--- title: "Man has ceased to be necessary: ​​from the man who produces to the man who receives" date: 2026-05-17 description: "Automation, guaranteed income, digital dependency. An analysis of how the modern world transforms the citizen into a kept person — without noise, without barricades." author: "Petru Cojocaru" categories: - name: "Science and civilization" url: "https://cojocarupetru.info/science-innovation-and-civilization.md" --- # Man has ceased to be necessary: ​​from the man who produces to the man who receives It is not a spectacular passage. It has no martyrs, no barricades, no smouldering ruins. What it leaves behind, instead, are flats occupied by tenants who will never become owners, bank accounts without physical cash, music without records, films without cassettes, work without long-term contracts — an existence in which almost nothing truly belongs to the person living it. > The most enduring chains are not those a man feels at his wrists, but those he comes to call ”safe”. **When man ceased to be necessary — the slow birth of a world in which survival becomes a granted privilege** [![Man has ceased to be necessary: ​​from the man who produces to the man who receives](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/Dezvoltare-personala/safe.jpg "Man has ceased to be necessary: ​​from the man who produces to the man who receives")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=352:man-has-ceased-to-be-necessary&catid=37:science-innovation-and-civilization&lang=en-GB&Itemid=501)There are historical transformations that contemporaries only recognise after they have already occurred. The Industrial Revolution did not arrive one morning to the beat of drums and notices posted on walls. It came in through the back door — in the workshop of a blacksmith in Birmingham who noticed he was receiving fewer orders, in the hands of a weaver in Lancashire who had lost his clientele without anyone ever telling him why. The truly decisive changes do not arrive announced; they arrive disguised as convenience. The West today looks, on the surface, like a victory. The shops are full. Deliveries arrive in twenty minutes. Screens pulse in every flat, every pocket, every waiting room. A man from 1950, had he been able to peer through a window at this world, would have believed he was witnessing the prosperity Marx had written about, without the conflicts Marx had predicted. And yet, beneath this illuminated, connected surface, there unfolds — quietly and methodically — one of the most profound transformations of the human condition in the past several centuries: the passage from man as producer to man as recipient. --- ## Comfort as Destiny ### The weary man readily accepts being kept The veterans of the Second World War came home with a single dream: stability. A house, a job, a neighbour to share a pint with on a Friday evening. They built the middle classes of the Western world not from political theory, but from trauma transformed into personal project. They wanted something that would last. Something to leave behind. Something that could not be taken back with a click. Their descendants live differently. They no longer seek stability — many have already abandoned the idea that it exists. They seek, instead, managed security: a job that guarantees they will not fall entirely, a digital system that delivers food and entertainment, a platform that confirms they exist and that they matter. Their exhaustion is real. It is not the laziness of those who refuse to work; it is the weariness of those who have worked hard and discovered that work no longer guarantees anything their parents were guaranteed. In such a climate, the promise of a guaranteed income acquires an almost religious force. It no longer presents itself as economic policy, but as absolution. As proof that the system, however cold it has become, will not abandon you entirely. And a man who fears he no longer has a place in the economy is willing to accept almost any form of protection that promises he will not be cast out of the world. History has a sombre lesson to offer about this willingness. Consider the Soviet collective farms of the nineteen-thirties. They did not function through pure terror — terror was already sufficient, but not sufficiently efficient. They functioned because they offered something concrete to the starving man: a roof, a ration, the certainty that tomorrow there would still be something. The price was the freedom to leave, to refuse, to be otherwise. But the starving man does not calculate abstract prices. He calculates the odds of survival. The world today is not a collective farm. But the question history poses remains: what happens when the support received from a structure you cannot control becomes your only safety net? When your survival depends on a transfer, and the transfer depends on a digital system, you no longer ask how much you receive. You ask who decides the conditions under which you are permitted to receive. People often confuse the absence of violence with freedom. But dependence has no need of a whip. Continuity is sufficient. It is sufficient for a man to know, somewhere deep within, that he can no longer afford to be entirely disobedient. --- ## Economic Transformation ### When man ceases to be necessary On the 4th of May, 1886, in Haymarket Square in Chicago, a group of workers gathered to protest against the twelve-hour working day. Someone threw a bomb. The police opened fire. People died. All of it, for eight hours of work a day. Forty years later, Ford was paying its workers better than any other employer in the industry — not out of generosity, but because Henry Ford had understood that his workers needed to be able to afford the cars they were building. This connection — capital needs labour, labour needs wages, wages sustain consumption, consumption sustains capital — structured an entire century of negotiations, conflicts, and compromises. Trade unions held power not because they had good ideas, but because they had something essential: indispensable bodies in the factory. They won because they could stop production. Artificial intelligence and automation break this logic precisely where it was most solid. They do not merely replace hands — they replace the mind organised into repeatable tasks. Writing, analysis, accountancy, design, translation, preliminary diagnosis, logistics, programming, administration. What had seemed reserved for human judgement becomes, step by step, a technical process. And a company that can function with far fewer people, that can sell globally without depending on the prosperity of the local community, that sees its profits rising whilst the number of necessary employees falls, no longer participates in the old negotiation. It no longer needs to. The exploited man could still negotiate, because he was necessary. The man rendered superfluous does not negotiate. He waits to be registered, to be supported, to be pacified. This is the great mutation that employment statistics do not capture well. Not all work disappears, and man does not vanish from the economy overnight. But the balance of power shifts. If the system can continue without an ever-greater portion of the population, that population loses the leverage through which it could demand wages, rights, dignity, and genuine participation. The poorest man is not always the one without money, but the one who has been stripped of purpose and given, in its place, maintenance. --- ## Guaranteed Income ### Daily bread and the peace that is purchased In the winter of 1932, the American government distributed food in cities devastated by the Great Depression. People stood in queues stretching several hundred metres in the cold. Nothing was asked of them in return, only that they wait and be present. Many said later that that moment — not poverty itself, but the queue and the dependence on state charity — had marked them more deeply than unemployment. Universal Basic Income can be presented in several ways. As a social right. As a solution to automation. As an instrument for reducing poverty. All of these arguments contain a portion of truth. There is real poverty. There are communities crushed by changes they did not choose. There are people for whom a fixed monthly sum would be the difference between dignity and humiliation. But in a heavily automated economy, controlled by a handful of technological and financial centres, the same income can become something else: the minimum price of social peace. A sum sufficient for people not to revolt, but insufficient to restore their power. Not an open door to dignity, but a well-heated room into which man is invited to sit quietly. Historians who have studied the fall of the Roman Empire observed a phenomenon they described with a phrase that has since become famous: panem et circenses — bread and circuses. It was not a matter of simple corruption. It was a cold calculation: give people enough that they are not hungry and sufficient entertainment that they do not think about what they lack. It worked for several centuries. The difference from our world is that the circus is now infinite and personalised. There is no longer any need to build a Colosseum; it is enough to maintain an algorithm that knows precisely what you like and delivers it without interruption. The problem is not the bread itself. It is not the help given to those in need. The problem arises when bread becomes the principal bond between citizen and order — when man receives not because he participates, creates, works, or negotiates, but because he is included in a scheme of distribution. Such a society may be peaceful. It may even be comfortable. But its peace resembles the quiet of a waiting room more than the life of a free community. --- ## The Invisible Infrastructure ### The power that no longer needs to show itself The East German state security service — the Stasi — employed, in the nineteen-eighties, approximately ninety thousand officers and over one hundred and seventy thousand informers. With all this apparatus, it could not fully control what people thought. It could control what they said in public, what they wrote, with whom they met. But thought remained, for the most part, their own. Contemporary digital power has no need of informers. It has something more precise: recorded behaviour. Every search, every click, every second spent on an image, every route followed on a map. The Stasi took notes; the algorithm understands. And, more importantly, the algorithm