Living in Late-Stage Capitalism
There’s this moment that keeps happening to me, and I suspect it happens to you too. You’re scrolling through your phone…let’s be honest, you’re always scrolling through your phone…and you see an advert for something you mentioned in passing to your partner three hours ago. Not searched for. Not typed. Just… said. Out loud. In your own home.
And here’s the thing: you don’t even feel shocked anymore. You just think, “Right, yeah, of course they’re listening,” and you carry on scrolling.
That’s what living in late-stage capitalism feels like to me. It’s the slow death of surprise. The gradual erosion of the belief that things could be different. It’s when the dystopia becomes so mundane that you stop calling it dystopia and start calling it Tuesday.
What Even Is Late-Stage Capitalism?
Before we go any further, let me acknowledge that “late-stage capitalism” is one of those phrases that makes certain people’s eyes glaze over immediately. It sounds like something a university student in a Che Guevara t-shirt would say whilst rolling a cigarette they can’t actually smoke properly. I get it.
But stick with me, because whether you like the term or not, you’re living in it. We all are.
Late-stage capitalism isn’t really about capitalism being on its deathbed, despite what the name suggests. It’s more about capitalism having run out of new territories to conquer, new markets to create, new boundaries to respect. It’s capitalism after it’s eaten everything else and started eating itself.
It’s when every single aspect of human existence…and I mean every single one…has been turned into an opportunity for profit extraction. Your sleep (there’s an app for that). Your grief (here’s a funeral financing package). Your loneliness (subscription-based dating, anyone?). Your anxiety about all of the above (wellness industry, step right up).
Nothing is sacred. Nothing is left alone. Everything must grow, compound, scale, disrupt.
The Airbnb-ification of Everything
Remember when Airbnb was just a way to rent someone’s spare room when you were travelling? Quaint, wasn’t it? Almost communal. Share economy and all that bollocks.
Now, entire city centres have been hollowed out, local housing markets destroyed, and neighbourhoods turned into revolving doors of tourists whilst actual residents get priced out of places their families have lived for generations. But hey, a few people made their mortgage payments easier, and some Silicon Valley investors got quite rich, so… worth it?
This is the pattern, isn’t it? A thing starts with a veneer of community-mindedness, of sharing, of making life better. Then it gets financialised. Then it gets scaled. Then it gets weaponised. Then it gets monopolised. Then it’s just another extraction mechanism, and we all pretend we don’t remember when it was different.
Uber did it to taxi drivers. Deliveroo did it to restaurants. Amazon did it to… well, everything, really. They call it disruption. What they mean is: “We’ve found a way to pay people less and make customers pay more whilst we take a cut of every transaction forever.”
The tech bros call this innovation. I call it enclosure. It’s the digital equivalent of what happened when common land got fenced off and given to wealthy landowners. Except now it’s happening to every aspect of our lives, and we’re all nodding along because the app interface is quite slick.
The Subscription Model for Your Entire Existence
Here’s where it gets properly depressing: they’ve worked out that they don’t even need to sell you things anymore. They can just… rent you access to existence, forever.
Your software? Subscription. Your music? Subscription. Your films? Subscription. Your car? Increasingly, subscription. Your heated car seats? BMW tried to make that a subscription until people got angry enough. Your smartphone apps? Subscriptions within subscriptions within subscriptions.
And the genius…evil genius, but genius nonetheless…is that you never own anything anymore. You just pay forever. It’s the opposite of buying something once and having it be yours. It’s like renting furniture for your entire life instead of just buying a sofa.
I worked it out once, actually sat down with a spreadsheet like a proper masochist, and calculated how much I spend per month on subscriptions. It was… let’s just say it was more than my first salary out of university. And I’m not even including the obvious ones like rent (which is just a subscription to shelter, when you think about it) or utilities (subscription to not freezing) or food (subscription to not starving).
The brilliant bit, from their perspective, is that each individual subscription seems reasonable. Seven quid here, twelve quid there. You barely notice. It’s only when you add them all up that you realise you’re paying a second rent just to access the basic tools and entertainment of modern life.
And you can’t cancel them, not really. Because they’ve made sure that all your photos are in their cloud, all your documents in their ecosystem, all your playlists on their platform. Leaving would mean rebuilding your entire digital life. So you stay. And you keep paying.
