The Alienation of the Modern Worker and the Creative Soul

A look at creative struggles, and the hope for a world away from social media and AI. Maybe it's time to fully walk away from it.

Karl Marx by Jack Smyth for The NYT

In the ever-shifting tides of modern labor, a quiet estrangement unfolds, a tale as old as Industry itself but today, it is now infused with the stark and cold luminescence of artificial intelligence and the pseudo-intimacy of remote work. The worker, once tethered to tools of craft, now communes with algorithms and pixels. For the modern creative, this alienation is sharper still; a dissonance birthed not from the brute mechanics of a factory floor but from the subtler exile from meaning, identity, and self-expression.

We’ll go through a few examples of works both old and new, in which their themes echo our modern pains. Firstly, Marx’s ¹Communist Manifesto which was first published in 1848 foresaw this estrangement, envisioning a world where the worker becomes alien to their labor, estranged from the fruits of their toil and disconnected from the essence of their humanity. In today’s creative industries, this alienation is not solely economic; it’s deeply existential. Where the painter once faced a canvas, they now face a screen that serves both as a tool of creation and a reminder of the omnipresent Market (a system that alienates people and benefits a select few).

Writers now craft stories, not for themselves or posterity, but for algorithms hunger for keywords and engagement metrics. Musicians compose, haunted by streaming platforms that value quantity over artistry, or more specifically, haunted by the demand for 20 seconds of a catchy bridge or chorus over a less than creative thematic melodic plot.

The pandemic years intensified this estrangement for some of us. Working from home or abroad, creatives navigated a digital purgatory and some still do. Freed from the physical office, they find themselves imprisoned in the echo chambers of Slack notifications, endless emails, and Zoom/Google Meet fatigue. Their craft, once a source of joy and identity, is now filtered through the sterile mediations of technology. The act of creation is no longer personal but fractured, endlessly iterated; stripped of intimacy.

Yet, it is not merely the tools of creation that alienate; it is the disconnection from the self. AI-driven productivity tools suggest ideas before the creative can even conceptualize, undermining the fragile but essential spark of originality. This shift, while subtle, represents a profound disempowerment, an outsourcing of thought itself. The creative becomes merely a curator of AI’s suggestions; a custodian of algorithms’ capabilities, rather than an originator of human vision. This process hollows the creative worker, leaving them estranged not only from their labor but also from their own identity as artists.

From Alienation to the Spectacle of Creation

To navigate this alienation, one must confront the modern spectacle of creativity—a spectacle shaped by the ceaseless churn of social media and the crushing weight of comparison. As Guy Debord articulated in ²The Society of the Spectacle, modern life is mediated by images, where lived experience is replaced by representations. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the creative fields, where social platforms transform art into commodities and creators into brands.

Scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, or Pinterest, the modern artist is inundated with the echoes of what has already been done. Inspiration becomes indistinguishable from mimicry, and the creative soul, drowning in a sea of comparisons, loses its voice. Rick Rubin, a sage of modern creativity, warns against this trap in his book The ³Creative Act: A Way of Being. Creativity, he argues, must arise from disconnection—from a deliberate withdrawal from the noise and a return to the raw, unmediated essence of self-expression.

This is not without some consideration; from his seat at a Lisbon café, Fernando Pessoa would gaze tremulously at life unfolding beyond the glass, his thoughts, a labyrinth of fragmented selves (he often wrote in the voice of characters, thus separating his thoughts into others to embody his outcries). The poet of disquiet found both solace and torment in this act of watching, caught between the inertia of his inner world and the pulsating reality of the streets. For Pessoa, the café was both sanctuary and prison—a place where he could detach from life yet feel its texture, if only faintly. His act of looking, both intimate and detached, encapsulates the creative’s paradox: to live on the margins of an experience, deeply observant yet profoundly estranged. This liminal space, between participation and withdrawal, remains the wellspring of a unique and melancholic creativity. Additionally, Virginia Woolf, in her seminal essay ⁴A Room of One’s Own, famously argued for the need for material and psychological space to nurture creativity. Woolf understood the interplay of solitude and freedom as essential to the artistic process, particularly for women who were historically denied both.

