencing the same thing that this is truly something else. Across the political spectrum, across generations, across political divides, there is a huge untapped potential for change in this new International of the disaffected.