Thanks to a recent New York Times exposé of work conditions at Amazon, the world now knows that the e-commerce giant’s ability to quickly and easily deliver an expansive list of items comes with a side of white-collar worker misery.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Over the past few years, there have been many investigations into Amazon’s warehouses’ grim labor conditions. Because of advanced monitoring technology, surveillance of warehouse workers is omnipresent; every movement is tracked and optimized. Every second is monetized, and accruing mere minutes of “unproductive” activity is an offense (or “time theft,” as Walmart, which operates similarly, calls these infractions) that must be weeded out.

These organizational structures, corporate cultures and surveillance systems are essentially technologies of exploitation. Amazon is not the only company putting them to use, but it has been a pioneer in instituting them widely, thoroughly and lucratively. We are surrounded by technologies that reinforce (at least) three features of modern capitalism: competition ethic, labor control and profit accumulation. They pull us into exploitative environments that have become standard, almost expected and at times unnoticed.

Labor control has always played an important role in capitalist economies. It’s not just about monitoring and managing the workforce but also about creating a certain type of worker. Exploitative technologies mold employees into the kind of worker that capitalism thrives on — productive, docile and exhausted. Docile workers are obedient and submit themselves to the company; they either internalize their roles in the system or play along, because it’s harder not to.

Exhausted workers are unlikely to dissent. They have neither the time nor the energy to, say, organize for change. And if they burn out, there’s a replenishing pool of fresh labor.

The drive to maximize profits has led to a quest for ingenious (and inhumane) ways to monetize everything. Whether it is the managerial organization and competitive culture of office workers or the surveillance systems and demanding push of warehouse employees, these technologies of exploitation are primed for slashing costs and wringing cents wherever possible.

Sounds dehumanizing, doesn’t it? It is! Yet executives, journalists and boosters routinely manage to frame these technologies as somehow emancipatory. The companies that implement them promise to make participants part of something bigger, better, more useful. Our success is your success, as they say. This is the price of winning and innovating. The harder you work, the more you will be.

This ultra-capitalist ethos sells us an existential story: Your wages are more than just the paycheck, they’re the self-fulfillment of buying in, integrating into the system and becoming more than a worker. “This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” Susan Harker, Amazon’s top recruiter, told The New York Times. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people, it doesn’t work.”

Taking over the world requires extracting the most from the available human resources. Only the “peculiar,” as Amazon calls them, are fit to survive this “purposeful Darwinism” and become a real contributor to the company mission. And if you don’t like it, you can choose not to work there.