does not need to punish you. It is sufficient for it to shape what is shown to you — which news, which products, which perspectives, which version of the world. It no longer needs to ban an idea if it can ensure that idea never reaches enough people. The old censorship cut brutally and left traces. The new censorship cuts nothing. It pushes some things to the fore and allows others to be lost in the darkness of irrelevance. In a world saturated with information, invisibility is often more effective than prohibition. Economic coercion functions according to the same logic. If money, identity, reputation, access to services, and social visibility all pass through digital infrastructures, a man becomes vulnerable without being arrested, beaten, or condemned. He ends up self-censoring not from great fear, but from a small, daily, repeated prudence — until prudence becomes character. A society does not necessarily become unfree when people can no longer speak. Sometimes it becomes unfree when speech no longer changes anything. --- ## The Citizen and the Kept Man ### The distinction we must not be permitted to forget Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst system of government, with the exception of all the others that have been tried. His remark contained a deeper wisdom than it appeared to: democracy functions not because it produces perfect decisions, but because it produces citizens who feel responsible for the decisions taken. The citizen participates, protests, votes, organises. He has a core of power that no top-down distribution can substitute. The citizen is inconvenient. He asks questions. He has memory. He demands accountability. He can refuse. He is not merely a statistical unit, nor merely a consumer with measurable preferences; he possesses, at least in principle, a political dignity. The kept man is something else. He receives. He waits. He fills in forms. He complies with conditions. He checks his eligibility every month. He lives with his eyes on the system, not with the system under his gaze. Even when he is not directly humiliated, something in his interior posture changes. He becomes more cautious, more dependent, more attentive to signals coming from above. The tragedy of the world to come does not lie solely in the fact that people might receive too little. It lies also in the fact that they might receive enough to no longer ask for the essential. A modest dwelling, food, endless entertainment, a functional digital identity — all of these can constitute a tolerable life. But the tolerable is not the same as the free. Apathy is one of the cheapest forms of social order. --- ## Childhood in the World of the Feed ### The man who grows up without patience and without roots In 1944, during Operation Overlord, the American soldiers landing on the beaches of Normandy had an average age of twenty-one. Many had never seen the sea before. Many had never read a map. But they had been educated to endure, to persist, to complete a task even when the body begged to stop. Not because they had been taught a theory of resilience, but because their lives — farm work, school with scarce resources, the discipline of a family in times of crisis — had formed them without explaining that this was what they were doing. The child of today is born directly into the stream of algorithms. For him, the world is no longer first family, street, book, nature, community. The world is screen, recommendation, notification, reaction. Reality does not open slowly, through accumulated experience; it arrives fragmented, colourful, rhythmed by systems that know how to capture attention before he has learnt to govern his own. A civilisation is not lost only when it loses its factories or its armies. It is lost, too, when it can no longer form characters. Patience, memory, inner discipline, respect for work done well — these do not appear spontaneously. They are cultivated. They require time, limits, models, repetition, and a certain rigour of life that a world transforming everything into instant access can no longer provide. The child who grows up in a world where everything arrives ready-delivered, ready-recommended, ready-approved may become the adult who confuses the absence of obstacles with freedom. But a life without obstacles is not necessarily a free life. Sometimes it is merely a carefully guided one. --- ## The Middle Class ### The retreat of the man who had something to defend Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America in 1831, observed something that his American contemporaries could no longer see, because it was all around them: no one was truly wealthy, but almost no one was truly poor. There existed an enormous mass of people with modest houses, small farms, local shops — people who had enough not to depend on anyone, and not so much as to shy away from politics. Tocqueville saw in this the foundation of American democracy: freedom is not born from constitutions, but from property. The middle class was, in its finest form, more than an economic category. It was the space in which the ordinary man could have something to defend: a house, a trade, a small business, a local reputation, a hope for his children. The man who owns something, even a little, regards power