It’s feudalism with better graphic design.
The Monetisation of Nothing
There’s this thing that happens now where people turn hobbies into “side hustles.” Actually, let me rephrase that: there’s this thing that happens now where people feel guilty for having hobbies that don’t make money.
You can’t just enjoy painting. You should have an Etsy shop. You can’t just play guitar in your bedroom. You should be building your YouTube channel. You can’t just write in your journal. You should be monetising your newsletter on Substack.
Everything must be productive. Everything must scale. Everything must contribute to your personal brand.
I’ve watched it happen to people I know. Someone who loved baking started an Instagram account for their cakes. Within six months, they hated baking. The joy was gone, replaced by engagement metrics and the constant pressure to post content. They’d turned something they loved into an unpaid second job that they somehow felt obligated to maintain.
This is what late-stage capitalism does to joy. It looks at something humans do purely for pleasure or meaning, and it thinks: “But how could we extract value from that?”
And we’ve internalised it so deeply that we do it to ourselves now. We don’t need a boss telling us to monetise our hobbies; we feel inadequate if we don’t. We’ve become our own middle managers, optimising our free time for productivity.
Rest has become a guilt-laden activity. Doing nothing feels like failure. Being unproductive is shameful.
I had a friend recently tell me, unironically, that they’d “wasted” their Sunday reading a novel. A novel! One of humanity’s great cultural achievements! Wasted! Because they could have been… what? Building their personal brand? Networking? Optimising?
We’re so colonised by the logic of capital that we can’t even relax without feeling like we’re losing some invisible race.
The Wellness Industrial Complex (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Buy the Yoga Mat)
Right, let’s talk about wellness, because this is where late-stage capitalism gets really insidious.
We live in a system that makes us sick. Literally, physically sick. Stress, burnout, anxiety, depression, terrible diets, no time for exercise, no time for sleep, no time for actual human connection that isn’t mediated by a screen. The system grinds us down, and then…
It sells us wellness.
Yoga classes. Meditation apps. Supplements. Green juice. Mindfulness courses. Self-care Sundays. Gratitude journals. Crystal healing. Sound baths. Whatever the hell “adaptogens” are.
And look, I’m not saying these things don’t help. Some of them do. Yoga is lovely. Meditation is genuinely beneficial. Sleep is important. Exercise matters.
But here’s the con: the wellness industry takes systemic problems…the fact that we’re all working too hard for too little, that we’re lonely, that we’re disconnected from nature and community, that we’re living under constant economic precarity…and it reframes them as individual problems that you can solve by consuming the right products.
Stressed about your job? Don’t unionise, don’t fight for better conditions, don’t question why you’re expected to answer emails at 10 pm. Just buy this lavender pillow spray. Sixty quid, please.
Anxious about the future? Don’t engage in collective action, don’t demand systemic change. Just download this meditation app. Only eight pounds a month.
Exhausted all the time? Don’t examine the fact that you’re doing the work of three people for the salary of 0.7 people. Just take these supplements. Forty quid for a month’s supply.
The wellness industry has annual revenues in the trillions now. Trillions. We’re so sick from capitalism that we’re paying capitalism to feel slightly less sick from capitalism.
It’s elegant, really. Diabolical, but elegant.
The Loneliness Economy
Here’s something that keeps me up at night: we’re lonelier than humans have ever been, and capitalism has worked out how to profit from that too.
We’re sold on connection through screens. Community through platforms. Friendship through apps. Love through swipes.
And it sort of works, doesn’t it? Just enough to keep you coming back. You get little dopamine hits. Little moments of validation. Little bursts of feeling seen. But somehow you end up feeling more isolated than before.
There’s always this sense that real connection is happening somewhere else. Real community is on a different platform. Real friendship is… well, somewhere. Just not here. Not now. Not with these people.
So you keep scrolling. Keep swiping. Keep posting. Keep consuming connection-flavoured products that leave you feeling emptier than before.
The platforms have gamified human relationships. They’ve turned social interaction into metrics. Friends become followers. Conversations become engagement. Intimacy becomes content.
