How the Machine Works: Byung-Chul Han, Logan’s Run, and the Beautiful Meat Grinder of Capitalist Achievement

There is a strange consensus in our age of anxiety. Everyone you meet—your co-worker in the open office pod, your friend freelancing from a café, your cousin building a “personal brand”—says the same thing, with the same weary half-smile: “I need to escape the system.” But what if this very impulse to escape is the latest product of the system? What if the fantasy of freedom has become the most effective mode of control? This, in essence, is what Byung-Chul Han calls the burnout society: a civilization of voluntary servitude, in which we no longer need the whip of the master because we whip ourselves with the demand to achieve.

Han’s argument is simple but terrifying: we are no longer oppressed by external authority, as in Foucault’s disciplinary society of factories, prisons, and bureaucracies. Instead, we are enslaved by our own internalized compulsion to perform. The language of coercion has been replaced by the language of possibility—you can, you should, you must express yourself. The worker has become an “entrepreneur of the self,” constantly optimizing, networking, and hustling. We are no longer subjects of obedience but of achievement—and that is precisely why we are exhausted, anxious, and profoundly alone.

To understand how this machine works, we need only look around us. Modern corporate environments—those sleek glass towers and airy, open-plan offices filled with kombucha taps and beanbags—are the new temples of this ideology. They are built not to discipline you, but to seduce you. The foosball tables and free snacks are the bright primary colors of a Logan’s Run set, disguising what they are: factories of self-exploitation. Beneath the cheerful palette of startup culture hums the same ancient logic that governed the first city-states of Mesopotamia—an elite that controls not just labor, but the mythos that defines reality itself.

The DAMO video essay on Logan’s Run gets it exactly right. The 1970s sci-fi film, with its domed city of youth and pleasure, is less about the future than a mirror of our present. The young citizens of Logan’s world live in a technicolor paradise of leisure, sex, and comfort—but only until their thirtieth birthday, when the crystal in their palm flashes black and they are summoned to “Carousel,” a ritual of supposed renewal that is, in truth, execution. What keeps them compliant is not the threat of death, but the promise of rebirth—a myth of infinite renewal that justifies their destruction.

Is this not the very logic of today’s creative economy? Where are the old people in your office? What happens to the designers, developers, marketers, and managers after their life-clock begins to flash red at thirty-five, forty? They disappear quietly, replaced by fresh, young faces. The tech and media industries feed on the energy of youth, grinding through bodies and psyches with corporate smiles and ergonomic chairs. Those who are lucky enough to earn high salaries find themselves locked into a cycle of consumerism that reproduces the very system that devours them. They spend their money to feel successful, to prove that the sacrifice was worth it, until the burnout comes—and then, they are “recycled.”

Han would say that the genius of neoliberalism lies in how it privatizes suffering. We do not revolt; we self-diagnose. Depression, anxiety, burnout—these are no longer social conditions but personal failures. The exploited no longer hate the system; they hate themselves for not thriving within it. The revolution is replaced by therapy. The strike becomes a sabbatical. “Mental health days” replace solidarity. As Mark Fisher wrote, stress has been privatized. The machine works best when it convinces us that its violence is our own choice.

The myth of the “achievement society” functions like the myth of Carousel: you are told that endless self-improvement will renew you, that each promotion, each project, each like, each follower brings you closer to transcendence—a new, better you. But the promise of renewal is a lie. What awaits is not rebirth, but burnout. And those who cling to the system beyond their “prime” are cast aside, policed by the few survivors who have climbed high enough to act as gatekeepers—the managers, the executives, the Sandmen of the corporate dome.

Even parents and older generations, especially first- or second-generation immigrants, often cannot see this machine for what it is. For them, the gleaming towers of corporate America still represent stability, prestige, the American Dream. They see their children entering this world with decent salaries and glossy perks, unaware that behind the glass walls lies a meat grinder more efficient than any factory floor. The young are fed into it before they have a chance to understand what is happening. And by the time they realize, they are already too tired, too indebted, too entangled in the web of consumption to resist.

Here we might recall Jacques Ellul’s idea of total propaganda: the most effective form of propaganda is not a message we can identify and reject, but an entire environment that shapes the horizon of what we can think. Today’s propaganda is not political slogans or posters—it is the interface, the notification, the corporate mission statement, the app that gamifies productivity. We live within a total system that produces our desires and defines our limits. Even our fantasies of escape—start your own business, move off-grid, become a digital nomad—are already absorbed into the logic of capital. The dream of freedom is simply another brand strategy.

This is how the machine works: it does not enslave by force, but by promise. It convinces us that we are free even as it feeds upon our very sense of self. It manufactures the desire to escape so that escape itself becomes another form of participation. Every attempt to leave only deepens the labyrinth. The result is a society of glowing screens and dimming souls, where everyone feels the same vague exhaustion but believes it is uniquely theirs.

In Logan’s Run, the only real act of rebellion is not to run toward renewal, but toward decay—to confront mortality, to accept limits. Perhaps that is the true wisdom Han gestures toward, the antidote to the burnout society: the rediscovery of negativity. The right to be unproductive. The courage to say “no.” To refuse the false freedom of endless achievement and embrace the truth of finitude.

So yes, everyone feels the same—trapped, tired, secretly yearning to run. But the way out is not through another startup, another reinvention, another Carousel. It begins when we stop believing in renewal and start recognizing the machine for what it is: a beautiful, efficient meat grinder that feeds on our hope. The first act of freedom is to stop running, to look around the dome, and finally say—this is not renewal.

This is the end.