differently. When this class thins, it is not only prosperity that is lost. A type of social character is lost. The permanent tenant, the temporary employee, the user dependent on platforms, the man who lives from one payment to the next — he does not have the same interior bearing as the modest property-owner who knows he can stand on his own feet for a while. A society of people without reserves, without property, and without stable trades is a society easily stirred and easily pacified. It can be roused for a day and sedated the next by a new promise of protection. Its roots are not deep enough for a sustained opposition. This is why the slow disappearance of the middle class is not merely an economic problem. It is a political and civilisational one. A world in which most people no longer have anything stable to defend becomes a world in which freedom itself begins to seem abstract. --- ## The Narrowing Window ### Technology is not the enemy — the form of its ownership is It would be a historical error — and one the Luddite movements of the nineteenth century already committed — to make technology a scapegoat. The workers who smashed power looms in 1811 were not foolish. They saw clearly that the machines were destroying their livelihoods. They were wrong about the solution. The machines were not the problem; the order in which the machines were owned was the problem. The same principle applies today. Artificial intelligence can heal, can educate, can liberate time, can help man understand things otherwise inaccessible. The problem is not the power of the instrument, but who owns it and to what end. A technology distributed widely, controlled locally, open and integrated into communities can strengthen man. A technology concentrated in a handful of opaque platforms can weaken man, even whilst making his life more comfortable. The same artificial intelligence that can assist a doctor, a teacher, a small entrepreneur can become, under a different order of ownership, the mechanism through which their work is absorbed, replaced, and transformed into profit concentrated in the hands of a few. Not everything is yet decided. But the direction is being set rapidly, and that which becomes infrastructure becomes, in time, destiny. Once man depends — for money, information, reputation, work, and communication — on systems he cannot control, his freedom remains written in constitutions, but grows thinner in daily life. The chains of the future will not rattle. They will not require full prisons or soldiers on every street corner. They will be soft, efficient, personalised, useful. They will reduce wasted time, anticipate desires, dispel loneliness for a few minutes, and make dependence appear to be care. Precisely for this reason they must be viewed with lucidity. Not in order to reject every change, not to idealise a past that was never as good as it appears from a distance, but to keep alive the question without which man ceases to be a citizen. *Who decides the conditions of our comfort?* --- ## Questions About the Arguments in This Text **1. Has there not always been a class that lives from the support of others? What is new in what you describe?** Dependence on external support is not new. What is new is its scale, its precision, and its invisibility. The mediaeval aristocracy received from serfs, but the serfs knew exactly who was exploiting them and why. The digital citizen of today is caught in a web of dependencies he cannot map: platforms that manage his money, algorithms that filter his information, cloud services that store his memory. The old dependence was local and visible. The new one is global and designed to appear as freedom. **2. Has automation not always created more jobs than it has destroyed? Why would this time be different?** This objection has a respectable history — and a partially justified one. The Industrial Revolution eliminated the trade of the hand-weaver, but created factories with thousands of employees. The computer eliminated typists, but generated an entire IT industry. The difference that economists such as Daron Acemoğlu and Erik Brynjolfsson signal is that artificial intelligence does not replace a category of physical or repetitive tasks; it replaces organised judgement. What was once reserved for a solicitor, a financial analyst, a triage physician, or an investigative journalist becomes, gradually, a technical process. And, for the first time in history, the speed of replacement exceeds the speed of adaptation through retraining. **3. Is Universal Basic Income not, all the same, better than poverty? Why do you present it as a threat?** The text does not present guaranteed income as a threat in itself. It presents it as an instrument of dual nature: it can be a genuine social right or it can be the minimum price of social peace. The difference lies not in the sum, but in the power structure behind it. A guaranteed income administered democratically, transparently, with adjustment mechanisms in which citizens participate, is an entirely different matter from an income granted at the discretion of digital platforms or states that condition payment on the digital behaviour of the recipient. The problem is not the bread; it is who holds the key to the larder. **4. Are you not exaggerating? People in Western democracies can vote, protest, change governments. Where is the lack of freedom?