Keynes always comes back.

Like those old English gentlemen who have technically been dead for forty years yet still appear in colonial clubs in Singapore, sitting beneath slow ceiling fans, discussing civilisation while the world outside rots beautifully in the heat.

Every now and then some Western newspaper digs him up again. This time it was Corriere della Sera. The old story: technology was supposed to liberate us from work. Three hours a day. Maybe four. More time to read Proust, listen to Bach, make slow love to people we truly loved, grow roses, become complete human beings.

Instead, here we are.

Tired.
Neurotic.
Sedated by caffeine, algorithmic pornography and notifications.
More productive than ever and, somehow, more miserable than ever.

The article essentially argues this: technological progress did happen, but capitalism devoured the free time it created. Every gain in productivity became new pressure, new work, new anxiety.

It is an explanation.
Very European.
Very moral.

Completely wrong.

Because the dirtier truth is another one entirely: technology did not fail at all. Technology is working magnificently. So magnificently, in fact, that it is beginning to make millions of human beings economically superfluous.

What Keynes failed to understand was that industrial capitalism and digital capitalism are not the same creature. Fordist industry needed the masses. Workers, clerks, middle classes, reasonably intelligent but stable people. In the twentieth century even a mediocre man could still have a house, a family, a social dignity. You merely had to arrive on time, drink moderately during the week and avoid arguing with the foreman.

Today, no.

Today the global economic system rewards tiny differences in intelligence, discipline and adaptability with almost obscene disproportion. A single brilliant, sleepless, slightly damaged individual assisted by AI can now produce as much as an entire small office could in 2004.

And he does it without a lunch break.

Contemporary technology does not distribute value.
It concentrates it.

Once, machines amplified collective strength. Now they amplify the individual strength of those who are already strong.

Everybody else falls behind.

And the better technology becomes, the wider the gap grows.

This is the part that truly terrifies Western elites, even as they pretend to discuss “work-life balance” on LinkedIn while drinking twelve-dollar green juices.

Because the question is no longer economic.

It is anthropological.

Two humanities are already beginning, slowly, to separate.

On one side:

• people capable of long concentration,
• rapid learning,
• emotional control,
• psychological resilience.

On the other:

• human beings destroyed by permanent distraction,
• infantilised adults,
• people incapable of reading more than three paragraphs,
• addicts to digital micro-dopamine,
• people convinced that “creating content” means lip-syncing in front of TikTok.

And the truly cruel part is that the market does not judge morally.

It simply selects.

The Western left still speaks as if we were trapped inside Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin — the poor worker crushed by the gears of industry. But contemporary capitalism does not merely crush. It eliminates. Quietly. Through irrelevance.

Entire professions are becoming administrative theatre kept alive only because nobody has yet found the political courage to admit it.

Useless meetings.
Project managers managing other project managers.
People forwarding emails to other people producing PDFs nobody will ever read.

Then suddenly a sleepless twenty-seven-year-old in Bangkok — half autistic, fuelled by nicotine and ChatGPT — arrives and, within forty-eight hours, produces:

• reports,
• analysis,
• code,
• translations,
• presentations,
• images,
• strategies.

Alone.

And this is where Keynes’ promise collapses.

Because Keynes imagined that once liberated from necessity, mankind would choose culture. Contemplation. Inner growth.

But one only needs to observe what people actually do with free time.

They scroll.

They scroll like addicts searching for cocaine inside a slot machine.

The West once dreamed of Athens.
It produced Las Vegas and Xanax.

European subways are astonishing if one possesses historical memory. Once you saw newspapers, books, silence, even boredom. Today millions of illuminated faces endlessly consume videos of people screaming, cooking, arguing, dancing, exposing themselves, reacting to other videos of people screaming.

Technological surplus did not produce wisdom.
It produced noise.

Meanwhile competition has become planetary. This too was something Keynes could never fully imagine. In his world there were still relatively protected national economies. Today a professional in Milan competes indirectly with:

• a coder in Shenzhen,
• a designer in Ho Chi Minh City,
• a Russian mathematician exiled in Belgrade,
• an Indian engineer working sixteen hours a day,
• or directly with an AI model.

So productivity increases, yes.

But every increase is immediately devoured by global competition.

If a software tool saves you two hours, you do not work two hours less. The system simply demands greater output.

Faster.
Cheaper.
More continuous.

Always.

And the final paradox is almost comic.

Keynes’ civilisation would theoretically be possible today. We possess enough technology, enough automation, enough accumulated wealth.

But it would require mature human beings.

Contemporary capitalism, instead, seems to produce precisely the opposite:

• infantilised adults,
• shattered attention spans,
• permanent addictions,
• fragile identities,
• inability to remain alone,
• inability to remain silent,
• inability to think.

So we continue telling ourselves that “technology betrayed us.”

No.

Technology is doing exactly what it was always meant to do:

amplify.

The real problem is what it finds standing in front of it when it amplifies contemporary man.

Translated with artificial assistance and human paranoia.