In the spectacle of online culture, tradition morphs into a feedback loop. Artists no longer honour the lineage of their craft as an evolving dialogue but instead imitate its most marketable iterations. The canon of creativity is reduced to trends, ephemeral and disposable. The act of scrolling, endlessly consuming visual and auditory echoes, replaces the act of living. This is what I’m getting at. This is the true alienation of the modern creative—not the separation from labor, but the separation from life itself.

When you take a photo of a coffee, the coffee has probably already been finished, before the image appears online. The viewer consumes a past experience two fold, and is pulled into a sense of longing. We are constantly living in representation. We drink the past.

The creative, in this landscape, becomes a voyeur of existence rather than its participant. They lose touch with the raw material of creativity: the ineffable, unscripted beauty of living. By grouping themselves into the spectacle, they forsake the authenticity of their voice. They become, as Debord warned, spectators of a world mediated through screens, unable to grasp the immediacy and transformative power of real experience.

What drew me into this particular section of Debord’s writings is that this was written in the 60s. When he says screens, he means any medium that displays images and information, but boy was he accurate.

Matthew Delarue, Sartre’s ambivalent anti-hero in ⁵The Age of Reason, offers a poignant mirror to the modern creative’s plight. His desperate quest for freedom, untethered from responsibility or external expectations, echoes the alienation felt by today’s artists. Delarue's refusal to commit—to relationships, ideologies, or even his own sense of purpose—reflects the paralysis that stems from the endless choices and comparisons of our modern world. Just as Delarue finds himself trapped by his own pursuit of liberation in the 1950s, creatives today, overwhelmed by the cacophony of digital life and AI’s imitative creativity, often lose the ability to act authentically. The struggle to reclaim agency in one’s art, is in many ways, a reenactment of Delarue’s existential battle for meaning.

A Recalibration of the Self

As last year and this January continue to wane on us, there is a call to retreat—a quiet beckoning to turn inward, away from the screens and the metrics, the likes and the comments. This time of the year continues to offer a natural pause, a moment to recalibrate, to dismantle the scaffolding of alienation, and to rediscover the foundation of our creative selves.

This recalibration demands a hibernation of sorts. Not a withdrawal born of despair, but one of intent. It is a time to silence the external noise and to step away from the spectacle, and to confront the blank page, the empty canvas, or the silent instrument without the weight of comparison. It is a time to reclaim creativity as a sacred act, one unmediated by algorithms or audiences.

Belief systems must be reshaped during this hibernation. The modern creative must find faith not in the metrics of success but faith in the authenticity of their voice. They must turn their gaze inward, not outward, seeking inspiration not in the scroll but in the stillness. The world, lived and unfiltered, as much as we hate it or like it, becomes the source material for our art—a world where inspiration is drawn from the textures of reality, not the curated perfection of the digital. To live creatively, as Rubin suggests, is to embrace imperfection, to honour the process over the product, and to see art not as a commodity but as a reflection of one’s being.

Conclusion

In the face of AI, remote work, and the spectacle of social media, modern creatives face profound challenges of alienation. Yet, within these challenges lies the opportunity to reclaim our craft, identity, and humanity. By stepping away from the screens and toward the authentic, we can rediscover the joy of creation, unburdened by metrics and trends.

It is a time to recalibrate, to embrace a creative hibernation that nourishes the soul and reignites the spark of originality. In doing so, we can move into this new year not as alienated workers or spectators, but as true artists—rooted in our own belief systems, living authentically, and creating fearlessly.

1. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. Translated by Helen Macfarlane, Penguin Classics, 2002.

2. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, 1994.

3. Rubin, Rick. The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Random House, 2023.

4. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Harcourt, 1929.

5. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard, Vintage International, 2007.

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