What do self-checkout machines tell the worker in a supermarket? What is their ultimate message? The answer can be found in a lecture, "Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism," delivered just over a year ago by the Marxist geographer David Harvey. About thirty minutes into the lecture, he mentions, while discussing the ever-increasing robotization of the workplace, an idea by the French social philosopher and journalist André Gorz. A quick background: One argument made by this thinker is that people in advanced capitalist societies work too much; another is that there's no real need or justification for economic growth. Indeed progress in advanced capitalist societies is now marked by de-development, by going backwards—walking instead of driving, buying locally produced goods instead of globally transported ones, recycling instead of trashing, and so on. The idea that Harvey draws from Gorz's body of work is that robotization alienates the worker from his/her job. (By the way, self-checkout machines are not robots—they do not do the work, they command you, the customer, to do the work.) The machine says to him/her that your job is not a solution, but a problem to capital.

The supermarket or company that hired you actually hates your job and will do what ever it can to remove or reduce it. This is the existential status of your job; it is not created by people who love it, in the way Christians imagine a god who made humans out of a sense of love that permeates every part of the expanding universe. And the more it expands, the more god's love grows. Your creators are the opposite of this cosmic benevolence. Job creators are absolutely satanic. They at once made you and despise you. So when you leave yourself (the person made by love) and become your work (the person made by hate), it is with the understanding that not a second you spend making a living is relaxed, is safe, is without the threat of extinction. The forces from above want nothing to be your job.