And the really sinister bit is that they’ve designed it to be just unsatisfying enough that you keep coming back for more, but never satisfying enough that you actually feel fulfilled. It’s the psychological equivalent of those crisps that are scientifically engineered to never quite hit the spot so you keep eating the whole packet.
Meanwhile, third spaces…the places where people used to just… exist together without having to buy anything…have been disappearing. Public libraries with reduced funding. Parks with locked gates. Community centres sold to developers. Even pubs, the great British institution of just being around other humans, are closing at a rate of dozens per week.
Everything that’s left costs money to access. Coffee shops where you’re expected to buy something if you sit for too long. Gyms. Co-working spaces. Even walking groups often require membership fees now.
You can’t just be anymore. You can only be whilst consuming.
The Algorithm Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself (And That Should Terrify You)
Let’s go back to that phone listening thing I mentioned at the start.
The really unsettling part isn’t that they’re listening. It’s that they don’t even need to anymore. The algorithm knows you so well that it can predict what you want before you want it.
It knows you’re pregnant before you’ve told anyone because of your search patterns. It knows you’re getting divorced before you’ve filed papers because of the songs you’re listening to. It knows you’re depressed because of how long you scroll at 2 am.
And this information…the most intimate details of your inner life, your fears, your desires, your weaknesses…is being sold. To advertisers, yes. But also to insurance companies. To potential employers. To data brokers you’ve never heard of who sell it on to other data brokers you’ve never heard of.
Your data is being turned into profit by companies you’ve never interacted with, building a profile of you that’s more comprehensive than anything you could write about yourself, and you have almost no control over it.
And the maddening thing is: we agreed to this. Somewhere in a terms-of-service agreement you didn’t read because it was forty-seven pages of legal jargon, you signed away your cognitive freedom.
You’re not the customer anymore. You’re the product. Your attention is what’s being sold. Your behaviour is what’s being modified. Your choices are being nudged in directions that increase shareholder value.
And it’s so normalised now that pointing it out makes you sound paranoid. Like, yes, obviously, the app is tracking your location at all times and selling that information to whoever wants it. What are you, some kind of Luddite?
The Gig Economy (Or: Congratulations, You’re All Precarious Now)
Remember job security? Remember pensions? Remember sick pay, holiday pay, the basic assumption that if you worked hard, you’d be looked after?
Yeah, capitalism doesn’t do that anymore.
Now you’re a “contractor.” An “independent operator.” An “entrepreneur.” Which is a fancy way of saying: you have all the responsibilities of employment with none of the protections.
You drive for Uber, but you’re not an Uber employee, so when you get sick, tough. You deliver for Deliveroo, but you’re not a Deliveroo employee, so when it’s raining and dangerous, you can just… not work. And not eat. Your choice!
The gig economy took the most exploitative aspects of Victorian-era piece work, dressed it up in an app, called it freedom, and convinced millions of people that this was actually a good thing.
“Be your own boss!” they said. What they meant was: “Experience all the stress of running a business with all the powerlessness of being an employee.”
And it’s spreading. It’s not just delivery drivers and taxi drivers anymore. Its designers, writers, consultants, accountants, even doctors and lawyers, in some cases. The professional classes looked at what was happening to working-class jobs and thought, “Well, that won’t happen to us,” and then it did.
Everyone’s precarious now. Everyone’s hustling. Everyone’s one bad month away from financial disaster.
The social contract…you work hard, you get stability…is dead. And we’re all pretending it isn’t because the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.
The Impossibility of Ethical Consumption
Here’s where I start sounding properly depressing: you cannot shop your way out of this.
You can’t buy the right coffee (fair trade, organic, locally roasted) to fix global supply chains. You can’t buy the right clothes (sustainable, ethical, carbon-neutral) to fix the fashion industry. You can’t buy the right phone (there is no ethical phone) to fix Big Tech.
The system is too big, too complex, too interconnected. Your individual consumer choices, whilst perhaps making you feel slightly better, are functionally irrelevant to the structural problems.
And the really insidious bit is that capitalism has convinced us that consumerism is activism. That buying things is how you express your values. That personal responsibility trumps collective action.
Can’t afford ethical consumption? Well, that’s your problem. Should have worked harder. Should have made better choices. Should have been born into more money.
