OBSERVATIONS & OTHER ACCIDENTS

How capitalism turned visibility into duty — and made the unobserved self disappear.

More than ever, we live inside a system where to be seen is to exist.
Capitalism has reframed visibility as a moral requirement: if you don’t show it, it doesn’t count. Value is no longer internal; it’s performative. A currency. A KPI. A proof of life.

The promise was freedom.
The outcome is soft surveillance — voluntary, daily, nearly devotional.

Today, life is a marketplace of selves, and every presence is a value proposition.
Being is not enough; you must broadcast.
Living is not enough; you must demonstrate.
Feeling is not enough; you must make it legible.

Capitalism doesn’t ask for authenticity — it asks for legibility.
A simplified, saleable, frictionless version of you.
The one that fits formats, feeds, algorithms.

We call this “performance,” but it’s something else:
it’s production.
The self converted into economic unit.

Intimacy didn’t disappear by accident — it disappeared because it isn’t profitable.
The private became idle;
the idle became unproductive;
the unproductive became undesirable.

And slowly, capitalism eroded the space where the self owes nothing to anyone.

The consequence is political, not psychological.
We have depoliticised our own interiority.
We turned rest into guilt, silence into absence, privacy into a retreat from relevance.
The unobserved self lost its value — and therefore, its legitimacy.

Then a film like Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023) arrives, functioning as an interruption. Not because of its narrative, but because of the quiet threat it embodies: a man who lives without an audience, without narrative, without yield.
A body outside the market.
Time that cannot be converted into capital.

It’s radical because it’s useless.
Political because it refuses visibility.

What the film exposes — bluntly, almost offensively — is this:
we no longer know how to exist without proving that we exist.

The crisis is not aesthetic or emotional.
It is economic.
The value of the invisible has collapsed.
And with it, everything that can only grow in the dark:
depth, silence, contradiction, slow thought, non-performative ways of living.

We mastered visibility.
We lost interiority.

Capitalism succeeded the moment it convinced us that we are only real when we are public.
Which is precisely why, today, the most political act is this:

to live without an audience.
To think without publishing.
To act without witnesses.
To exist without proving.

Disobedience begins when the self stops being a product.