** Formal freedom — the right to vote, freedom of expression, judicial independence — remains largely intact in liberal democracies. The text's argument concerns a different dimension: substantive freedom, that is, the real power to conduct one's life independently. A man who depends for housing on a rental market controlled by a handful of large institutional landlords, for information on three or four platforms, for work on digital ecosystems in which he can be deactivated without real recourse, and for communication on services that monitor his behaviour — this man may be free in the constitution and captive in practice. Tocqueville called this situation 'soft tyranny': it does not prohibit you; it renders you irrelevant if you become inconvenient. **5. Are children today not, in fact, better educated and more connected to information than any previous generation?** Access to information and the capacity to process it are different things. A man with a vast library, but without the patience to read a sentence to its end, is not better educated than one with a single book he has read ten times. Research in cognitive neuroscience — from Maryanne Wolf's studies of the reading brain to OECD reports on the decline of long-text comprehension among adolescents — documents a real change: the capacity for sustained attention, deep reading, and reasoning in complex chains diminishes in direct correlation with fragmented digital consumption. Not because of the children, but because of the deliberate architecture of platforms that win them through fragmentation rather than depth. **6. Are small business owners, freelancers, and digital entrepreneurs not proof that the middle class is reinventing itself?** Partly, yes. There is a digital entrepreneurial class that prospers. But to confuse the apex of a pyramid with its base is a statistical error. For every content creator earning a decent living from platforms, there are several hundred earning below subsistence level. For every start-up that succeeds, there is a pit of burned capital. And digital entrepreneurs who appear independent are, in reality, tenants of infrastructure: if Amazon, Google, or Apple decide to modify their algorithm or suspend their account, the business disappears overnight — without notice, without real recourse, without compensation. Their independence is real, but fragile and conditional. **7. The Stasi and totalitarianism are excessive comparisons for today's digital democracies. Are you not trivialising history?** The comparison with the Stasi is not one of identity, but of mechanism. The text does not suggest that we are living in East Germany. It suggests that the power of surveillance — once reserved for totalitarian state apparatuses — has migrated into private hands and has integrated itself so deeply into everyday convenience that it no longer appears as surveillance. If the Stasi could have offered East German citizens a smartphone with which to order pizza, watch television series, and speak with friends, in exchange for complete monitoring of conversations and movements, it is a legitimate question how many would have refused. That, precisely, is the difference — and precisely that is the problem. **8. What solution do you propose? The text diagnoses but does not prescribe.** The text is deliberately non-prescriptive, not from lack of position, but out of respect for the complexity of the problem. False solutions — a return to a pre-digital economy, the rejection of technology, the nationalisation of platforms — are as dangerous as the problem itself. What the text implicitly suggests is that the right question precedes any solution: who owns the infrastructure upon which daily life depends? The distribution of technological ownership, the regulation of access to data, the reconstruction of local institutions and of the middle class are not spectacular solutions. They are slow, difficult, and tedious processes — which is precisely why they do not appear in political discourse, which prefers swift promises. **9. Does man not, all the same, have more practical freedom today than in any other age? I can travel freely, communicate globally, access knowledge from any corner of the world.** Yes — and this is the reality that makes the argument difficult to sustain in brief conversations. The freedoms of movement, of expression, and of access to knowledge are, in absolute terms, greater than ever before. The problem is not the comparison with the past; it is the trajectory. If ten years ago you could use the internet without an account, today you are, practically speaking, invisible without one. If ten years ago you could pay in cash anywhere, today some essential services refuse banknotes. If ten years ago you could exist professionally without LinkedIn or a verifiable digital presence, today in many industries you cannot. Direction matters more than current position. **10. Why should I read this text if I am not an economist, a philosopher, or a politician? What does it have to do with me?