It’s a brilliant con, really. They’ve privatised morality. Turned ethics into a luxury good. Made virtue something you purchase rather than something you practice.
And it means that the people with the most power to change things…the corporations, the billionaires, the actual decision-makers…face no real pressure to change anything. Because we’re all too busy agonising over whether our chocolate is sufficiently ethical and our trainers sufficiently sustainable.
Meanwhile, a hundred companies are responsible for seventy-one percent of global emissions, but sure, I’ll use a paper straw. That’ll fix it.
The Death of Leisure
I think one of the most overlooked aspects of late-stage capitalism is what it’s done to our concept of time.
Our great-grandparents fought for the eight-hour workday. Three eights: eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for leisure. It seemed reasonable. It seemed achievable.
Now? Now you’re always working. Even when you’re not working, you’re working. The emails don’t stop at 5 pm. The Slack messages keep coming. The work follows you home because work is on your phone, and your phone is always with you.
And if you’re not working at your job, you should be working on yourself. Optimising. Improving. Learning a new skill. Building your network. Maintaining your personal brand.
Rest is for the weak. Leisure is lazy. Free time is just time you’re not monetising.
I read somewhere that medieval peasants had more leisure time than modern workers. Medieval peasants! The people we’re taught to think of as living in constant toil and misery had more time off than us!
They had saints’ days. Festivals. Seasons where work simply couldn’t be done. Community celebrations. Time to just… be.
What do we have? Two weeks off a year if we’re lucky, during which we’re expected to stay connected to email “just in case.” Bank holidays that feel like time stolen from productivity. Weekends that are really just time to prepare for Monday.
We’ve constructed a society where doing nothing feels impossible. Where rest requires justification. Where you have to be productive even in your free time.
And we wonder why everyone’s burnt out.
So What Now?
Here’s where you’re expecting me to offer solutions, aren’t you? Five easy steps to overthrow capitalism. Three simple tricks to fix everything.
I don’t have them.
I don’t have a manifesto. I don’t have a political programme. I barely understand how any of this works, and I suspect the people running it don’t either. They’re just doing what they were told to do (make the number go up) without thinking too hard about the consequences.
But I do think there are things we can do. Small things. Insufficient things. But things nonetheless.
We can remember that we’re not just consumers. We’re citizens. We’re neighbours. We’re humans with worth that isn’t determined by our productivity or our bank balance.
We can resist the monetisation of every aspect of existence. We can have hobbies that don’t make money. We can create things that aren’t content. We can rest without feeling guilty.
We can build communities that aren’t mediated by platforms. We can have conversations that aren’t performed for an audience. We can be present with each other in ways that can’t be quantified or sold.
We can demand better. From our employers. From our politicians. From the systems that govern our lives. We can unionise. We can organise. We can remember that collective action is how workers got every right we have.
We can stop believing that our problems are personal failures when they’re actually systemic dysfunctions. That our stress, our exhaustion, our loneliness aren’t individual pathologies but rational responses to an irrational system.
And we can talk about it. We can name what’s happening. We can refuse to accept that this is just how things are, how things have always been, how things must be.
Because it isn’t. And it doesn’t have to be.
The End (Or: There Isn’t One, Really)
Late-stage capitalism is exhausting. Living in it. Thinking about it. Writing about it. Trying to imagine alternatives whilst being so thoroughly immersed in it that you can barely conceive of anything else.
It’s like being born on a moving train and being told this isn’t a train, this is just how the ground works. And then trying to explain to people that no, actually, we’re on a train, and maybe we should think about where it’s going.
Most days, I don’t have hope that things will change. Most days, it feels like we’re locked into this until it all collapses under its own contradictions or the planet becomes uninhabitable. Most days, I’m just trying to get through.
But some days… some days I remember that systems that seem permanent have fallen before. That things that seemed impossible have happened. That humans are capable of imagining different ways of being and then making them real.
Some days I have hope. Not much. But some.
And on those days, I think: maybe we don’t have to live like this. Maybe there’s another way. Maybe we could build something better.
Maybe the train has brakes after all.
Maybe we just need to remember how to pull them.
Until Next Time
Discover more from Dominus Owen Markham
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.