The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The System Forgets Nothing, But It Never Remembers You - The Deeper Thinking Podcast


Listen Later

The System Forgets Nothing, But It Never Remembers You

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

A meditation on capitalism, memory, and the quiet refusal to be rendered knowable.

We live in a system that forgets nothing, but never remembers us. It tracks our movements, records our actions, and stores our data—yet the more it accumulates, the less it seems to know us. It does not recognize us as beings, but as fragments in an ever-expanding machine. In this world, alienation is not an affliction—it is the architecture.

This episode traces the silent contradiction at the heart of late capitalism—how it demands our presence while erasing our personhood. Drawing from the writings of Karl Marx, Fredric Jameson, Silvia Federici, and Bernard Stiegler, we examine how unpaid life, estranged labor, and digital extraction converge to produce not just economic inequality—but ontological displacement.

This is not a story of collapse. It is a search for interruption: moments that elude monetization, gestures that resist capture, spaces that soften rather than sort. In this episode, the act of remembering oneself—within and against the system—becomes a philosophical gesture of resistance.

Reflections

Some thoughts that surfaced in the margins:

  • The system doesn’t forget because it remembers—it forgets because it never knew you.
  • To be recognised as data is not to be remembered—it is to be rendered predictable.
  • Attention is political. So is memory. So is the act of feeling real in a world of proxies.
  • Not all gestures need to be productive. Some simply need to be felt.
  • Capitalism metabolises everything—except what we refuse to offer.
  • The smallest acts of presence might be the only unextractable currency we have left.
  • Why Listen?

    • Reframe capitalism not as an economic force—but as an ontological structure
    • Trace alienation as infrastructure, not just emotion
    • Engage with Marx, Jameson, Federici, and Stiegler on attention, memory, and unpaid life
    • Recognise the small, human gestures that resist extraction
    • Listen On:

      • YouTube
      • Spotify
      • Apple Podcasts
      • Support This Work

        If you’d like to support the ongoing work, you can visit buymeacoffee.com/thedeeperthinkingpodcast or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you.

        Bibliography

        • Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: International Publishers, 1964.
        • Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
        • Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia, 2004.
        • Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
        • Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics. London: Verso, 2017.
        • Bibliography Relevance

          • Karl Marx: Explores alienation and the displacement of human essence under capitalism
          • Fredric Jameson: Frames late capitalism as a totalising cultural logic
          • Silvia Federici: Grounds the politics of unpaid labor in historical structures
          • Bernard Stiegler: Introduces technics as memory systems that displace human temporality
          • Byung-Chul Han: Uncovers the internalisation of control through self-optimization
          • To be remembered, we must first become illegible to the system that forgets nothing.

            #OntologicalCapitalism #KarlMarx #FredricJameson #SilviaFederici #BernardStiegler #ByungChulHan #Memory #Alienation #Postmodernism #EstrangedLabor #CapitalismCritique #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #SystemicForgetting

            ...more
            View all episodesView all episodes
            Download on the App Store

            The Deeper Thinking PodcastBy The Deeper Thinking Podcast

            • 4
            • 4
            • 4
            • 4
            • 4

            4

            92 ratings


            More shows like The Deeper Thinking Podcast

            View all
            This American Life by This American Life

            This American Life

            91,010 Listeners

            Radiolab by WNYC Studios

            Radiolab

            43,923 Listeners

            Freakonomics Radio by Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

            Freakonomics Radio

            32,262 Listeners

            Hidden Brain by Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam

            Hidden Brain

            43,549 Listeners

            Philosophize This! by Stephen West

            Philosophize This!

            15,267 Listeners

            The Gray Area with Sean Illing by Vox

            The Gray Area with Sean Illing

            10,717 Listeners

            Philosophy Bites by Edmonds and Warburton

            Philosophy Bites

            1,545 Listeners

            Philosophy For Our Times by IAI

            Philosophy For Our Times

            318 Listeners

            The Daily by The New York Times

            The Daily

            113,075 Listeners

            The Indicator from Planet Money by NPR

            The Indicator from Planet Money

            9,563 Listeners

            Overthink by Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

            Overthink

            460 Listeners

            The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

            The Ezra Klein Show

            16,492 Listeners

            The Economics of Everyday Things by Freakonomics Network & Zachary Crockett

            The Economics of Everyday Things

            1,647 Listeners

            The Telepathy Tapes by Ky Dickens

            The Telepathy Tapes

            8,894 Listeners

            Zero to Well-Read by Book Riot

            Zero to Well-Read

            591 Listeners