Ana Teixeira Pinto ~ Asocial Contract
The classic social contract assumed wage-labor as the primary distribution mechanism for productivity gains. The political enfranchisement of non-property owners followed because their labor became systemically critical; postwar stability was, in large part, mass employment subsidizing mass consumption. But this was a contingent historical compromise. Deindustrialization rendered the industrial bargain obsolete; financialization untethered value from labor. The promise of AI is to free capital from dependency on human labor —not merely to undercompensate workers but to make large swaths of them structurally redundant. It breaks complex roles into commoditized micro-tasks; fragmented, remote, and platform-mediated work frustrates collective action while enabling algorithmic management and real-time productivity scoring. New jobs, when they appear, demand skills displaced workers lack. The horizon of middle-class life—college degree, entry-level job, steady promotion, retirement—was already fraying; AI may sever it entirely.
Waged labor is also the mechanism that converts a citizen’s time into state revenue. Sever the wage, and the state faces a fiscal crisis, prompting it to redefine citizenship around asset-ownership. The resulting class relation is at odds with the reproduction of the social contract. Hence the ongoing assault on political and civil rights: if capital no longer needs to sustain a workforce, political concessions are no longer warranted, and there is no rationale for maintaining the citizen’s legible role within the national narrative. Without incentives to sustain their populations in a political community, states will renegotiate the terms of membership. This means suspending the rights they had previously granted—and this is the stage we are now in. This talk will examine its logic of redundancy.
About: Ana Teixeira Pinto
Asocial Contract will be presented on the 3rd of October in the context of
APRiCot Garden 2026: If Not Here, Then Where? Making Our Home in Shared Struggle
