ABSTRACT
One of the major problems Marx described in nineteenth-century large-scale industry concerned the physical exhaustion of workers in the factory. Workers were frequently unable to keep up with the accelerating pace of the new machinery. Given that there was an extensive ‘reserve army’ of unemployed workers, capitalists had no incentive to humanise working conditions. Using the writings of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, I argue that an analogous problem emerges in platform capitalism with regard to mental exhaustion. Gig apps like Uber and Deliveroo demand workers’ constant attention for new tasks, but disregard the human need for rest. As in the nineteenth century, the abundance of new potential workers discourages companies from investing in more humanly sustainable working conditions. The end result of this overburdening of the human mind is the current depletion of human potentiality visible in mental health issues like burnouts and depression.
