When Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, he built his analysis on a simple truth: labor is the foundation of capitalism. It is through labor that value is created. The worker produces goods, the capitalist extracts profit, and wages are the minimal share returned to the worker for survival. The entire capitalist machine runs on this equation.
But in the 21st century, the foundation has shifted. Labor is no longer the sole engine of value. The new raw material is life itself—our digital traces, our clicks, our likes, our searches, our photos, our texts.
Life as the New Labor
Every time a person googles a recipe, posts a photo of their cat, or “likes” a friend’s video, they are producing value. Not consciously, not as work, but as residual life turned into data.
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Platforms transform this life-data into profit: targeted ads, machine learning models, predictive analytics, product design.
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Billions of users create this data “for free”, unaware of the wealth it generates.
If labor was the blood of capitalism, life is the oxygen of post-capitalism.
The Winners: Platforms and a Few Stars
In this system, who benefits?
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Tech giants: Google, Meta, TikTok, OnlyFans — they monetize billions of micro-actions. Their profits reach hundreds of billions of dollars.
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A tiny minority of users: bloggers, influencers, OnlyFans creators — those who master the art of turning digital life into spectacle. They are held up as examples of “success,” proof that anyone can win if they just try hard enough.
But in reality, this is a lottery. For every millionaire influencer, there are millions of invisible users whose life-data fuels the system without reward.
The Losers: The Digital Masses
The vast majority of digital citizens receive nothing.
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No dividend for their searches.
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No share of profit from their endless scrolls.
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No ownership of the algorithms trained on their faces, voices, and histories.
They live in the illusion of free services — while in fact they are the unpaid workers of the post-capitalist economy.
The Question of Redistribution
If life itself is the foundation of value, then justice demands redistribution of the profits it generates. But here lies the deadlock:
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Tech giants will not voluntarily share.
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They will always point to exceptions — the famous YouTuber, the viral TikTok star, the successful OnlyFans model — as proof that the system is “open to all.”
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Yet these stories are propaganda. They conceal the truth that billions produce value invisibly and receive nothing in return.
Toward a Digital Capital
Marx revealed that labor was exploited under capitalism. Today, we must confront a harsher reality: life itself is exploited under post-capitalism. Our existence is raw material, our attention the commodity, our desires the market.
The platforms will insist: “Look at the influencers — you could be one too.” But we must see through the illusion. The problem is not individual success; it is collective dispossession.
The true revolutionary question of the 21st century is:
If life itself creates value, who owns value added of the life?
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