** It has to do with you because the transformation described does not take place in the abstract realm of grand politics. It takes place in the decision to rent rather than buy, because ownership has become inaccessible. It takes place when your child can no longer sit for ten minutes with a book without growing restless. It takes place when you realise that, if internet banking disappeared tomorrow, you would not know how to pay your bills. It takes place when you notice that your entire professional life depends on the existence of an account on a platform you do not control. Great historical transformations do not announce themselves with speeches. They come in through the back door, in the details of the day after tomorrow. --- ## Online Bibliography Academic, journalistic, and economic analysis sources consulted in the research and preparation of this article. **Automation, artificial intelligence, and the labour market** Brynjolfsson, E. & McAfee, A. — *The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies* — W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. Summary and context: [MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy](https://ide.mit.edu/insights/the-second-machine-age/) Acemoğlu, D. & Restrepo, P. — *Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets* — Journal of Political Economy, 2020. Available: [NBER Working Paper](https://www.nber.org/papers/w23285) Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research — *The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth* — 2023. Summary: [Goldman Sachs](https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/generative-ai-could-raise-global-gdp-by-7-percent.html) McKinsey Global Institute — *Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation* — 2017. Available: [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/jobs-lost-jobs-gained-what-the-future-of-work-will-mean-for-jobs-skills-and-wages) **Universal Basic Income** Tan, K. H. et al. — *Universal Basic Income in the Age of Automation: A Critical Exploration and Policy Framework* — 2025. Available: [ResearchGate](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391803859_Universal_Basic_Income_in_the_Age_of_Automation_A_Critical_Exploration_and_Policy_Framework) LSE Business Review — *Universal Basic Income as a New Social Contract for the Age of AI* — April 2025. Available: [LSE](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2025/04/29/universal-basic-income-as-a-new-social-contract-for-the-age-of-ai-1/) PubMed Central / NIH — *AI, Universal Basic Income, and Power: Symbolic Violence in the Tech Elite's Narrative* — 2025. Available: [NCBI](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11891208/) Stanford Basic Income Lab — systematic research on UBI experiments worldwide: [Stanford](https://basicincome.stanford.edu/) **Surveillance capitalism and digital power** Zuboff, S. — *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power* — PublicAffairs, 2019. Full reference: [Harvard Business School](https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791) Zuboff, S. — *Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization* — Journal of Information Technology, 2015. Available: [AIS eLibrary](https://aisel.aisnet.org/jit/vol30/iss1/10/) Wikipedia — *Surveillance Capitalism* — conceptual synthesis: [Wikipedia EN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism) **The middle class and the platform economy** McKinsey Global Institute — *Poorer Than Their Parents? Flat or Falling Incomes in Advanced Economies* — 2016. Available: [McKinsey Digital](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/digital-blog/will-digital-erase-the-middle-class) Masaar — *Platform Economy: The Future of Work in the Digital Age* — 2024. Available: [Masaar](https://masaar.net/en/platform-economy-the-future-of-work-in-the-digital-age/) UNCTAD — *Global Investment in the Digital Economy Surges but Remains Uneven* — 2024. Available: [UNCTAD](https://unctad.org/news/global-investment-digital-economy-surges-remains-uneven) **Digital childhood and attention** Wolf, M. — *Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World* — Harper, 2018. Author's page: [Maryanne Wolf](https://maryannewolf.com/) OECD — *PISA 2022 Results: Literacy and Digital Reading* — 2023. Available: [OECD](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_53f23881-en.html) **Historical and philosophical references** Tocqueville, A. de — *Democracy in America* — 1835–1840. Digital edition: [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/815) Orwell, G. — *The Road to Wigan Pier* — 1937. Reference for the industrial working-class context: [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30583) Judt, T. — *Ill Fares the Land* — Penguin Press, 2010. On the decline of social democracy and the middle class: [NYU Press](https://nyupress.org/9143118077/ill-fares-the-land/) **Narrative structural inspiration** Beevor, A. — *Stalingrad* — Viking, 1998 / *D-Day: The Battle for Normandy* — Viking, 2009. Methodological model: historical narrative anchored in verifiable individual experiences, alternating between macrohistorical panorama and human detail. Full author bibliography: [Antony Beevor Official Site](https://www.antonybeevor.com/) **Journalism:**[Rația Digital](https://opozitia.net/2026/05/10/ratia-digitala/) — Antonel Neculai, Adrian Onciu ---