When you are always, at least potentially, being watched, any form of self-expression is also a sort of betrayal, a card player’s tell. With ubiquitous visual surveillance, we will surely retreat inside ourselves, into the realm of the unexpressed, Emily Dickinson’s “profounder site” of privacy, the “soul admitted to itself.” While the language is spiritual, it describes a state that secular people also recognize. We have an expectation that, before we go forth into the social world, we can occupy a private interior space for experimentation and contemplation, a space free of the judgment of others. This interior space is by its very nature utopian and transgressive. On it we rest our ideas about freedom, choice and moral responsibility.

For a generation or so, we have been fantasizing about the possibility of becoming posthuman. What would our own evolution look like? What are we becoming? When we think of our successors, we lazily imagine sovereign individuals who are somehow more powerful than ourselves, whose sense of themselves is more intense, more luxurious. The superman, the Extropian genius, the next wave. But we are making a world where such a possibility seems increasingly remote, at least for the majority. Perhaps augmented powers and an expansive interiority will be achievable for a small elite, to those who will be able to pay for privacy. Most people will find themselves living more muted, circumscribed lives.

If our sense of self looks likely to be transformed by the erosion of privacy, it is also under pressure from the erosion of the social world of work and the human identities that come with it. Automation is about to destroy the livelihoods of many kinds of worker, from taxi driver to investment banker. It is encroaching on many of the domains of the “human,” those of expertise, craft and even art, and taste. Low payroll costs mean higher profits, and private companies have no obligation to ensure full participation in the labor market.

The advent of that much-heralded thing, the Leisure Society, looks less like a seven-day party weekend than large-scale human warehousing. We define ourselves through our social roles. We are socialized to be useful, to participate, to maintain a state of high productivity. Our politicians, eager to reduce the cost of providing a social security, grind into us the notion that idleness is a great sin. But for many, idleness will be enforced, and along with it the shame of being watched and treated as sinners. For as citizens excluded from economic life, the idle are always the most disruptive and have historically been subject to the most intense surveillance.

Posthumanity is too grandiose a term for what is on the horizon. This is about power, and an economic reorganization that is driving wealth upward, not a species evolving toward some sort of Borg-like network form. A nostalgic yearning for the halcyon days of humanity may allow us to strike melancholic poses, but it will do little to halt the vast processes that are driving these changes. Instead we need to imagine a kind of politics that still assigns a value to private life and new forms of belonging that do not revolve around work.