sus
Moderator
Neoliberalism as "value capture"—a concept from C Thi Nguyen to describe when the simplified value system + priorities of a gamification take over the activity's previous, richer but implicit/unspecified value system.znore says Finnegans Wake and The Crying of Lot 49 are artificial intelligences which have overpowered their creators. That certainly appears to be the case with capitalism, if it is an artificial intelligence.
E.g. when you start tracking your word count too closely when writing, or start gearing posts to reaction counts; when you get addicted to hitting your "10,000 steps"; when institutions begin measuring their professor's quality by citation counts; when universities begin changing their school to win in magazine rankings
Here it's the simplified scorekeeping of money that takes over more holistic but vague, undefinable values—cleanses us of ambiguity, subjectivity, judgment calls, soul-searching. Turns continuous functions into discrete ones.